In this thread, I would like to explore the parenting style and psychology of the boomers / Gen X.
https://www.bolde.com/xx-ways-boomer-parents-traumatized-their-kids-without-meaning-to/
For starters, I think it’s interesting how they developed into working machines. Their weekends are spent performing meaningless busywork.
One thing that I notice is the lack of boundaries: boomers try to control their kids’ financial decisions, they don’t knock on their kids’ doors, they demand that they conform to their political or religious beliefs.
Have you been reading Adorno again?
The article just describes a conservative parenting style. Kids do better with such parents.
“The IFS/Gallup report found that “the most important factor in the mental health of adolescent children is the quality of the relationship with their caregivers.” The key driver is parents who have an “authoritative” style that combines “affection and attentiveness to children’s needs with structure and requirements for pro-social, responsible behavior.”
In contrast, liberal parents are more likely to have a permissive parenting style and “are the least likely to successfully discipline their children.”
“[C]onservative parents enjoy higher quality relationships with their children, characterized by fewer arguments, more warmth, and a stronger bond, according to both parent and child reporting,” the report concluded.”
From Report: Conservative parents more likely to raise mentally healthy teens
I think that everyone believes that it was good, because you’re told over and over that it is – in fact I used to think that I was totally fine and had a normal childhood – but in reality it was a controlling and emotionally distant style of parenting.
The boomers were raised by people who went to war, survived the Great Depression. So when those people experienced massive material success, the parenting style became “Shut up, get over yourself, others have had it worse. Be thankful. Work as hard as you possibly can.”
For example, I can’t tell my parents hardly anything about myself because it becomes a struggle session.
My parents make important financial decisions for me. They force me to invest money in things that I do not believe are good investments. I can’t tell them my point of view, because they will tear me down and shame me.
My parents decide who I’m going to vote for in every election. They tell me when to vote and make sure that I vote for their candidate.
My parents forced me to go to college, even though I tried to tell them that it did not seem like a good idea. I tried to tell them that I wasn’t ready for that decision. So now I’m $20,000 in debt, and in their minds, it’s my fault, because I decided to go. Instead of listening, they attacked me.
I used to do the dishes every day. But my mother told me one day that she doesn’t want me to do them, since she’s retired and can do them instead. I offered to keep doing them, because it’s a part of my routine, and this made her furious and she started insulting / guilting me. So I stopped doing them.
Guess what happened: my mom started finding my dishes in the sink. And she was furious that I left them there for her to do. So every time I eat something, I have to immediately clean every item that I used, even though it’s inconvenient.
And boomers do stuff like this, and they feel really righteous about it. They make decisions on a whim without any concern for anyone else’s feelings.
There were close to 5,000 tadpoles in our pool. I tried to save as many as I could. My dad wanted to use the pool, so he dumped all 4,000 that were remaining. I had to help him do it, and my parents were gossiping about how I “looked sad.”
And my mom was particularly abusive because every single time I would make a mistake – didn’t matter what it was – she would throw a tantrum and become irrationally furious. If I couldn’t find her car keys (that she lost), then she would take it out on me, and the memories are so painful that I do not like to recall them. And she would do it over and over and over and over again.
People are not strong all the time – that’s why we look for emotional support from our loved ones. But when that’s taboo, when telling your parents how you feel is punished – well you develop things like Cluster B, defensive detachment, homosexual desires.
“Tough love” did not give me thicker skin. It made me into an emotionally disorganized person.
In my early twenties I became obsessed with older women and sought out relationships with them. I wanted them to hug me, to say kind things to me. It was an overwhelming compulsion. Cougarism is really the straight version of homosexuality – it comes from shame.
And my sister went trans and cut off contact with the family. I haven’t seen her in nearly seven years. This is just what happens when you shame and bully sensitive autistic children.
I’ve also witnessed the collapse of my entire extended family, and it was so weird because I always thought that we were a loving family. But what it was is my aunts and uncles were raised in an emotionally distant way, and they had to compete for love and attention among many siblings. And all their kids turned out gay, degenerate, insecure, and cluster B.
