Q. Do parents have more access to information than they used to, and does that benefit them in their child rearing?

Between mother and daughter, the child that I reared.

By that time Emma was 62, and had already reared 14 children, none of them hers.

Similarly, their children would be wards of, and reared basically by society.

It is experimenting with flexible working hours to make child rearing easier.

She writes, "Inevitably, while they are at work, child rearing becomes someone else's job."

The women, she said, are generally not doing this willingly, but because society as a whole still makes child rearing primarily a mother's responsibility.

"America has an explicit public policy not to share most of the costs associated with child rearing with families," she said.

She'd spurned the trend of leaving the child rearing to the nurse.

Those striking social changes notwithstanding, there are still issues of child rearing that both generations may see differently.