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 don't think you can generalise. My parents were well educated in child psychology (psychiatrist/doctor and teacher) and my father was a member of an association against corporal punishment for example (I remember its booklets coming to the house in the 1960s or 70s). I would say they were very involved eg i came home for lunch every day until I was 10 from school when my father did too from the local hospital and read poems to us and also every bed time we had stories and songs from our parents - in other words it was a fairly involved set of modern parents in the new freedoms of the 1960s.
I have millennium children and also 2 Gen Zed ones. The later ones have had the internet all their lives and social media in a way the older millennial ones did not have in the 80s.

It is an interesting thread but I think in our case there are not big differences, although there may be in other families.

I’ve definitely seen this approach come via schools though, more so than parents.
At one point in the last few years schools were given more input into children’s mental health, and PSHE lessons took a turn to focus on feelings and victimhood. I don’t think this has been successful.
Dd’s mental health deteriorated badly with input from school and CAMHS. A whole group of her peers (including her) seemed to be in competition as to who was sufferering more (DD of course!) and who was genuinely mentally ill and who was just attention seeking. It was a very weird time in her life from a parental point of view.
I had a quick google of the Abigail Shrier book it looks like this is what she’s looking at?

I agree that generalisations aren’t always helpful.
It’s interesting, though, seeing threads about schools and the changes in behaviour, increase in poor behaviour, and trying to pinpoint what’s causing that and where it’ll lead.

I think kids are driven everywhere now as well . Where as as a youngster I was allowed to take buses everywhere . Or a bus with an older sibling .

My parents were late Silent Generation and I’m a mid Gen-Xer. I had a lot of freedom and with no cell phones, we’d take off around the village on our bikes and just need to be home by 6. We spent more time in unstructured play, climbing trees and paddling in streams. One summer, we were obsessed with playing detectives and followed “suspicious” ppl (I.e. innocent neighbors) around. 😂

What that generation wasn’t so good at, imo, was admitting to and getting help for problems, especially mental health. Some difficult things happened during my childhood and I probably could’ve used some counseling to process them, but it didn’t occur to my parents. They struggled enough dealing with my Dad’s lifelong MH problems, I think, because you just didn’t talk about them back then. I suffered from anxiety for a long time, probably triggered by these difficult times, but it wasn’t acknowledged.

So that’s one area where I think our generation have done better with our children. DS (15) is an anxious child and we started getting him help years ago. He’s so much better now.
Personally, I’m not keen on tracking my family either-I know that many ppl do and that’s fine-but I prefer not to.
It feels too helicopter/BigBrother-ish to me.

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

You're slightly older than me and I recognise this. My parents didn't smack because they didn't need to, a look was pretty much all it took. Same with teachers - I can only recall one who used corporal punishment. School punishment when I moved to secondary was a detention, and when you ambled home late and told your DM why, it was regarded as learning a very useful life lesson not to do that again.

I'm Gen X and I'm a mess. The main difference between my parenting and my parents', apart from the fact I HOPE I am less self-centred than they were, is that I really want to allow my kids to feel their feelings and deal with them, not pretend the feelings are not happening and get on with it. I think the former makes you much more resilient.

Additionally, I think there are good and bad elements taken from all generations.

My father was considerably older than my Boomer mother - so technically Silent Generation - and grew up in a time and a culture where excessive corporal punishment was 'the done thing'.

However, he was an extraordinarily gentle man and would no sooner have lifted his hand to anybody - man, woman, child or animal - than chewed his own leg off.

(I know it's a given for any half-decent person now, but it is easy to forget that less than half a century ago it wasn't unusual.)

His extreme opposition to physical discipline was seen as a bit weird at the time by some members of his family ('it's just a smack!'), but as it turns out, he was very much ahead of his time...

I’m a millennial with boomer parents and my dad was home from work by 6pm most nights (occasional business trips to USA but 3 weeks a year max). He would eat dinner with us all together, bath db and I while dm (who was a sahm) cleared up the kitchen in peace. He’d read us bedtime stories etc. in the day, dm would bake with us, play games, trips to the park.

my dc had that when very little but but 7 years old dh and I both worked full time. We flexed our hours but they were in childcare far more than I ever was. We do get lovely holidays and they want for nothing (ignoring dd3 wanting a brand new iPhone despite having a slightly older one).

my boomer upbringing was normal in the south east amongst my friends so I really don’t recognise the benign neglect apart from in homework - dm would say “have you done all your homework?” I’d say “yes” and that was that. My dc only got independent at year 8 and we did have to encourage that.

i think there’s good and bad in every generation. Having just employed 2 people in their 20s in my team at work, they are committed, hard working and use their initiative. I also have some in their 40s who like to be told what to do as they hate making decisions due to crippling anxiety. I’m not sure the grouping by generation is an accurate picture, just a load of stereotypes that allow each generation to blame each other.

“I jokingly describe my childhood as one of 'happy benign neglect' (with the exception of educational matters, which were considered of EXTREME IMPORTANCE in our family).”

I’m generation X and we deliberately raised our kids with this exact parenting. To cut a long story short, now young adults, they talk about their ’idyllic childhood’. They’ve done ok and they still like us and hang out with us. I vote for this as a winner!

Are family days out to the supermarket a recent phenomenon? I don’t remember them from my childhood but I often see two parents in Sainsbury’s, consulting the same shopping list, dragging around screaming toddlers and causing havoc. I’ve never understood why one can’t stay with the children while the other shops.

Always in peak times too, to cause maximum havoc.

