When I was growing up during the ’70s in Buffalo, my siblings and I were met after school by Papa, my grandfather who lived with us and cared for us while our mother was at her factory job. If Papa was not around, there were any number of “aunties” and other mothers from the neighborhood available to feed us and taxi us to and fro. Most of these women were also employed, but they did shift work in hospitals or had jobs in retail with varied schedules. No matter. As a black mom on the block, everyone’s kid was your kid.

Mommy wars? “That doesn’t make a lick of sense,” Mama, who’s now 80, would say. Mama lived to sit at the kitchen table — our light blue princess phone nestled in the crook of her neck as she took long drags on her cigarette — gossiping about her girlfriends. But there was a mutual sense of love and respect among the moms of her generation. They were always tired, just like moms now. But never too tired to offer encouragement — words like, “Girl, all you can do is the best you can.”

There was none of the scorn I see today, and that the media so loves to perpetuate, among many white moms judging one another’s “choice” to work or stay home, or to breast- or formula-feed. The parenting industry exacerbates this divide. When women are persuaded to ignore their maternal instincts and common sense in favor of contradictory and competing instruction manuals, it’s no wonder they turn on one another.

Of course, it’s not like this multibillion-dollar parenting industry was built with me in mind. When pundits talk about timeouts and parenting by negotiation — Dr. Phil suggests no fewer than five critical steps — and behavior contracts that you can download off the Internet, I know good and well they are not talking to a black woman. Or at least not any black woman I know. When it comes to discipline, we are far more authoritarian.

Last week, in a viral clip of the Baltimore uprising, we saw Toya Graham, a black mother, snatch her son from the crowd. Yes, it has led to plenty of debate about corporal punishment. Did she need to smack him upside his head? I don’t know. But she was doing what she felt she had to. “I didn’t want to see him become another Freddie Gray,” she said. Dating back to slavery, black moms have had to hold a strong grip on their children’s behavior. Only a foolish mother would risk boosting her child’s self-esteem to the point where he might be perceived as uppity by whites. Tough love is what it’s called today. Back then, it was the only love that could keep a black kid safe.