What's happened? When it's no longer popular to go to church, you don't have to do it to be successful in the community, these fine people have simply dropped out. They don't deny the existence of God. They live ethical lives. In fact, they are usually quite good people. But the fact is they are simply not born again. They have never received Jesus Christ as Savior. So we see the younger generation praying spiritually for the older generation as frequently as we see the older generation praying for the wayward son or daughter to come back home to the Lord.

As you see, joyful motherhood is not the experience of everyone. Why are there so many situations in which the parent-child relationship lacks joy?

I am convinced that the twentieth century has ushered in a whole new set of heightened expectations in regard to parent-child relations. The criteria for personal happiness are so different today than they were a few decades ago.

Many a parent in the sixty-years-old-plus age bracket had not been exposed to contemporary theories on child raising. The 1930s and 1940s, with the Depression and World War II, were "survival" years for many. People were happy to just have a job. The nuclear and extended families stayed closer together geographically, but that did not necessarily mean that there was much sharing of intimate thoughts and feelings. One just hoped that he or she could get through World War II alive without the Nazis taking over. The 1950s had us scared of international Communism.

It was during these same 1950s and 1960s that their children were going to college, studying psychology, sociology, and becoming aware of early childhood and adult development patterns. The theories of Freud, Jung, Adler, and their successors, who further developed this emerging understanding of the human inner world, became the preoccupation of the educated born post-1940. This is bewildering to many parents whose educations were interrupted by the depression and the war.

The men of that generation had been raised not to cry, to hold emotions in, to be the producers, the bread winners. They were taught to work long hours, to be successful. They had a sense of responsibility not only to their families but to society. The women had been taught to be homemakers. A few had jobs, but in most cases that was only temporary until children came along. Their priority was to be in the home, and they taught their daughters similar priorities.

Then came the 1960s when values went up for grabs. Traditional family structures were questioned. Women had their rights too. Economics began to necessitate, in the minds of some, the two-career family. The feminist movement created a backlash on the part of those who became all the more entrenched in their traditionalism and conservatism.

What do we observe? We observe a generation of women between age 35 and 55 today who are caught in the middle, between the experience and values of their mothers who see life one way and their daughters who see life and its opportunities so differently. They become aware that both options have their pluses and minuses.