The confusion has been growing since the 1960s, when a variety of social changes increased the civil rights of the young, at the same time as our culture was rebelling against authority figures. A new generation of parents rebelled against the perceived despotic practices of their own parents. And the balance in power within the family shifted so that the old rules of bringing up children didn't apply. More recently, perhaps in an effort to recover that balance, new laws have been passed that dictate that parents will be held responsible for the consequences of their kid's problem behavior. But while local, state, and national governments can pass laws requiring parents to do a better job of raising kids, no new paradigm is offered to replace the old one.
Parents lack a standard format and a set of shared rules for bringing up children.
What they need is a new model that will ease their confusion and give them the tools to deal with such issues as power, control, values, punishment, and discipline. I wonder why the government hasn't jumped into this gulf and given us a paradigm. After all, they have in so many other areas. Take the Basic Food Pyramid. Even though it has changed a couple of times in our lifetime, it has been posted in every school, been placed on countless cereal boxes, on the sleeves of millions of loaves of bread, and appeared on the panels of milk cartons.