Did boomers get it right?

[GreyGoosehound]

I’ve lurked on several recent posts about deteriorating behaviour in schools, with increasing violence and 4 and 5 year olds who don’t have basic skills.

I’ve also seen threads and SM posts about boomers, mainly negative. But it’s also acknowledged that GenX are quite a hardy, resilient bunch.

I am generation X, and have brought up my genZ children differently to how I was raised. I was more present in their lives, made huge efforts to meet their needs in a way that my parents didn’t, as did many other parents in my age group.

You don’t need to look hard to find criticism of Millenials and GenZ, and GenAlpha (2012+) are commonly discussed as nightmare fodder.

Did the benign neglect and distanced parenting of boomers work better for growing children? Did the freedom that GenX had make a huge difference in their development?

I know there are global issues that contribute - the internet must have made a huge difference to both parenting and in child development, financially GenX had an easier time of becoming independent from parents, all this will have an effect.

I wonder if this is just a blip in human development, or how genZ and future generations will parent their children in response to how they were parented.
Thought this would make an interesting discussion.

I'm 40, my mum is 71 and dad is 74.

I so value the freedom I had growing up. I was left to occupy my own time. As a child that meant making up my own games, often in the garden. As a young teenager it meant hours upon hours painting my nails, writing in my diary, or sunbathing in the garden listening to my Walkman. As a slightly older teenager (14+) it meant taking 2 buses and walking for an hour to get to my friends' houses to hang out together. I didn't do ONE after school activity. Children now seem to have every second planned and accounted for.

And I can't believe the independence I had and how babyish young people seem now. I was holidaying alone with my boyfriend at 15, going on nights out with my mates at 15, holidaying abroad with mates at 16. At uni I changed my degree course without even letting my parents know!!

I think the problem is that kids are getting less and less time, and parents are relying more and more on things to make their life easier - not that parents are giving more and more time to them.

I'd agree less time just being and more focused filled time - quality making memory times with associated pressure.

I think there is also more pressure to give experiences or opportunities with clubs and groups than was in my 80s childhood.

I have had experience of this too. At the time I did exactly what the guidance was. Now I am beginning to doubt the guidance, especially as life is even tougher now, and my DC will just have to cope. I see a generation of anxious kids, and I don't think we are helping them by pandering to their anxiety. I have got tougher now.

That has been the case for lots of previous generations, i.e. where the kids went out in the morning and didn't come home until tea time, spending the day hanging around with their friends.

I think the bigger difference is that kids are being protected too much by the "it's dangerous to go out" mentality, and because they're not hanging out together, they're defaulting to being lonely in their own homes and just using smart phones or gaming consoles to beat boredom.

Obviously, working parents feeds into that as kids are fobbed off to childminders, grandparents, etc, so taken out of their home environment so not joining in with all the other kids living nearby and going to eachothers' houses etc. Yes, they get together with friends at childminders, nursery, school, etc., but that leaves a void in school holidays, weekends, etc as they're often not living close enough to their friends with everything being so fragmented.

As a child that meant making up my own games, often in the garden. As a young teenager it meant hours upon hours painting my nails, writing in my diary, or sunbathing in the garden listening to my Walkman.

This is the part of my childhood that I loved. I've always been able to occupy myself and still now feel comfortable doing my own thing. I'm rarely if ever, bored.

I think there is also more pressure to give experiences or opportunities with clubs and groups than was in my 80s childhood.
That's not what I recognise from my 80s childhood either. I did Brownies/Guides, dance and drama, Church choir and gymnastics. My brother did Beavers/Cubs/Scouts and hockey and cricket and Church choir.

We weren't unusual, most of my friends were at the same activities. This was in Kent, Cumbria and West Midlands as we moved around.

I am a boomer who had a great childhood. Boundaries were set and adhered to, but that gave a firm foundation, together with the love and care I was shown. My generation was the one that played out in summer until it got dark, explored woods and fields and weren’t frightened to do so.

