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 engage in play with my DC every day, I do a hell of a lot more imaginative play with mine than my parents ever did with me. Most of the parent friends I have made since having children are really engaged with their kids from what I’ve seen of them. And most of us have complained about the fact you have to give kids screens as soon as they’re in school. This generation of parents are not all dumping their kids in front of a screen. Same as our boomer parents didn’t simply dump us in front of the tv just because it was there. Well, I’m sure some did as I’m sure some of this generation do, but it’s not a fair generalisation to make.

@GreyGoosehound did you grow up into a fully functioning, well adjusted, healthy (physically,mentally and emotionally) adult with healthy relationships and boundaries?

Without any therapy or other "aids"?

No I didn’t, particularly with regards to healthy adult relationships and boundaries. Most of the issues growing up were swept away and ignored and I grew up believing they were normal things to go through.
I was diagnosed autistic in my 40s, my daughter diagnosed at 19.
The therapy and support my daughter received through school and CAMHS made her issues far worse and much more difficult to deal with. I’m grateful to have not had to deal with that.
My daughter had the benefit of having a loving supportive mother, but things, although arguably her life experience has been easier than mine, have been far more difficult than my own, which was rather neglected with an emotionally abusive father.

This thread is so irritating. Please stop referring to people over 60 as boomers. We are human beings who actually from my experience were / are great parents .
Can only speak for myself and close friends but our children had a great childhood and haven’t any problems with their upbringing. We all gave them a fabulous childhood and all thriving as adults in their late 20s / early 30s .
What has changed now is SM which our children dodged until they were late teens .

@GreyGoosehound then they didn't get it right did they? Because that's the benchmark, not happiness, or not struggling, or resilience (which more often than not gets mistaken for maladaptive coping mechanisms).

Did DD get ABA "therapy"? Because that would certainly have made her worse.

This.

Maladaptive coping mechanisms are not resilience. Binge eating disorder and self-harm are not resilience. Moving jobs every two-to-three years to avoid disciplinary action because you can't understand why you keep pissing people off and so keep doing it is not resilience.

No ABA.
Maladaptive coping mechanisms of course aren’t resilience. My daughter had access to more mental health support than I ever did, but her life experience as a teen developing into an adult, and that of many of her peers, has not been better than mine. The help didn’t work, but at the same time it was very much positioned as dd being lucky to be able to access it, and that her chance to be well adapted with good coping mechanisms was good - but all interventions created a much bigger problem.
I’m wording this very clumsily, sorry!
Her life should in theory be better than mine, as she has had better parents, more support than probably anyone my age could access, but it’s not.
The whole point of the thread wasn’t about individual families, but about the general trend of children (and I suppose now adult children) appearing to cope less well than previous generations, and wondering whether different parenting styles and other outside influences were impacting this positively or negatively, but I suppose it’s too early to have the whole picture.

I have the government to thank for being able to go to university etc. My mum and dad wouldn’t pay for me, and luckily I got a full grant as they didn’t earn enough anyway. They were also a tad tight. I remember on my 13th birthday being told I’d get no more pocket money as I could now legally work (I think it’s changed now), so I got a paper round and cleaned in a private school. It sounds Dickensian now!

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
-Socrates

"What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?"
-Plato

"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint ... As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behaviour and dress."
-Peter the Hermit AD1274

Anyone criticising the ‘youth of today’ as being unusually disappointing is not only displaying the typical view of tge old but has also forgotten their own youth or look at it through rose tinted glasses

Gen X here.

I remember going home crying sayings a girl had hit me . My mother said .Don’t come to me crying get back out there and hit her back!
Some hard life lessons learnt….
no after school clubs just out on the street to play and fight my own battles!

"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? "

Yay. I am a boomer ( late, don't feel like one but technically ,allowing for the fact that it's all a lot of made up stereotyping, I am)
My children are 29 and 23.So not Gen X. You cannot generalise.
My parenting of them has really not involved benign neglect and distanced parenting - my parents' parenting of me and DSis didn't involve benign neglect and distanced parenting either.
Having said that I definitely had more freedom growing up and I do think that made a difference - can't speak for GenX though...

@VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia Institutions were closing down in the seventies. By the early eighties they were virtually all closed in Scotland and England. As a child I knew plenty of parents in the seventies with severely disabled children living at home with their parents. You are talking about the 1950s and 60s when severely disabled children were still institutionalised.

Mental health support? What mental health support?

I'm a GP and there is no mental health support for children or adolescents unless in extreme cases like schizophrenia or suicidal ideations. Even these take months and months to be seen.

People moaning about depression and anxiety on social media is not mental health support for young people. It's just an unhelpful sound chamber that is largely defeatist and teaches them to be aware of their poor mental health, but does not give them the tools to deal with it.

Maybe you've paid privately or live in a privileged part of the country, but the mental health support you refer to does not exist in most places.

Dd had an emergency referral to CAMHS crisis team about 6 years ago. She was seen the same night.
She had a mental health mentor at school and one through young carers.
That mental health support may not exist right now, but for suicidal dd of a few years ago it very much did.

I'm sorry to hear that your DD has had a very tough time with her mental health.

But it would appear that you are basing your opinions on today's youth on your DD, an extreme case. The vast majority are not suicidal, even if they struggle with their mental health. They would not be seen by Camhs. I've referred very depressed or anxious teens to Camhs and sometimes referrals are outright rejected. Or they just never hear back. There is simply no funding unless they are a risk to themselves or others.

I'm Gen X, raised by Boomers. I have wondered the same, OP, as my children aren't as resilient as me. But I have a much closer relationship with them and they come to me for support. I think the neglect of my parents, particularly emotional neglect, has made me tough, resilient, but unable to ask for help (too used to having to just work it out myself) and I never share my feelings with my mother, ever. I just let her see me soldier on with no emotion. I think this sometimes frustrates her as she's grown and would like me to share with her now, but it's what she created. It also meant I couldn't tell my mother when some things happened during my growing years that I shouldn't have had to deal with on my own and impact me to this day.

I think the parenting we received did make us stronger and more resilient but there is a reason we decided to do it differently with our children. My children have told me I got it right.

I’ve only discussed dd as the thread took a point in that direction.
The reason I started the thread was having read several accounts over the last few months of increasing behaviour difficulties in schools, younger generations approaches to work and being managed (not a criticism - I don’t think it’s a bad thing that younger people are not prioritising work in the way that older generations have). and reflecting that from what I can see people are generally better parents and more involved in their children’s lives than they were when I was brought up (obviously there are exceptions to this).
Perhaps the increase in poor behaviour a bad thing or a temporary adjustment. The thread is not about my daughter.

The upbringing you describe produces "sink or swim" results and the "swim" isn't necessarily the most efficient way to travel through water.

When I disclosed as an adult the sexual assault I suffered as a child, the response was "why didn't you tell us at the time?". Well, you didn't want to deal with bullying at school, you wanted me to either deal with it myself or shut up, so why are you surprised that I didn't tell you?

The binge eating and other forms of self-harm I'm left with are not efficient methods of swimming.

Several posters have pointed out that generalising any one generation as being this or that is reductive and inaccurate. There are good and bad parents of every generation and there are DC in every generation who thrive or suffer as a result. But what many of us in Gen X are saying is that OUR parents weren't that great a lot of the time. They were raised with minimal emotional support and they parented us in the same way.

Feelings weren't talked about in my family. My parents divorced and remarried within the space of less than a year and if we showed any negative feelings towards the horrendous upheaval this caused in our lives we were slapped, told to stop causing problems and sent to our rooms. In my naice, MC home we were expected to have a stiff upper lip and to not voice uncomfortable thoughts. My Silent/Boomer DPs got some things right, but they got other things badly wrong and they were actually very selfish, oblivious and/or uncaring at times.

chugg, I agree with you and liked the ancient quotes. I think Shakespeare has some too. The youth of today, whenever that is, are always different from the older ones or everyone thinks they are and yet since the dawn of time teenage hormones have led teenagers to break away from adults, be brave or wild and then calm down in their 20s.