My parents were boomers and now that I reflect on things, extremely self-centred. Kids were just an extension of themselves. 'Look how quiet, dutiful, mannerly my kids are' attitude. Respect between adults and children was a one way street. There was a bizarre concept that because they brought you into the world (their choice entirely), you owed them everything.

As a millennial, I don't expect respect unless I give it. I don't expect kids to bow down to adults. But I'm not a fan of mollycoddling or helicopter parenting. The main issue with today is an excess of social media and people having very negative attitudes towards their mental health due to a lack of stoicism.

I also wonder if the rise in divorce, single parents and blended families has anything to do with increased mental health problems and lack of resilience.

Heh these days many Gen Zs argue they should have everything precisely because they didn't ask to be born!

of course nothing has changed. People have always hated the 'yoof of today' and looked back with rose tinted glasses at times gone by.

It was nonsense then and its nonsense now.

Like music, same old rose tinted nonsense about modern music

The biggest thing I find as a parent of the Alpha generation is that there is just so much information thrown at you about parenting that it can make you feel really unsure of yourself. Parenting seems to be entirely child centric, and I don't think that's right. But it is a balance that we are still working out. Each generation's parenting is a reaction to the last. The move away from authoritarian parenting is a good thing, the move towards talking about and teaching emotional regulation skills is a good thing IMO. But the move towards permissive parenting, and towards parents being increasingly dominated by and afraid of their children, is not a good thing IMO.
Children needs boundaries, but not corporal punishment. They need support, but not helicoptering. They need empathy, but not for their emotional reactions to have too much power. There is always a pull one way or the other. The best parents in any generation, are the ones who find a good balance. Which is really easy to say and really hard to put into practice!

Yes, that's the other extreme. It's ridiculous

I don't think there's a rise in mental health problems. I think there's a rise in people talking about their mental health problems and seeking treatment for it.

"Back in the day" many, many people were dreadfully unhappy but just didn't know any different so either got on with things or died by suicide.

Did the benign neglect and distanced parenting of boomers work better for growing children?

I'm a boomer and don't recognise that description of my parents' parenting style, can you elaborate?

I had loving, caring parents but we had rules and weren't pandered to in any way. That still doesn't fit 'benign neglect' or 'distanced parenting'. I'm sure most of my peers would agree with that

I think it's hard to define one thing as what your generation of parents did "wrong". The times and problems of different generations are massively impactful. Kids and teens growing up through the war, the memory or the war and threat of future similar wars, industrial decline and mass redundancies, the paranoia of the 9/11 era, COVID, wars in Ukraine and Gaza. The changes in internet for good and bad. Changes in legal punishments both domestically and nationally, greater knowledge on the impacts of abuse, drugs, changing attitudes to drink and drugs and on and on.

How do you pull one aspect and say all your kids problems are because you cared too much as a parent?

I'm GenX and my parents are Silent Generation. 'Benign neglect' about sums it up. We didn't do any afterschool or weekend activities/clubs/sports and had no idea of their existence. They claim there was no such thing but in retrospect I'm pretty sure that things like Guides/Scouts and music classes and sports activities existed in the 70s and 80s - it just wasn't on their (or our) radar. Weekends might consist of driving somewhere and sitting in the car with a panda pop and bag of crisps while they went to the pub. Overall I just remember it being incredibly boring.

They now regularly express incredulity at the activities (two sports, two musical instruments) that DC do - and that we actually do stuff with them at all. "Oh I was just playing on the Switch with DS" is met with utter dumbfoundment - just WHY would an adult want to play with a child??

Speaking to peers this is not unusual, and parents of this generation who interacted with their children beyond the purely practical seem to be an exception.

I think people confuse gentle-parenting with permissive parenting and never upsetting them. It just means I explain the world and feelings to my kids in ways they can understand.

E.g. I don’t tell them they have to finish their plates at dinner. I trust them to know when they are full and so they are getting used to trusting their own decision-making. When they have to make big decisions when they are older, they will already be accustomed to having their boundaries respected and trusting that they make good decisions.

It just means I work with (not always successfully) the science of how their brains work. Another example is telling small children no. Toddlers don’t understand no/don’t/stop. If I tell them “don’t jump on the sofa” - the hardware up top just isn’t equipped yet and they hear “jump on the sofa”. It’s more effective to say “get down from the sofa ” aka telling them what to do instead of what not to do, if that makes sense? I think my generation (I’m 30) is doing okay. It is not my job to harshly judge older generations when they didn’t have this info available and were just using the tools that they had available. I just think now that we know better we can do better.

So if kids under 20 have all been poorly raised, surely they're being raised by parents who are you kids generation?

If parents are saying "this made me unhappy iny childhood so I won't do it to mine" I'm not sure parents get to pay themselves on their back at what a greedy job they did

I don't really think this is useful because I highly doubt there's ever been a generation/s of children who think it's fine to physically assault their teachers, swear, destroy school property and basically run feral whilst being fully supported by their parents.

In years gone by, such people would have been regarded as a burden, both on their families and to the wider community. Everyone had to pull their weight or they'd go hungry. Parents who were useless would have been roundly condemned and shamed for failing to raise useful human beings.

But there's no evidence to support that feeling feelings make them resilient - in fact the opposite. Rumination and thinking about feelings too much does the exact opposite. The Bad Therapy book mentioned above goes into a lot of detail about that. Feeling your feelings just makes you more miserable.

There's clearly a line to be drawn someplace, but for the majority of scenarios a child faces, telling them to shake it off and it's no big deal is better for them.