My children were young children before the advent of social media and they played out, rode their bikes to friends houses, but I think we were more wary and more likely to be used as a taxi.

I once said on this forum, that it worried me that I saw so many parents, walking along, glued to their phones, with babies and toddlers being ignored in their prams and push chairs. I was told very firmly, that they must be having an emergency or looking for directions, but I don’t believe that. Not every parent I see is having an emergency or doesn’t know where they are. Modern parenting is very different and seems to be dismissive of any strategies or expectations that previously were normal, usual and effective.

Of course it wasn’t perfect, but I’m not convinced that raising children according to an app is either. Communication, care, firm boundaries and most of all love, are surely important.

Something that strikes me compared to my own upbringing is how child-centric many parents are. It's ridiculous (to me) at my child's primary school - the smallest playground injury, someone not winning a competition, a week when reading books weren't loaded on tablets - these are just some examples of incidents that have led to parental uproar and an apparent sense that their little darling isn't anyone's priority. When I was younger my parents' response would have been "oh well". It's like a kind of extreme indivualism that does no one any favours.

I think the real cause of the problem is both parents being out of the house for up to 50 hours a week each and children being raised by childcare providers. I KNOW this won't go down well though. Is it a co-incidence that anxiety and depression have rocketed in the last 20 years, right about the same time that both parents started going out to work.

My parents were pretty hands off. I asked my dad once whether I was difficult to bring up as a child. His response was not really we just kind of left you to it most of the time.

There were a few times when I was growing up that I wished my parents could have been more helpful, but generally I think they way they bought me up, to take care of myself, to be an independent person, to make sure I look after myself financially and not have to rely on them for bail outs, to get myself out of my own trouble I create has worked well for me, especially in business.

Ultimately as a parent I think your job is to teach kids to adult successfully. You don't do that by doing everything for them, and you don't do it by refusing to let them learn from their mistakes.

I’m a 1949 dob, first child in 1972 then 1984 and 1986. In the 1950’s we played out between meals, we magically recognised dinner and tea time and ran home. There was hardly any traffic, we played ball games in the streets. As teenagers in the 1960’s we had untold freedoms.
my parents were kind, never smacked, raised voices rare yet we knew boundaries.
(n the 70’s my first child rode her bike and shared a friend’s pony. The cycled to the stables unsupervised aged 8-9. By the time my next 2 arrived, no playing out, cycling definitely no cycling to the stables. Everything supervised - traffic the main problem. Then the problem of any problems being the fault of parents
i feel for my primary school aged grandchildren, whose ability to run wild is almost nonexistent. Of course they do after school clubs, so do their friends - no one can just go and call and play out, traffic nightmares plus fear of peadophiles - we know more than previous generations.
The young parents I know are just as loving as previous generations. I believe there’s more pressure on them

It's parents trying to hard to avoid their kids experiencing negative emotions. You see it here. Parents buy 6 of the beloved teddy so kids never have to experience losing it and working through that emotion. Parents take their kids out of sats and then wonder why their kids aren't coping with GCSEs. Stress, anxiety and sadness are all normal emotions. Allowing kids to work through these emotions instead of micromanaging them will help them build resilience.

I’m a generation X on the cusp of millennial though and I had liberal, Boomer parents, many of my friends were the same, I have a different experience of being a generation X er as we were hitting the teenage years when the recession hit the UK; the counter culture of that time was very much anti-corporate, anti-money as a result, we didn’t want to choose that predictable life with uni for the purpose of a career path into a profession as it wasn’t a way of life to be relied upon anymore. All my friends studied subjects Bon the Arts or humanities as education was for the sake of education, not for the job you’d get following your graduation! Many of us would navel gaze, banging on about boring life in the London suburbs, listening to Suede whose lyrics seemed to understand the plight of youth in the suburbs. I don’t think we were anymore resilient than teenagers now. I have a sixth former DS and I definitely think he will have it harder due to the way of the world and therefore will be more resilient, not less!

