I think Glenn Reynolds is on the right track with his column at Tech Central:  The Parent Trap.  (H/T:  The Corner)

Here's a glimpse:

Parenting was always hard work, of course. But aside from the economic payoffs, parents used to get a lot of social benefits, too. But in recent decades, a collection of parenting "experts" and safety-fascist types have extinguished some of the benefits while raising the costs, to the point where what's amazing isn't that people are having fewer kids, but that people are having kids at all.

This occurred to me recently while reading Caitlin Flanagan's new book, To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife. Flanagan's book is mostly a comparison of her own housewifely and maternal life with that of her mother, and one thing that struck me is how much of what counted as acceptable -- or even exemplary -- parenting a generation ago would now be considered abuse and neglect. Here's an example:

"My mother was by no means indifferent about me: I was her pet, the baby of the family. But back then children were not under constant adult supervision, even if their mothers were housewives. By the time I was five, I was allowed to wander away from the house as long as I didn't cross any big streets. I had the run of the neighborhood at six. . . . A nine-year-old could be trusted with a key; a nine-year-old knew how to work a telephone if anything went wrong. Moreover, anxiety as a precondition of the maternal experience had not yet been invented."

Nowadays, of course, children don't get the same treatment. (I have heard repeatedly that my state's Department of Children's Services considers it neglect to leave a nine-year-old alone in the house for any time at all). Today's middle-class kids are always under the adult eye. It's not clear that the kids are better off for all this supervision -- and they're certainly fatter, perhaps because they get around less outside -- but the burden on parents is much, much higher. And it's exacted in a million tiny yet irritating other ways. Some are worthwhile -- car seats, for example, are probably a net gain in safety -- but even there the cost is high: I heard a radio host in Knoxville making fun of SUVs and minivans: When he was a kid, he boasted, his parents took their five children cross-country in an Impala sedan. Nowadays, you'd never make it without being cited for neglect. And you can't get five kids in a sedan if they all have to have car seats, which these days they seem to require until they're 18.

Likewise, Flanagan notes the pressure to take children for a seemingly endless array of after-school activities, most of which require parental chauffering. Add to this the increasing amount of parental responsibility for things their children do wrong, coupled with steady legal diminution of parental authority (Flanagan mentions an incident in which Caroline Kennedy was spanked for running off and notes that today it might result in jail time -- an exaggeration, perhaps, but not by much.) You're responsible for your kids in ways previous generations weren't, but your ability to discipline them is much reduced, and as my wife (a forensic psychologist) notes, the bad kids know that they can cow most adults by threatening to call 911 and make a bogus abuse charge. And forget disciplining your child, even with a harsh word, in a public place: At the very least, if you do you'll be looked on not as a virtuous parent helping to preserve the social fabric, but as that worst of all sinners in contemporary American culture: a meanie. And schools, anxious for parental "involvement," place far more demands on parents than they did when I was a kid.

Obviously, things have changed a lot in just a couple of decades, to the point where I do not feel it is safe for my children to roam even our neighborhood.  I just don't know the neighbors well enough.  And of course, car seats are a necessity nowadays.  We used to bounce around belt-free in the back of our big red Impala!

But there is no question that parenting is more scrutinized by the state than ever before.  It's not easy to be a parent in our culture.

Oh, and I should add that it is next to impossible to find a vehicle to fit our family size without spending a fortune...all because of car seats.