How many bosses can a woman with children have? All women with children are working moms. Some get an actual paycheck – some don’t. Regardless, we all know that the real boss is the child.
I grew up in the ’50s when Dr. Spock’s book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, was right up there next to the Bible. I wore out my mother’s paperback edition raising my own children in the late ’70s and ’80s. Just like my mother, I wanted to be the best mother I could but wasn’t quite sure how to do that or how to measure my success. Dr. Spock’s opening line was Trust Yourself: You know more than you think you do. Maybe yes – maybe no. But, when I’d exhausted all other available resources, I went with my instinct. 
Is mothering in 2015 harder than mothering in 1950 or 1980? I don’t think so. But, is there a different pressure to “entertain” children? Probably. Dr. Spock reminded us that children can and should entertain themselves.
Social researcher, Wednesday Martin, Ph.D., observes that today, “failing to nurture your child on every imaginable measure and enrich him in every possible way is considered neglect… Sociologists call it ‘intensive motherhood’ – a gendered ideology that dictates that women should spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and money on childrearing, and that failing to do so is failing to be a good mother… Children who once worked for us are now our bosses.”
I appreciate where she’s coming from and agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Martin that today’s mothers are under tremendous pressure to prove themselves as mothers, that motherhood is “intensive”. I’m not sure there is a true “cultural shift” since the ’50s. There are certainly many more ways to “entertain” a child today and a miasma of instant information and opinions at a mom’s fingertips. But I didn’t work for my mom in 1950 and my children never worked for me.
Motherhood was intense in 1950. It was intense in 1980. It is intense today. One way or another, children have always been the “boss”. 
vivinolavita 