Generation X's Method of Parenting
Posted: Tue Aug 16, 2022 7:08 pm
My daughter is now a young adult, and I have to admit that I'm starting to recognize where my best-intentioned strategies for parenting may have been a disservice to her.
Let's start with a simple one: access to money. I grew up in a low-income family (given the size of it), and my daughter did not. As my access to cash grew, it seemed natural to me to share the increases with my family. From the time she was born till she was about 8-9, we literally spoiled her. I say "literally" because I started to notice from her around the time she was eight or nine an attitude of expectation, which quickly turned into entitlement. I think there are more factors to that sense of entitlement than just the fact that we gave her so much (like, the way were were constantly reinforcing how innately special she was), but I have no doubt that showering her with gifts led to that unhealthy attitude.
Contrast that with how I was raised. Whenever I got a gift from my parents, it was a huge deal. I felt really lucky for a day. The vast majority of the "fun" stuff I wanted as a kid were things I never got or only had access to via a friend. I was left wanting. If I wanted something badly enough, I would look for ways to make money and start saving. All my daughter had to do was express a mild interest in that thing and it would eventually show up in the house. We were terrible parents that way. In fact, I remember there was this brand of stuffed animal that had hundreds of characters, and I found myself "collecting" them on her behalf. She had my collection of teddy bears.
I want to go back to the note I made about constantly reinforcing how innately special she was. I think this is something somewhat unique to my generation that changed our view of parenting: the proliferation (i. e. fad) of self-help books and gurus. I was heavily into those in my late teens/early twenties. It felt like I was teaching myself what I thought my parents should have taught me. So, as a consequence, I imagined that I would be a much better parent by not making the same mistakes my parents made. I constantly tried to reinforce positive beliefs. The problem I didn't recognize is that the self-help books in those days taught us to "believe something about yourself until it manifests and becomes true." Essentially, their advice was to keep lying to yourself until you turn into the thing you've been lying about all this time. The problem is that it's not a long-lasting solution (you might start feeling confident for a while after pumping yourself up on possibilities, but life has a way of reminding you of certain truths). I suppose I'm realizing that the low-grade depression I would feel after my real-life started reasserting itself again after being all pumped up and super motivated is the same depression I'd be giving my daughter when I made her believe she was innately special, but life wasn't comporting with that belief.
And, of course, like many other parents of young children in the late 90's/early 2000's, I never let my kid go outside alone. This is amazing to me in hindsight, and likely my biggest regret. OMG, she might get kidnapped! The reason this is amazing to me is my own childhood experience should have taught me that strangers with candy rarely happens! It never happened to me, or anyone I knew. Of course, I knew it could happen, but didn't have the ability to weigh its actual scale. Just the thought that it could happen made me want to mitigate it from ever happening. This all seems crazy now, considering I remember walking to the local convenience store several blocks away when I was 4, put in charge of my younger brother age 2!
As a result of the constant "protection," I get the sense that my wife and I have compromised our daughter's emotional immunity. The things she finds tragic, life-changing, dramatic, etc. are the kinds of things my generation considered annoyances. I don't think we raised her with enough resistance, enough challenges, or enough opportunities to solve problems on her own.
I have framed all this in the context of my own experience parenting, but I'm really talking about a generational trend here. I think Gen X and Millennial methods of parenting have led to the high levels of depression and anxiety we see in college students today, and I think it's because were were too nice to them in order to avoid being the "mean" parents we perceived ours to be. The easiest way to notice this manifesting is in all the attention we seem to spend these days on "offending people." When I was a kid, offending someone was not much of an offence. Most people intuited, "That's your problem, not mine."
These days, not only do we listen to people when they tell us one thing or another offends them, we actually honor it, devoid of any consideration of the speaker's intent. Young people today are "triggered" just by hearing certain key words. Context is irrelevant. The whole uproar over Dave Chappell and trans people goes away if you consider the context honestly. I know this, because I watched the special, and then read several articles criticizing it, and all I can say is that it seems we watched different shows. The show I watched seem to be in full support of trans people. It's as though you can't make a joke about a disenfranchised group, because to do so requires you to say the name of the disenfranchised group, and just hearing those words is enough to trigger certain folks no matter what the context is. This is like it being offensive to joke about my wife; I can't do that if I assert that "I support and love her."
I'm sure social media is partly to blame, and I have a feeling that a cultural shift will occur at some time down the line when parents stop giving their kids access to a computer/cell phone until they're adults and can handle it. But that's a whole other topic (it might be the other side of the same coin).
tl;dr: I think the Gen X and Millennial generations' methods of parenting are largely to blame for the children now entering adulthood who are seemingly ill-equipped for life's challenges.