Honestly, I think nothing has changed in thousands of years. There is good and bad parenting and good and bad young people in all generations. There is a tendency to look back to a golden age that didn't really exist.

I don't agree that nothing has changed. Obviously there was no golden ageand every era has its issues, but not necessarily exactly the same ones.

I'm in my early 50s and have teenage dc, one of whom is at university. I think I have parented pretty similarly to my boomer parents. Big importance on education, but let them make their own mistakes and don't sweat the small stuff.

I'm a secondary teacher and a lot of the parents seem to be at one extreme or the other - disinterest bordering on neglect or tiger/helicopter parenting. The fact that kids' successes at school are seen as their own successes, but their failures are seen as the school's failures does not help them to deal well with setbacks or failures or take responsibility for their behaviour, especially if parents don't do anything about this.

F

Sorry, I quoted this as we were seemingly the unhappy kids of liberal Boomers, I don’t think it is a modern phenomenon. Being the kids of liberals is likely to lead to lots of debate rather than just getting on with living so that’s probably why they are unhappy: it was ever thus!

I think the thing that’s had the worst effect on young people’s mental health, as a group, is the arrival of the internet in general and phones and SM in particular. I think where we’ve gone wrong is not understanding how harmful these things are and therefore taking a fairly relaxed attitude to small children using screens for hours a day, kids on SM etc and our own propensity to scroll on our phones rather then interacting.

This isn’t too much care and concern- it’s not enough. We’ve neglected our kids just as much as the boomers neglected us, only in a different way, while patting ourselves on the back for being better parents- we've been fighting the last war. I think our kids will look back in horror at how lax we’ve been, just as we look back on our boomer parents smoking in the car with the windows closed etc etc.

The answer is never less caring or less connection.

Yes, this in spades. Also, now that parenting information is so easily available (internet), so much advice is "your children will be mentally brain damaged forever if you raise your voice to them!!!", and everyone seems utterly petrified of this.

made huge efforts to meet their needs in a way that my parents didn’t

What do you mean by this? What needs do you think were missing in your life?

I wonder if parents are scared to upset their kids because they spend less time with them? More parents work full time post kids than in previous generations and if you only see them 2hrs a day do you want to spend that time battling over homework and teeth brushing or indulging their every whim?

I'm Gen X and my DC are Gen Z. Honestly I wouldn't describe my kids as spoilt, entitled or lacking in resilience. I think in some ways they've had to develop more resilience! (eg being thick skinned about social media)

It's not just micro-managing and attempting to shield from normal emotions but now children (and adults) are constantly being urged to focus inwards to 'look after their mental health'. Any negative emotions are labelled as mental health issues which means children are even less encouraged to take control of their reactions to normal life while they wait for professional interventions.

I'm Gen X and I remember my Dad saying in a joking way "children should be seen and not heard" - joking but that was how parents back then parented. I do think I'm quite resilient and independent due to my childhood although we did lack mental health support - we were just left to get on with it and as a teenager that is hard.

My kids are entitled which is a result of the environment they are living in - maybe started off by the generation of parents above me - I'm not sure when the shift started. I don't like entitlement so I try and change it but it's not easy. I think it's harder for young people when they enter the workplace as a result of their entitlement - harder for them and harder for their employers!

Emotional needs I suppose. Support when I was badly bullied at school, care for my mental health as a teenager.
With hindsight though I wonder if this lack of approach from them was better for me in the long run, because my more supportive parenting to my children hasn’t meant that their lives are measurably happier/better than mine.

My upbringing was about pleasing my mum and dad and I was dragged along for the ride.

One theory I have is that millennials who were brought up like this 👆now feel it’s their role being to please their own children and “be dragged along for the ride” (to 100 millions extra curricular activities).

The hardest thing I have had to learn as a parent is how to create my own boundaries because I will often respond to request without stopping to think of it is reasonable or not.