ABSTRACT
The history of modern parenting focuses on changing roles and functions for children and reflects larger shifts in society, such as the increasing separation of work from home or changing gender roles that generated often complicated and difficult parental responses. This chapter deals briefly with the emergence of serious historical research on modern parenting, a relatively recent development that has yielded a number of significant findings and with several key topics clearly open to further analysis. It offers several more specific case studies, where particular factors have shaped modern parenting or where comparative differentials must be explored within the common modern framework. The need to support modern parenting, and to figure out what measures of support are useful and why parental needs have expanded, may be a significant challenge going forward. Throughout the modern period as well, social class complicates any generalizations about parenting.
