When you were a child playing house, what sort of mommy or daddy did you look like in your head?

Were you June and Ward, all pearls and suits and "Wash up, boys!", while your little scamps got in to all sorts of hilarious and innocent high jinks that would unravel before their eyes, but come together within the alloted 22 minutes, usually about the time Father returned home?

Or the Nelson version of the same, where Harriet held down the tidy, calm, ultimately reasonable fort during the days as Ozzie vanished into a fog of 'work' that was never described or explained?

Maybe you aspired to the wacky version of parenting the Ricardos represented where Wifey always had some 'splainin' to do and Junior was more a prop than anything else.

Maybe your life experience made Carol and Mike, with their mixed brood of blond and brunette Bradys more true-to-life, or perhaps you simulated single-parenting a la Shirley Partridge or John Forsythe as "Bachelor Father". (Is there anyone out there old enough to remember that one?)

How about adventure parenting with the likes of Sky King, custodial guardian of his niece, Penny? Or how about the father/son thing that seemed to happen between the Skipper and Gilligan that made survival possible on an island in Los Angeles?

Even with a range as wide as Archie and Edith to the Waltons, parents were most certainly parent-like in the TV world of our childhood, but can you even recall the image you had of the parent you thought you aspired to be? It might make a difference in the parent you've become.

This article written by mom Regan McMahon, author of "Revolution in the Bleachers: How Parents Can Take Back Family Life in a World Gone Crazy Over Youth Sports" suggests that the images of parenthood that permeated our childhood come back to haunt us.

Expectations of what a mother should be change according to era, reflected in and refracted by the culture. That solicitous TV mom gave way to the wisecracking mom, but women still fall prey to the whammy of idealized momminess. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 71 percent of women in the labor force had children under 18 in 2005, yet we are still striving to meet 1950s-era cultural expectations of stay-at-home moms.

No wonder we're tired and stressed. It's not that we're old, it's that our role models were Donna Reed and Jane Wyatt, not Felicity Huffman and Stockard Channing, so we have this really wacky template in our heads that we keep trying to fit ourselves into.

Yep. When in doubt, blame it on TV.