The statistics tell us that as a group, Gen Xers are waiting longer to become parents; according to the Centers for Disease Control, approximately 22 percent of American women today give birth to their first child between the ages of 30 and 39, compared to only 9 percent in the early 1960s. However, it appears that once we do cross over to the baby side, we take our roles seriously. Turned off by the alienation that many of us experienced as latchkey kids, it appears that my generation is choosing to raise our children differently by more often putting home life first.

"I think that a lot of Gen Xers are trying to create for their children the childhoods that we feel we didn't get," explains Joey Cody of Knoxville, Tenn., a 31-year-old writer and current stay-at-home mother of a baby boy.

Recent census numbers reveal that fewer new mothers are going back to work immediately, with the percentage of mothers of infants in the workforce falling from 59 percent in 1998 to 55 percent in 2000, the first such notable decline in 25 years. In my own circle of peers, and certainly in my own life, I have noted a trend toward "sequencing" -- what author Arlene Rossen Cardozo defines as women focusing on one thing at a time, whether that's caring for kids or concentrating on a career. Gen X parents seem less willing to be labeled "working mothers" or "stay-at-home mothers." Instead, we are increasingly comfortable with the idea that we will play different roles at different points in our lives.

And while the "slacker" employment stereotype of Gen Xers has been thoroughly debunked (after all, we gave the rest of you people the Internet boom of the late 1990s), anecdotal and emerging market research does support the assertion that many Gen X parents both expect and are managing to create for themselves flexible work-family arrangements that clearly place their roles as parents firmly in the center of their lives.

"Flexibility is the most important thing for employees today," noted Carol Evans, president of Working Mother Media in a May 2003 USA Today article titled "Generation X Moms Have It Their Way." "Generation X moms may want to work only one day a week, but they still think of themselves as career women. They do not think of such arrangements as 'a privilege.' They just expect it. And companies need to deal with that."

Maria Bailey, author of "Marketing to Moms: Getting Your Share of the Trillion Dollar Market" and CEO of BSM Media, a market research firm that helps companies such as Oracle, Microsoft and Office Depot target mother-consumers, says that this focus on work-life integration is one of the primary features that clearly differentiates Gen X parents from the mothers and fathers who preceded us.

"Because so many Gen X women are high earners, they tend to have discussions before marriage or early into the marriage about which spouse will allow their career to slow down to raise the child," explains Bailey. "This is very different from generations of couples that preceded them. There is also an openness and willingness among Gen X dads to be the stay-at-home parent ... and Gen Xers have the ability through technology to better fit work into their lives as parents."

Robert and Nicole Allison, both 32, are a married couple with two young children and a third on the way. Several years ago, they made the radical decision to leave their high-pressure, six-figure law-firm jobs in Chicago and search for a simpler life. After several twists and turns, the Allisons ultimately settled in a tiny rural village in middle Tennessee. Rather than commute into one of the nearby suburban office parks, each of them has managed to find a full-time telecommuting position as legal counsel to a different technology firm -- one in Chicago and one in San Francisco -- something that would not have been possible before the advent of the Internet.

"If we had stayed in Chicago," explains Robert, "we would be making much more money and attending fabulous parties, but we would be working 70 hours a week. We would basically never see our kids. We work very hard at what we do now, but we have achieved a balance that makes us better parents and better employees. I think that this balance is something that our grandparents' generation took for granted but was lost during our parents' generation. Now, our peers are reclaiming it."

"I was raised upper-middle-class by a dad who sold his soul to make a lot of money," says Dawn Friedman, a 32-year-old mother of one from Columbus, Ohio. "This is radically different from how [my husband] and I live. It drives my dad crazy that we're not more ambitious, but his parenting values are just vastly different than ours. My father still thinks it's all in the trappings. Me, I had the trappings and I know they don't mean a thing if you aren't taking care of the hearts and minds of the people that you love."

While we Gen X parents do bring certain strengths to our roles as parents -- such as our aforementioned comfort with diversity and willingness to be very hands-on in our child rearing -- we also face unique dilemmas.

One of these challenges will be in not letting the fact that we often share our kids' tastes in music, movies, TV and books turn us into pals rather than parents. When I was a kid in the '70s, there were the "cool parents" like my own who listened to the Stones, Joni Mitchell and Little Feat, and the "old parents" who came of age in the '50s rather than the '60s and favored Pat Boone and Lawrence Welk. Today, however, Gen X parents and their kids were both raised on the same rock 'n' roll, which has now been around long enough that icons like David Bowie and Steven Tyler have fans ranging in age from 10 to 55. As a result, Gen Xers and their kids are a lot less likely to argue over which radio station plays in the minivan. These parents and their kids both like Green Day, Good Charlotte and Eminem. In my own family, my 12-year-old son wears the same black Chuck Taylor Hi-Tops favored by his civil engineer father, and they both share a fondness for old-school hip-hop.

"My son Jones and I both love 'The Simpsons,' which I consider to be the classic Gen X crossover cartoon," says Robert Allison. "Jones 'gets it' on one level, while I get it on an entirely different level. To him it's like 'The Flintstones,' while to me it's like 'Seinfeld.' Yet we can both watch it and appreciate it at the same time. My dad and I couldn't watch anything together until I was 14 and I finally liked the news."

Marrit Ingman, a 31 year-old mother of one from Austin, TX says that she finds herself and her child referencing the same pop culture touchpoints, something that rarely happened with her own parents when she was a child.

"My son is 19 months old," explains Ingman. "At breakfast yesterday I told him my eyes were crusty from sleep. He said, "Hey, hey!" and gave me a cheese-eating grin and I realized he thought I was talking about Krusty the clown."

Despite our pop cultural literacy, in one way, we Gen X parents are exactly the same as those who have parented before us; no matter how much we talk, read, write, and think about our own parenting, we wont be able to get a clear picture of what we did right and where we went wrong until our own offspring are grown and can tell us  and their therapists.

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