Tough love cannot be healthy because it is unnatural. We evolved to share a fair amount of sensitivity. When you start changing parent-child relationships in any way that is unnatural, the results are never good.
I am skeptical of this.
With regards to parenting styles, there are considered to be four:
Conservatives tend to think of themselves as the perfect Authoritative parent, but they tend to actually be Authoritarian.
So, for example, my father wanted very much to be authoritative, and my mother has mentioned this to me a few times. But in reality, he banned me from watching Nickelodeon because he was worried about whether it promoted bad morals. That’s, obviously, the tip of the iceberg.
As for the “pro-social behavior” aspect of the authoritarian parenting style, Boomers tend to be basically libertarian, which is totally anti-social.
I have no doubt that conservative people in other cultures are good people. Stress here is that it’s in other cultures. So, say in France or Korea, for example, yes, conservative parents are probably good.
But, remember, in the USA, conservatism completely vanished in the 1960’s, and the Boomers all became cringe-inducing hippies, and then later in life they found it hard to maintain this liberalism since liberalism became kind of stupid and anti-white, but the Boomers could not give up on their insane dogmas about individualism and free-dumb and so on, so they became the Kosher version of a non-liberal, which is some kind of libertarian thing which was created by Jews, for Jews.
These Boomers are not, and cannot be, actual good conservative people. It is inconceivable for any family past the 60’s to be functional and caring like Leave it to Beaver.
@johnnymcivor It does sound like your parents were shitty, but blaming that on their year of birth makes as much sense as blaming it on their astrological sign.
You’re describing coastal America. In the interior, life carried on much as it had in decades past. I joke that where I live we never had the sixties. The fifties began right after WW2 and lasted until Reagan was elected.
It such a sad story, and all-too-common.
The fact of the matter is that humans need safe spaces. It’s dysfunctional if we need safe spaces frequently in adulthood, since we are supposed to know how to handle other humans and danger by then. But all humans, and all animals, need a safe space in childhood.
While in that safe space, we learn that we can trust other humans (not always, but sometimes), and that other humans maybe, just maybe, can have goodwill towards you, wanting good things for you, working together with you to achieve each other’s desires. Without that safe space, you go through childhood with this impression that nobody cares about you and many of them are enemies/competitors. This will not destroy you - you can overcome a hostile world by being belligerent and narcissistic. Thus, zero-love parenting often creates narcissists.
Let’s say your family is a safe space during childhood. That safe space is equivalent to a “sandbox environment” as it goes in engineering lingo, in which one can tinker and test things without breaking things. In this safe sandbox, the competencies to speak and look good, to handle people and dangers alone, and more, should be developed - and they must be developed by the time one reaches adulthood. People learn best when the brain has the exact chemical balances that correspond to positive emotion. That’s one of the main ideas behind ADHD medicine - it just basically increases your dopamine levels in hopes that it will increase neuroplasticity. This ADHD medicine has miraculous short-term efficacy, but it might have weak long-term efficacy.
Without that safe space where both trust and competency can be built, people might never feel safe around another person, and might never develop the ability to stand for themselves. The result? Debilitating anxiety.
So far, I see two outcomes from evil parenting. One is narcissism, the other is debilitating anxiety. This was the outcome in my family.
But there might be another - some kids might be smart enough to escape early, realizing their family is garbage.
What I describe above is shockingly similar to Faulkner’s brilliant book, The Sound and the Fury, in which he describes an insane and dysfunctional family. They were a wealthy Southern family, which seems to have no particular meaning in the story, besides perhaps giving you an idea that the insanity might have come from the guilt and shame, and also giving the opportunity to have a black servant-woman who was completely mentally-sound to also have a role in the story which also provokes many thoughts in the reader. Anyhow - the main point for here - one of the sons killed himself. The daughter went off on her own, partied, had sex, had a baby, and ultimately just left the country to live in France. The other son became an unscrupulous, greedy bastard. The hero of the story was the daughter - because she chose freedom from the toxic world she grew up in.
“Shut up Billy depression doesn’t exist now tell the nice pollster how happy you are.”
