A new “beta mum” trend suggests some cures for the ills of modernity. Women, according to the Wall Street Journal, have had enough with being tiger mums and helicopter parents. Now, they are taking a more relaxed approach with their kids: fewer after-school activities, more playtime in the neighbourhood, and more parental me-time. “My mom was taught that once you become a mother, that’s it for you, your life is over,” one self-avowed beta mum told the WSJ. “My generation doesn’t want to live that way.”

One reason for this trend is the increasing precarity of the white-collar achievement mill: why get the grades and do all those extracurriculars to get into a top-tier college if you won’t get a job afterwards, anyway? Another is the likelihood of super-achievement leading to child burnout, which is a very real problem. There’s also maternal burnout, made worse by all the mothers now trying to juggle working from home with childcare. And then, of course, there is feminism: supposedly unnecessary, overdone childcare time competes with women’s other objectives.

Some of this sounds good, but some sounds like more of the usual mummy wars, with the cool, happy, parkour kid replacing the Harvard grad as the ultimate status item, achieved while the woman pursues her own objectives. In the piece, other “beta” confessions include mismatched socks, dirty dishes, and forgotten suitcases in the driveway, which feel more like humble-brags than anything else. These things happen to absolutely everyone; they are hardly maternal sins, nor are they bucking the system in any radical way. The beta mum is a tiger in sheep’s clothing: still doing a very good job, just now she has to look like she’s not trying too hard.

Hands-on parenting time is up, including for fathers, a statistic often used to suggest we are over-parenting. The cultural popularity of the tropes of alpha mum and helicopter mum also suggests the same thing. It’s possible, however, that “over-parenting” is a myth of a culture which is relentlessly hostile to actual parenting. Modern parents schlep their children around to activities not because they want to breed super-achievers, but because the other option is having your child at home all day on a screen — something the vaunted chilled-out Seventies parents didn’t have to deal with. (Yes, there was television, but before video on demand, sometimes there was nothing to watch on it.)

And modern parents “helicopter”, over-interfering and solving the child’s problems for them, because it’s actually easier in the moment to just do it yourself than to perform one of the most difficult and essential jobs of parenting: establishing discipline. Most helicoptering is a form of avoiding parental responsibility and parental work. We’re worrying, we’re talking, we’re hiring psych professionals — instead of enforcing rules and serving dinner.

Modern children are legitimately overstressed and oversurveilled. Once they hit middle school, their lives are consumed by nearly as many platforms, apps and widgets as the average adult uses. And trying to win the elite college admissions racket is truly a toxic drain on young lives. But modern children are also being given achievement as a replacement for self-mastery. And the mother wars, in all their forms, are always suspiciously about the mother: what is she doing or doing wrong? What hysterical fripperies can we focus on now? Are you alpha or are you beta? Either way, the work of parenting — which is actual work, and valuable work, and work the child needs to thrive — receives no honour. Doing less of it is no answer.

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Valerie Stivers is a senior editor of UnHerd US.

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