Anita Dufalla, Post-Gazette Click illustration for larger image. Sandra Collins is a writer living in Ben Avon (collins@library.duq.edu).

First it seems parents are suspect for lacking the moral fiber to say no to their children, indulging their every whim, creating little monsters who are never satiated and behave abhorrently. The result is reality programs that frighten parents with images of their fleshy, corpulent adult children or nannies that invade our homes to bring parents to heel over their disarmingly inept efforts at raising decent human beings.

Or, parents are dismissed as indolent for plopping their little ones in front of the electronic babysitter -- the TV set -- as they wile away the hours in the kitchen, gabbing to girlfriends on the phone or lolling in bed with a good book or whatever it is that parents do when they are not actively parenting (or, so I've been told). The Disney Channel and Dora the Explorer now substitute for what used to be good, old-fashioned nurturing.

On the other hand, what of those pitiless parents who overschedule their progeny, expecting them to execute every unfulfilled potential that mom and dad were denied or some such drivel as that. Now that parents do not actually discipline their children, mom and dad rigorously discipline their kids' waking hours with soccer, piano lessons, swim team, play dates and camps in order to ... what? Entertain them? Occupy their every sentient moment? Exhaust them with activity? Oh, what those evil parent-minds won't conceive of in the interest of torturing their children!

Now I hear mom and dad are to blame for the opposite affliction: "helicoptering," the new made-up word for parents who hover and smother, refusing to let their kids grow up. Helicoptering can be anything from a daily cell phone check-in to calling the college adviser of one's young adult kiddies to helping negotiate their first job offer. It's suffocating parental involvement writ large, what USA Today calls "young people still tethered to the nest," to the detriment of all and sundry. By failing to create and enforce boundaries, helicoptering parents have stifled independence and decisiveness, breeding instead a generation of dependency and trepidation.

All right, I've had just about enough bellyaching about parents who do too much, parents who do too little, parents who injure their children through neglect, through stifling proximity, through unrealistic expectations, through lack of expectations, blah, blah, blah.

God knows, I neither crave nor deserve a pat on the back, but all this unsolicited commentary and condemnation really wears a bit raw.

Let's be honest: I -- and many of my parent peers -- have lived profoundly independent young adult existences, in college and afterwards. Growing up in the socially progressive 1970s and '80s, we experimented with a variety of living and social arrangements, gender roles, pharmaceuticals, alcoholic refreshment and socioeconomic strata (bohemian, vagrancy and otherwise).

Many of us, products of the dysfunctional "Leave It to Beaver" chimera, rejected conventional family ties as constraining, painful or plain and simple, just too much work. We blithely pursued our pilot lifestyles with a confident liberty, free from trepidation or fear (or guilt or responsibility, for that matter). It was way fun but as with any youthful exuberance, such excessive freedoms left most of us scarred and scared, and some of us dead.

Truth be told, those who survived came out on the other side craving connection. Not the false reality of a TV sitcom but the real deal: a life partner, children, a home, those modest desires borne not of social expectation but of real need to bond and feel grounded. Having tripped the light fantastic, we arrived at parenthood, to our surprise, disarmed by love but far less confident in our life skills than our parents' generation. I cannot speak -- nor do I wish to -- for previous generations or for those of this generation who crave psychic and physical freedom from such bonds. Furthermore, I am certainly neither so idealistic nor so naive as to presume that biological attachment means that my children might actually like me.

But I like them. I really do.

I like them as people and as individuals. And because I like them, I like to be with them. And talk to them.

Do I need to direct their every effort? Good heavens, no. I can barely direct my own. Do they occasionally disappoint or defy or disregard me? Absolutely. In fact, that's their job, if I've done my job right.

Do I embarrass and annoy them on a regular basis? You betcha. And that probably won't change because my social and emotional incompetence continues to manifest, independent of my children's needs and concerns.

This current spate of parent-bashing puts me in mind of a story about Fred Rogers of "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" fame.

In concluding a college commencement address, Mr. Rogers had the newly minted graduates stop, close their eyes and think about the moms and dads (or grandmas and grandpas or aunts and uncles) who raised them, toiled on their behalf and brought them to this glorious moment, proud beyond belief of all that the new graduates had done and will do. Then, he had the graduates turn around and say thank you to their loved ones. There wasn't a dry parent eye in the place.

Parenting is the most imperfect of jobs in the world: there is no prerequisite save a certain miraculous fertility. No job application, no credit check involved. (Of course, for those who adopt, there is all of that, and then some. Their Herculean efforts are even more baffling in the face of such blistering criticism.) But the task itself -- the job of taking a little life and enculturating it to the great wide world around us -- who among us has it to do it, and do it well?

So what if we hold them too close, savor their affection too much, inhale the bounty of their youth far too long? We do the best that we can, which admittedly is rarely well-done, but really, it's all we have to give.

So, to the rash of smug parent-criticizers, now and in the future: Rather than casting aspersions, I humbly commend the arcane wisdom of King Solomon, a man who understood the disarming enchantment of it all: "Lo, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. / Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth. / Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them!" (Psalm 127).