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" What&amp;#039;s your image of the 21st-century mom? Many people might profile her this way: hardworking but harried; loving and indulgent; seeking support from friends rather than family; and feeling guilty, guilty, guilty about not doing a better job at home. That may be the conventional wisdom \u2014 but a very different picture emerged from a national survey conducted by Good Housekeeping in partnership with ABC News Good Morning America. We interviewed 585 mothers with at least one child under age 18 at home, and the women&amp;#039;s message was loud and clear: Parenting is hard work, but most think they&amp;#039;re doing a good job. Many even feel they&amp;#039;re doing better with their kids than their own moms did with them. And working-mother guilt? Save it for your seventies scrapbook \u2014 mothers with jobs, full-time or part-time, are no more likely than their at-home counterparts to feel guilty about not always being the perfect parent. Check out our findings \u2014 starting with perhaps the biggest surprise of all. The new mother-daughter team Of the women we polled, more than half describe their current relationship with their mother as excellent \u2014 while only a third remember being on such good terms when they were growing up. In fact, for many women, Mom has become more than just family: Half the women say they now consider her a friend.  Maybe even a best friend. Joanne Linehan, 34, a high school teacher in Warrensburg, New York, with a two-year-old and a baby on the way, was a typical teenager who wouldn&amp;#039;t be caught dead at the mall with Mom. But at 26, she accepted an invitation to be her mother&amp;#039;s golf league partner. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;d hang out afterward at the bar and talk,&amp;quot; she recalls. &amp;quot;That was the first time I saw my mom as more than the lady who lived at our house and took care of us kids. I have friends from school and college, but they&amp;#039;re just as busy as I am with family and work. So my mom is now the person I share the most with.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Daughters seeing their mothers as confidantes and best friends is a development that&amp;#039;s unusual in the history of humankind,&amp;quot; says Deborah Tannen, Ph.D., a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and the author of the best-selling You&amp;#039;re Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation. Why are we seeing this new closeness right now? When women entered the workplace in force in the seventies, some experts say, they ended up living very differently than their mothers had, and a big generation gap opened up. Not so for the women we surveyed \u2014 they may find it easier to relate to their mothers as equals because 59 percent of their moms worked outside the home. Tannen believes that today&amp;#039;s mother-daughter teams benefit from a cultural bias that values youth over age, creating a two-way street in which moms need their daughters&amp;#039; advice as much as the daughters need theirs. Talk to me! Technology is another reason for this strong mother-daughter connection, says Tannen. Cell phones and e-mail make it easier to stay in touch, and most of our respondents do, speaking to their mothers at least once a week. Four in ten are even chattier, talking once a day or more.  One of them is Jennifer Morton, 36, a stay-at-home mother of a 12-year-old son in Raleigh, North Carolina. The only thing Morton won&amp;#039;t bring up with her mother? &amp;quot;Problems in my marriage,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;What if I&amp;#039;m the one who&amp;#039;s wrong? I need a more objective view...and I don&amp;#039;t want her to be prejudiced against my husband.&amp;quot;  Morton&amp;#039;s response isn&amp;#039;t unusual. While 61 percent say they turn to their mothers for advice on life in general, and over half ask for parenting tips, only a third invite Mom to weigh in on their marriages or relationships.  Being a good mom gets tougher all the time Almost three quarters of the women say that being a mother today is harder than it was when their own moms were packing the lunch boxes.  Are they just feeling sorry for themselves? No, say the experts, who point out that today&amp;#039;s tidal wave of parenting guides and must-have developmental toys creates intense pressure on mothers to raise little Einsteins. And popular culture plays a part. In follow-up interviews, many women said they needed to shield their kids from inappropriate music, TV, movies, and Internet sites.  That jibes with the findings of Martha Farrell Erickson, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota and coauthor of The Motherhood Study, a comprehensive survey of 2,000 American women, published in 2005. &amp;quot;Many mothers feel that the values they are trying to instill in their children are the exact opposite of the values of pop culture and the media,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;These women have the sense of spitting into the wind in terms of how hard it is to counteract messages of greed, commercialism, and sexuality.&amp;quot; And the world now seems a much more dangerous place. &amp;quot;My mother would let my sister and me go for 20-mile bike rides alone. I would never let my kids do that,&amp;quot; says a Midwestern mother who homeschools her kids (and has recently taken in two foster children). &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m always careful; I always make sure I know who my kids are with, and where.&amp;quot;  Rethinking the guilt  As they cope with all this, women sometimes worry about not being quite the parents they&amp;#039;d like to be \u2014 and of those who worry, more than half also feel guilty. The surprise: Working mothers, even those on the career track, feel about the same amount of angst as the full-time moms \u2014 no more, no less.  But guilt has not gone away entirely, so let us count our respondents&amp;#039; reasons. The biggest: not having enough time for the kids. Other hot buttons:  &amp;quot;Getting them the best education possible.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Providing for their future.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Not doing as many cultural things with my son as I should.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Not seeing my daughter as a separate person soon enough.&amp;quot;  And that one-word chiller: &amp;quot;Divorce.&amp;quot;   Discipline is alive and well  At the end of the day, though, it seems today&amp;#039;s mothers go to bed feeling proud \u2014 a staggering 99 percent give themselves a parenting grade of excellent or good. And while more than half of the women say they &amp;quot;spoil&amp;quot; their kids more than their own moms did them, discipline is another story. The vast majority say they are as strict as their mothers were, or even stricter, with their kids. &amp;quot;The baby boomers rejected discipline, and now we&amp;#039;re seeing a swing back to a healthier cultural norm,&amp;quot; says Dorothy Firman, Ed.D., a psychotherapist in Amherst, Massachusetts. &amp;quot;These mothers seem to be saying, You can let your children be who they are but also teach them limits and rules.&amp;quot;  My mother, my role model All in all, our survey suggests that on Mother&amp;#039;s Day, American women will be joyfully celebrating their moms. Over a third of the women say they sometimes feel like they&amp;#039;re turning into their mothers \u2014 and most of them say that&amp;#039;s a good feeling.  That&amp;#039;s certainly true for Janet Bengtson, 47, a substitute teacher and former nurse in rural Lemoore, California, who has three teenage sons. She puts our finding into her own highly personal, articulate words: &amp;quot;I realized recently that I talk the same as my mother; that when my feelings are hurt, I get very quiet, hold my breath, and count to 10 like she used to do. And a lot of the way I am as a mom is because of what I saw her do when I was a child. Like her, I was very strict when my kids were young and made sure they had clear, tight boundaries. Also, we had little in the way of material goods growing up, but it didn&amp;#039;t matter, because my mom was crazy about us. That&amp;#039;s how I am today \u2014 what matters isn&amp;#039;t money; it&amp;#039;s the excellent relationship I have with my boys. My mother and grandmother love them, too, and my mom is totally involved with all 22 of her grandchildren. I&amp;#039;m part of a strong heritage of really good moms.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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