'Put on a Sweater! I Feel a Draft!!'

Here's a stereotypical definition of a Jewish mother: "A chicken soup-feeding yenta who wants her son to be a doctor and her daughter to marry one." That comes straight from Beliefnet.com.

With Sunday such a special day for moms everywhere, stereotypes of the typical Jewish mother, especially in terms of how they parent, may still be around. But certainly, among health-care practitioners, those oversimplified conceptions are gone, gone, gone -- right?

"Nothing valid about them," declared Dr. Henry Paul, psychiatrist and author (Is My Teenager Okay?) in private practice in New York City. "Similar mothers exist in all ethnic groups. The characteristics usually described as a Jewish mother are not specific to Jewish mothers."

Moreover, interviews with other doctors and therapists revealed that the stereotypical traits of "overbearing" were "not exclusive" to Jewish people.

And moms have other things on their minds these days.

According to Dr. Paul Fink, a professor of psychiatry at Temple University's School of Medicine and past president of the American Psychiatric Association, only 2 percent of women back in 1938 were in the workplace, whereas now, 70 percent to 80 percent are working.

That does not mean that basics in parenting no longer apply.

Yet, the concept of Jewish mothers having a monopoly on the upbringing of a child is "old-fashioned and an anachronism," said Dr. Harvey Guttmann, president of Gastrointestinal Associates in Rydal.

Indeed, the team approach often exists in parenting today: father, mother, nanny and day-care staff, he added. "Every one of them has a piece of the child," he stressed, unlike a half-century or century ago, when mothers were homebound.

And emotional factors and stress affect intestinal functions, noted Guttmann: Parents "have a strong hand in bringing up the child, and how they bring up the child will in some ways determine how he or she handles stressful circumstances."

'A Longstanding Tradition'

Jonathan Berent, a performance anxiety specialist (www.socialanxiety.com), agreed that parenting is a "shared project" these days. He pointed out that anxiety among parents often shows up in the job they do raising children.

That old "Jewish mother" stereotype included "guilt provocation," stressed Fink.

"Expectations and reacting positively to mother is a long-standing tradition," he continued, but "the modern generation [of mothers] is not as nagging, pushing, demanding as the old-school. The key element is to love the kids."

However, do Jewish mothers still worry and have concerns about their children?

"Absolutely," declared Fink.

He noted that middle-class kids throughout the world are also under "tremendous pressure" to compete from their parents.

Still, some psychiatrists note that if there is a stereotype that Jewish mothers are more anxious than some other groups, there is historic reality to back it up, certainly among Ashkenazi mothers, said Maurice Preter, M.D., a psychiatrist, neurologist and psychotherapist in private practice on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University.

In the Russian Empire of two centuries ago, children were ripped away at age 12 from their mothers to serve in the Czarist army for 25 years. Those Jewish mothers clung to their children.

"These days, the clinging is called neurosis," he said, "but in the old days, it was reality."