What kind of parents were babyboomers?

I asked Ben Osborne, the marketing manager for Leapfrog, and he said baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, were the first to have a huge change in schooling because they wanted an education. They had been the last to start, and therefore most were making adjustments to make up for things they didn’t have as kids, such as laptops and college courses. They have more resources to educate their kids better, he said.

But this is also a generation that may not understand that they’ve been the last to start many things, in the case of the students being more idealistic.

And then there’s this, about what millennial parents are doing:

After I typed this sentence into the Leapfrog website, I saw something I had not expected. The article highlighted many wonderful parents who had taken a huge risk by changing their parenting habits to help their kids become happier and more positive. (Eileen McKee-Berg, Michelle Bolser and the Lee family, for example.)

This reaction makes sense to me. Maybe a lot of babyboomers feel shame or embarrassment about what they did, either with their own parents or in raising their kids. When millennials were kids, they didn’t do that, they might say, so why should we?

Sometimes it can be good to tell the babyboomer parents and grandparents what they didn’t do, like let their kids play video games on Sundays when they should be reading the Bible, and how kids today go to school and enjoy sports and clubs at home because of things their parents did.

The millennials will surely teach the older generations to appreciate the virtues of sports and community activities. They will also teach them the differences between wanting to spend their entire childhood inside and wanting to have an outdoor life and take in the views and feel nature, and the differences between watching a TV show and reading a book that takes them through time, or reading a book and wanting to talk to a fictional character that is based in the world of the book.

They might teach them about new casino sites which are contained on their computers and mobile devices as opposed to physical ones they have to make an entire trip out of visiting…

And the millennials will teach babyboomers that raising a child has more to do with personal happiness than what happens in schools or homes.

Or babyboomers, with enough time, might be better at seeing the generational problems because they’ve learned to appreciate the differences between what they did and what millennials did.

So babyboomers and millennials aren’t born in the same time, and sometimes it can be difficult to see what the other one did before them.

But babyboomers aren’t born in the same time as boomers. Many babyboomers are still raising their kids and aren’t sure what their kids are doing today because they were told to raise kids in schools and homes.

On the other hand, millennials and babyboomers are born into different eras and different circumstances.

What babyboomers and millennials have in common is what they were told to do, and what they did. And what they do is different because they have different motivations.