Let's start with a simple one: access to money. I grew up in a low-income family (given the size of it), and my daughter did not. As my access to cash grew, it seemed natural to me to share the increases with my family. From the time she was born till she was about 8-9, we literally spoiled her. I say "literally" because I started to notice from her around the time she was eight or nine an attitude of expectation, which quickly turned into entitlement. I think there are more factors to that sense of entitlement than just the fact that we gave her so much (like, the way were were constantly reinforcing how innately special she was), but I have no doubt that showering her with gifts led to that unhealthy attitude.
Contrast that with how I was raised. Whenever I got a gift from my parents, it was a huge deal. I felt really lucky for a day. The vast majority of the "fun" stuff I wanted as a kid were things I never got or only had access to via a friend. I was left wanting. If I wanted something badly enough, I would look for ways to make money and start saving. All my daughter had to do was express a mild interest in that thing and it would eventually show up in the house. We were terrible parents that way. In fact, I remember there was this brand of stuffed animal that had hundreds of characters, and I found myself "collecting" them on her behalf. She had my collection of teddy bears.
I want to go back to the note I made about constantly reinforcing how innately special she was. I think this is something somewhat unique to my generation that changed our view of parenting: the proliferation (i. e. fad) of self-help books and gurus. I was heavily into those in my late teens/early twenties. It felt like I was teaching myself what I thought my parents should have taught me. So, as a consequence, I imagined that I would be a much better parent by not making the same mistakes my parents made. I constantly tried to reinforce positive beliefs. The problem I didn't recognize is that the self-help books in those days taught us to "believe something about yourself until it manifests and becomes true." Essentially, their advice was to keep lying to yourself until you turn into the thing you've been lying about all this time. The problem is that it's not a long-lasting solution (you might start feeling confident for a while after pumping yourself up on possibilities, but life has a way of reminding you of certain truths). I suppose I'm realizing that the low-grade depression I would feel after my real-life started reasserting itself again after being all pumped up and super motivated is the same depression I'd be giving my daughter when I made her believe she was innately special, but life wasn't comporting with that belief.
And, of course, like many other parents of young children in the late 90's/early 2000's, I never let my kid go outside alone. This is amazing to me in hindsight, and likely my biggest regret. OMG, she might get kidnapped! The reason this is amazing to me is my own childhood experience should have taught me that strangers with candy rarely happens! It never happened to me, or anyone I knew. Of course, I knew it could happen, but didn't have the ability to weigh its actual scale. Just the thought that it could happen made me want to mitigate it from ever happening. This all seems crazy now, considering I remember walking to the local convenience store several blocks away when I was 4, put in charge of my younger brother age 2!
As a result of the constant "protection," I get the sense that my wife and I have compromised our daughter's emotional immunity. The things she finds tragic, life-changing, dramatic, etc. are the kinds of things my generation considered annoyances. I don't think we raised her with enough resistance, enough challenges, or enough opportunities to solve problems on her own.
I have framed all this in the context of my own experience parenting, but I'm really talking about a generational trend here. I think Gen X and Millennial methods of parenting have led to the high levels of depression and anxiety we see in college students today, and I think it's because were were too nice to them in order to avoid being the "mean" parents we perceived ours to be. The easiest way to notice this manifesting is in all the attention we seem to spend these days on "offending people." When I was a kid, offending someone was not much of an offence. Most people intuited, "That's your problem, not mine."
These days, not only do we listen to people when they tell us one thing or another offends them, we actually honor it, devoid of any consideration of the speaker's intent. Young people today are "triggered" just by hearing certain key words. Context is irrelevant. The whole uproar over Dave Chappell and trans people goes away if you consider the context honestly. I know this, because I watched the special, and then read several articles criticizing it, and all I can say is that it seems we watched different shows. The show I watched seem to be in full support of trans people. It's as though you can't make a joke about a disenfranchised group, because to do so requires you to say the name of the disenfranchised group, and just hearing those words is enough to trigger certain folks no matter what the context is. This is like it being offensive to joke about my wife; I can't do that if I assert that "I support and love her."
I'm sure social media is partly to blame, and I have a feeling that a cultural shift will occur at some time down the line when parents stop giving their kids access to a computer/cell phone until they're adults and can handle it. But that's a whole other topic (it might be the other side of the same coin).
tl;dr: I think the Gen X and Millennial generations' methods of parenting are largely to blame for the children now entering adulthood who are seemingly ill-equipped for life's challenges.