Conservative children respond with how they should feel, not how they actually do. These parents are also the most likely to then ask afterwards if their kid said what they wanted them to say.
Though ultimately that study is saying warm emotionally attentive disciplined parents raise better kids. Which is true. It just frames it to look like common conservatives are universally better and not the rare obscure unicorn conservative is better. Pulling a real conservative parent bell curve on us.
That’s literally it. Many conservative families deny the field of psychology, finding it to be lacrymose whining or worse.
Well, I just see it over and over again. It’s nothing personal. The millennials and gen Z are fucked up in other ways.
A really shocking realization for me was how this thinking caused things like the Elan School. You should really read this.
Man everything you said reminds me of my own parents…I wouldn’t have cared about the tadpole thing but I would never make you do that and it’s crazy they don’t know how much you love little creatures. Obviously if you attempted to save them, they meant a lot to you. Everything else is nearly the same as mine. Even attempting to sabotage me with college. (It’s not an inherently bad idea but making me do a local college specifically was really just a ploy for them to keep their punching bag on a tight leash.) Ugh! I wish you could lie! So many of your problems could be mitigated. Lie about who you vote for. Lie about your income. Lie about doing the investments they want. Lie about working overtime. Act dumber then you are, sure it fits their dependent narrative but it reduces suspicion of lying and gives you free time when they give up. You need to treat your parents like a husband trying to divorce their wife acts. Augh I wish I could teach you all my tricks. Especially since it’s the only functional support I can offer.
Yeah they do not want my feedback on any topic. If they do something I really don’t like, I can’t share that with them because they shame me. And shame is incredibly painful, it disconnects you from your body.
Right now, my mom is working on something outside my bedroom. She has the radio on, listening to stories of gruesome murders. It is extremely loud, and I really do not like listening to such stories because it makes me upset. I could not ask her to turn it down, or listen to something else, or use headphones, because she would become furious, and sigh, and start getting passive-aggressive before launching into a tirade yelling about how I never help my father in the garage, or I do nothing for anyone, how I’m close to 30 years old, and I don’t have a girlfriend, and I have college debt, and how several years ago, my apartment in Pittsburgh was messy, and how I’m a pipe dreamer, and how I had a certain look on my face several days ago, how I’m “on drugs” and on and on and on. And this completely ruins my day.
So I don’t. I try to stay out of her way, and that’s our relationship. She has never asked me about my feelings on any topic, but she does nice things for me and then holds it over my head. She, in effect, feels entitled to rip her son apart whenever she wants for any reason.
I think they believe that they love me, because they have a very specific image of who I really am – it’s the Eagle scout. So if I deviate from that image in any way, they shame me, they guilt me, they attack me from all angles. And then they act like they’re victims, and they have a whole victim narrative about how hard they work and how they were “only asking” for X Y Z.
All the while I’m not saying anything. I’m just listening to their feelings and their opinions and needs, and as for mine they don’t care and are not legitimate.
I remember one time, I cleaned the entire house and made dinner etc, and when out to say hello to my mom, she decided that she was furious with me and began tearing me down. Her stated reason? Something bad happened to her girlfriend at work. So in her mind, she was entitled to calling me a bad son and a loser and this and that.
Another time, we had a spot behind the back steps where we dropped the garbage bags. But raccoons would rip these apart and scatter them all over the yard – so my parents would have me clean it up. Well, I tried to ask if we could get a garbage can, or put them in the garage. But they refused because “dad doesn’t want to smell it,” and a garbage can “looks stupid.” In fact, they thought the garbage can proposal was hilarious and laughed about it.
So every time they put out new garbage, the raccoons would tear it apart, and I would have to drop what I’m doing and rake it all up – then fill a new garbage bag with the garbage. They had me do this for a few years until my dad realized that he could just get a garbage can and NOT have garbage all over his yard.
And all of this is justified with tough love and a sense of entitlement. That because you suffered a certain amount, that you are “owed.”
I do want to add that I don’t think liberal parents are better. Pick the girl toy as a girl or boy toy as a boy and they’ll chew their child out. I just think the bar is hell. The guy who only cuts off 5 of my fingers is technically better than the guy who cuts off 6 fingers, I guess.
