I’m always intrigued by the eternal present of “nowadays”: Trends that rise and rise like an Escher staircase. Just now I was coming to the end of Anna Karenina — which I had expected would be just Madame Bovary on the steppes, but it was vastly more — and found this passage:
“He assures me that our children are splendid, when I know how much that’s bad there is in them.”
“Arseny goes to extremes, I always say,” said his wife. “If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied. And it’s true, as papa says,—that when we were brought up there was one extreme—we were kept in the basement, while our parents lived in the best rooms; now it’s just the other way—the parents are in the wash house, while the children are in the best rooms. Parents now are not expected to live at all, but to exist altogether for their children.”
“Well, what if they like it better?” Lvov said, with his beautiful smile, touching her hand. “Anyone who didn’t know you would think you were a stepmother, not a true mother… Well, come here, you perfect children,” Lvov said to the two handsome boys who came in…
The time when children knew their place, and parents could enjoy themselves, is just a generation past, and apparently it always was.
Common Infirmities 