If you have a few children – sometimes two is enough, and definitely by the time you have three – you probably have a difficult child in the mix.

Four children are playing in a room happily and then there is crying. You don’t even need to go into the room to know who is crying.

I have one such child. One day last week we were racing to get to school on time. My daughter was trying to put on her coat; my son was trying to fit a few things into his backpack. I was trying to carry someone’s special project. And then I noticed that this child was still not dressed.

“I’m not going to school today,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.

“You are part of a family,” I said slowly, with audible exasperation. “You are not the center of the universe, and we all need you to get dressed.”

As soon as I said the words, I felt guilty. But for what?

I ask myself, even now. Is it that I’m breaking the news to him that he’s not the center of the universe? That the world won’t stop and accommodate every one of his wishes? That I won’t stop and accommodate every one of his wishes?

“Your generation of parents is basically obsessed with their children,” a friend in her 60s said to me. “They are obsessed with giving their children perfect childhoods. Parents today don’t want to rock their children’s boats. We never spoke about our kids and worried about our kids the way you all do.”

Although I know it is true, part of me still finds it hard to believe. So many parents I know devote hours of mental energy to understanding the inner workings of their children, not to mention the hours of schlepping to and from baseball, tennis, cello, chess, swimming, and gymnastics, not to mention the tutor.

“My son has a tutor every day after school,” one father of a child who attends a private school in Riverdale told me without any discomfort. “He needs the help to keep up academically, and socially he’s very happy. I want to give him the help he needs to stay at the school. “

“Tutors and more tutors,” another woman in her 60s told me. “My kids just played in the park. Stickball and hide and seek and so forth. Of course they had activities, but not like you kids have lined up for your children. My daughter has a separate calendar that she keeps for her children.”

Just a few hundred years ago, the concept of childhood didn’t even exist. Only in the 18th century did the Western child – once at the periphery of the family, once ready to begin work at 7 or 8, once viewed as a miniature adult – begin to be viewed as the center of the family’s affection, to be loved and nurtured for the first 18 years of life. But my generation of parents, especially those raising their brood in New York, has really made up for all those centuries of neglected children.

“Never have I seen such coddled, tutored, overprotected, overscheduled children,” a psychologist who practices on the Upper East Side told me. “Parents are investing so much energy into their children today that it begs the question: Is it possible to over invest in your children? And not just emotionally. Financially, as well. I think the answer is yes. I see parents who view the hurdles that their children face as a deviation from this idealized path of supreme happiness. When of course, childhood is really about learning how to cope with the hurdles.”

A director of a fashionable nursery school says parents today have a hard time sounding angry at their children. “Parents don’t want to be the source of their children’s discomfort. So all I hear is, ‘Sweetie, I asked you not to do that.’ And ‘Honey, that’s not a good idea, is it?’ Whatever you say after ‘sweetie’ and ‘honey’ isn’t going to cut it. Letting your children know you’re angry when they misbehave is important. You aren’t going to scar them. In fact, you run a greater risk of damaging them by ignoring their behavior,” she said.

“When everyone around you is investing so much in their children, you really can’t help but feel like a bad parent if you decide not to,” a mother of three children said. “Even if you intellectually understand the consequences of obsessing over your children, even if you value the time your children spend daydreaming in their rooms, or playing with friends, even if you see your friends’ marriages suffer because they put all their energy into their children and not each other – even so, it feels like an uphill battle to leave your kids alone and not feel guilty about it,” she said.

So as far as the guilt is concerned, I guess I’ll feel it any which way I go: if I obsess, or if I benignly neglect. If they are my sun, moon, and stars, or if they are simply random planets.

“We’ve just found a new way to mess up our kids,” a mother of two boys said. “Our parents were hands off, and they paid their price. We’re smothering our kids left and right, and we’ll pay our price.”

sarasberman@aol.com