I sometimes wonder what my parents did all day.

Obviously they weren’t poring over the latest car seat crash test report, snooping through text messages, or researching telltale signs of antibiotic resistant skin rashes. They weren’t drilling the toddler in sign language, googling “sea otters” for the 2nd grader’s PowerPoint assignment or coordinating weekly conferences with the speech therapist to work on lazy Rs.

Did they even once have to rethink the bike helmet storage strategy?

I’m not bitter, just curious in a quasi-historical sort of way.  Does all the spare time explain the rise of macrame?

I imagine the previous generation of parents breezing carefree through the grocery store without parsing labels, rooting out lurking corn sweeteners, or weighing the benefits of organic kale against the risks of salmonella.

Is this why so many of our parents smoked? To kill time?

They didn’t have to keep anything charged or update their status or check to see what pics the tweens were posting. They read no blogs, flamed no message boards, no RSS feed ever popped up in their browsers alerting them to the latest case of head lice at the elementary school. Nor did they have to refresh the inventory of downloaded SpongeBob episodes on the iPhone.

When I focus for a moment on the change in attitudes on any particular issue — sunscreen, for example — I cannot but help wondering, for just an instant, how we managed to survive.

Does our greater awareness make modern parents better than those of previous generations? Of course it does.  Think of it this way: Is a Prius better than a Pinto? But that doesn’t mean we have to LOL at their expense and tweet about it. Show some class, people.

I’ve been meaning to ask my own parents about how they spent all the extra time they had as parents, but I’ve been really busy hauling the kids to drum lessons and club soccer, and I’ve taken a vow not to text and drive.