Parenting sure has changed through the years. Thinking back to caveman days, it’s hard to imagine a mother worried that little Mykkennaleigh was eating too much gluten or had enough wooden toys to stimulate her. Throughout history, it seems like parenting was approached as an instinctive thing, whereas now it is approached as an exercise in logic and self-flagellation.

Where we now worry whether we are giving them enough opportunities, we once used to open the door and tell them not to come home until dinner. Where we now text them every 20 minutes to find their location, we once just used to tell them to have fun at the old lot full of broken freezers. Where we now worry whether we are playing with them enough, we once used to send them out to work the crops.

And a lot of these parenting values are fairly recent. Even the difference between when we were kids and how we parent our own kids is massive. We all try to do a little bit better than the generation before, but it seems like with modern issues and what we know about child development, parenting has become an almost impossible task. The data is sure to tell us that we’re guaranteed to be doing it all wrong, no matter what we do.

So we might as well laugh about it!

1. Playing dress-up now includes contouring and a punch card for Sephora

2. Just because I drank cholera from a hose when I was young doesn’t mean my precious little munchkin should have to

3. Parenting used to be just making sure you heard that door open at 5 o’clock, and that it wasn’t opened with any sass

4. Ah, the good old days, when you could just lasso your child while whipping through traffic

5. Raise your hand if you DON’T have a picture of yourself that strongly resembles this

6. This is the Xennial version of walking 10 miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways

7. Back in the day you could be a whole different person while at school; now you get an alert on ParentConnect if your child so much as farts in class

8. Your parenting is fine, don’t worry about it so much

9. Every generation has their questionable habits, we just don’t realize how questionable until later

10. Nothing made you feel more loved and secure than that arm slamming across your chest

So if you feel like a bad parent – don’t worry, it could be worse!

And to be honest, you won’t even know how bad you’re really doing until 20 years down the road. It’s practically a rite of passage!