In an emotionally-fuelled TED Talk Jennifer Senior, a New York Times and New York Magazine journalist, takes a look at how modern parenting doesn’t need to be, and indeed shouldn’t be, as stressful as culture and society dictates. So, “why is it that we are at sixes and sevens about the one thing parents have been doing for millennia?”

Why does parenthood become a crisis?

Senior points out that in 1948 Benjamin Spock released his famous book The Common Sense Book Of Baby And Child Care. For decades it was the book for parents to turn to and more than anything Spock emphasised that parents probably knew more than they thought they did. But these days there is a book for everything: from raising a gluten free child to forming a science-minded kid right up to raising a bilingual child, even if you only speak one language.

As Senior says, “Short of raising your kid to build a nuclear bomb there is pretty much a guide to everything.” So the question that Senior really wants to ask is, “Why does parenthood become a crisis?” Part of the problem, that Senior theorises, is the verb “Parent” didn’t enter common usage until 1970.

Go back only a fraction further in time and Senior points out that children were seen as a commodity. They were sent to be part of the work force from a very early age thereby helping the household generate an income. And then the school system was introduced. As one economist once, cynically said, children became “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”