Today's parents cop a lot of flak. We're variously described as helicopters or tigers.

We are viewed as "either too hands-off or too hands-on", wrote social researcher Rebecca Huntley in 2017. We parent by "remote control" or are too overprotective. Whatever we're doing, we're doing it wrong.

The latest admonishment comes from children's author and school principal John Marsden, who has written a new book about parenting, The Art of Growing Up. He says "toxic parenting" is creating an epidemic of anxiety among today's children. In his view, our ham-fisted attempts at parenting are ruining our kids.

To be fair, he doesn't introduce toxic parenting as a modern phenomenon, tracing it back as far as Genghis Khan. But, somehow, he's concluded that this generation is worse than all that have gone before us.

We're bad parents, Marsden said on Radio National's Life Matters, because we have "a lack of willingness or ability … to take on the adult role in the family."

It's "startling and horrifying", he says, when a parent allows their child to interrupt them when they're speaking to another adult. It shows that children are in charge.

Even when we try to get it right, we miss the mark. When we're not overly controlling, we're absent. We indulge our kids or fall prey to narcissism. Free-range parents, meanwhile, shirk decision-making.

In the words of one Facebook commenter — and Cicero — "O tempora, o mores!" (Oh the times! Oh the customs).

Children's author John Marsden has taken aim at what he calls "toxic parenting". ( ABC Central Victoria Larissa Romensky )

It's the same intergenerational stoush

Telling modern-day parents — as if we're a homogenous group — that we're uniformly terrible is nothing new. It's the same-old intergenerational criticism that the old have been levelling at the young for years.

Parenting standards started slipping in ancient Greece, according to 20th-century scholar Kenneth John Freeman.

"Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs."

More than two millennia later, parents we're still getting it wrong. Parenting experts in the 19th and 20th centuries regularly condemned mothers as anxious, ignorant or neglectful, attributing all sorts of character flaws and illnesses among children to deficient parenting.

Yes, we get some things wrong

Today, I don't see how changing social mores — a willingness to listen to children and allow them more agency than in the past, for example — mean we're subjecting our children to bad parenting.

Yes, parents today get things wrong, just like every generation of parents before us. We all live with the mistakes of the people who raised us, whether it's an inability to talk about our emotions, the limited opportunities afforded by the imposition of restrictive gender roles or exposure to unnecessary risk due to poor health choices.

And yes, anxiety is on the rise. But let's look at why. The planet is in peril. The cost of living is so high that, in many families, both parents have to work all the time. As dual-income households become the norm, workplaces remain largely inflexible to these changes. Meanwhile, the advent of the internet and social media exposes our kids to a new set of risks that we're only just learning to navigate.

And who was talking about anxiety 30 years ago? Part of the reason we're identifying more cases of anxiety is we're aware of it in a way we weren't in the past.

Anxiety isn't just affecting kids: more than 2 million adults in Australia experience anxiety in any one year.

The parenting I received didn't magically cure me of social anxiety or make me any better at managing my emotions — but these are things I'm actively trying to address in my own children.

Be constructive with criticism

Of course, Marsden's argument has an element of truth. Many parents are over-protective of their children. But how constructive is it to label our parenting as "emotional abuse"? If Marsden has a genuine message that he wants to disseminate among modern parents, he should consider couching it in less aggressive terms.

He's wrong that it's taboo to criticise parents: we're written off as incompetent all the time.

It's also untrue that there is no public discussion about the issues that Marsden raises. There are countless articles online that tie over-parenting with anxiety. There's even a snappy pejorative label to describe it — we're lawnmower parents.

But resilience has emerged as a parenting buzzword for a reason: we know that coddling our children inhibits their independence. We're just trying to do our best.

In her article on overparenting, Dr Huntley arrives at the judicious conclusion that parents today are, in fact, not doing a terrible job.

So, thank you, John Marsden, I am happy to take on any constructive criticism you may have in my ongoing effort to be a better parent. What I don't accept is that my generation represents a new nadir in parenting.

Nicola Heath is a freelance writer.