Actually the biggest winning factor is a good marriage but these results are a survivorship bias. Ideology = Good Parenting vs Success = Ideology.
If a very conservative person gets a divorce, their pro-marriage score likely drops. If their pro-marriage score drops, it rigs the assessment of their conservative score. If you are successful, you stay conservative. If you aren’t, you don’t. The conservative bucket is pure because it’s pre-filtered for success. The divorced MGTOW dad isn’t a real conservative if he doesn’t believe in the foundation of marriage and thus gets dumped to the regular conservative bucket, keeping the very conservative bucket clean. It’s less that conservatism keeps you in a good marriage and more that people in a good marriage are the only ones left in the very conservative bucket.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the boomer idea that “you have it easy, I had it hard.”
Isn’t antiwhitism just an extension of this thinking? In the same way that old people try to sabotage their children, white liberals try to sabotage the interests of younger white people.
Case and point: Bill Gates gave his entire fortune away to Africa, and gave almost nothing to his kids.
There’s a lot of ways in which it is the same mentality.
There is this sense of wanting to make life hard and miserable for other white people and for your children. And, as you have said, it derives from a certain kind of envy: envy at your own children for potentially having a better path/setup/course in life from which they might reach a higher socioeconomic position than you could.
This is, of course, malevolent. And, Asians would never have this mentality. But, white people often do. I’ve heard my mother say all kinds of things to this effect. And, indeed, my parents have often discouraged me from ambitions. Most particularly, discouraging graduate school, encouraging certain low-status/not-respected career paths, and especially not leaving my home state for a higher-status place which is something my mother clearly wished she done herself, but was too afraid to do. It’s funny to think of the many Asian parents from low-status states and places who directly tell their kids to leave their loser region and go to a high-status place - even other countries if that is considered the high-status thing to do.
This is just one example of this boomer mentality. But there are even more dimensions to it. Gotta close this comment out before it becomes a ranting effort-post.
One more dimension - antipathy towards other whites. By antipathy, think both hostility and zero-empathy. Whites are trained in various indirect ways to direct our empathy towards non-white people. We are trained to be highly critical of ourselves.
I saw an Asian lady with a skin disorder today with a Taylor Swift hoodie. Gets you on trails of thinking. Firstly, how there is a fascinating phenomenon by which Taylor Swift is victimized by so many critics, and this, in turn, causes other people with various grievances to be attracted to her. Feminists, ugly girls, girls with disabilities, gays, and more.
Secondly, it got me thinking of how many Asians low-key liked her from the start. Now, they usually don’t actually like her. It’s more like, a simulation of fandom or an assumption that this is the person they should respect. You see, in Asian countries, whenever the media industries trot out the next megastars, they entire society gets behind them. This is as true in Japan as in Korea. It’s done for males as well as females, but females tend to like this stuff more, naturally. Basically, when everybody in Japan or Korea sees the popular performer, they just conclude that this person was the best, they are the national champion (like an Olympic athlete but for media), and that they must have some respect and show support for the champion of their culture.
This kind of thing basically applies for black people too, actually, though they have their typical way of “playing it off” to maintain a cool appearance. But behind the cool appearance, you will see that black people really refrain from tearing-down famous black people unless they are extremely “whack” as is the case with the Canadian Drake, in particular (and his being mixed-race and Canadian is a huge part of why he is whack).
And, Asians kind of assume the same would apply for whites, and that they have a minor duty to stand behind Taylor Swift to some extent just for the fact that she is (sort of) the “IT-girl” of our era, and they need to be good citizens of the USA.
But none of these phenomena apply for whites. Three problems we have in standing behind our champions (and actually behind any white person)
From the above things, we have this “Culture of Critique” among whites.
And, this same thing generates a feeling of latent antipathy regarding other white people, and it gets inside nuclear families even, with Boomers being disloyal to their own children.
I remember Sam Vaknin was talking about how narcissists have inverted empathy – friends and family are enemies, strangers are allies.