In terms of recent changes, teenagers who don't go outside much and don't move around much probably are less happy. My psychiatrist father as well as offering drugs and therapy for those who had very serious medical conditions also encouraged people to take up a new hobby outside. The open air, sun (when it is not raining in the UK), being active, doing things, not just at a screen (or not just stuck with head in a book all day) tends to make people happier which is not surprising as it is how our species has been since we began to exist.

My parents were born in the 1920s and as I said above as psychiatrist/doctor and teacher were very good at things like child psychology and ahead of their time.
I do accept generations do differ over time - the Victorians were brilliant at some things - they made us the most successful nation on the planet and built railways and all sorts, but also pretty nasty at other things eg my uncle was sent to a boarding school aged FOUR with his 12 year old cousin in the 1920s because he was jealous of the next baby. His father was born in 1880 so a Victorian. There he was made to write with his right hand even though left handed. I doubt there was much mental health help for those suffering in world war I whereas by the time WWII came around the UK was much better at that kind of help.

There are good and bad parents every generation. But the way parents bring up children badly does differ. The neglectful parents in the past who let their children run feral and pretty much ignored them, are the neglectful parents of today who shove a tablet or phone at their children so they can ignore them. And the different types of neglect does produce different outcomes in children. The children left to run feral would be the ones getting into trouble with the law, while the children left with a tablet or phone all day are the ones whose development will be delayed and with poor social skills.
It is not true there are no differences between the generations.

In terms of not talking about feelings, there is a middle way. There have always been parents who listened to their children and took their feelings into account. My grandfather who was born in the late 1800s was like this.

But the parents parenting children just after the war were often suffering trauma. I have known older adults who were tortured in Japanese POW camps, who fought hand to hand in trenches, who lost lots of members of their family during the war, who were in concentration camps. The trauma of war meant may of those parents only coped by trying to push down their feelings, especially around their children. Lots of wives at the time would say that their husband would not talk to her about what he witnessed when fighting. So people got on with life as best as they could.

@chuggachug some of those quotes are made up.

I think this is a good point about the baby boomers. They were often raised by parents who were of the ‘stiff upper lip’, era when many Victorian values were still held high. And many were traumatized too from the war. This is true of my boomer parents and their peers. That obviously had a bearing on how they then raised their children. I’m not saying they were all poor parents at all. Mine were great but you can see from the many posts on here that so many weren’t. And that even the good/great ones were all far less involved in our lives and gave us so much more freedom than kids get today. Was that really a good thing? I cringe when I think of the situations I got into as a 13/14/15 year old. I had far too much free rein and grew up far too fast (even with loving steady parents). I actually wish mine had been a bit more involved in my studies and my emotional welfare.

Whilst this freedom can be seen as a good thing in SOME ways, it clearly isn’t a good thing in other ways. It wasn’t a ‘better’ method of parenting. It may have resulted in young people being more outwardly independent and resilient but it has not necessarily created people who are more well adjusted long term (as seen above in many posts). Having a better attachment to our parents is always a positive thing for children. Having them on our side and advocating for us is always better than the alternative in my opinion. That’s proven in psychology.

Another thought I have about all this is that I believe some parents today are parenting in the complete opposite way to how they were raised because they hated how they were raised! They want to advocate for their child’s wellbeing, their child’s wellbeing &happiness comes above everything else. Now obviously this could go to an extreme level where the child has no boundaries but I think that this is triggering for a lot of older people. I think they see these children and young people being treated with respect as a whole human (in a way they never were) and it triggers them and they then blame it for the ‘ills of society’.

I think you are correct, then add in micro managed free time and the over use of tech.

I have friends who baby their teens - they never played outside with friends, won’t let them use the oven, don’t talk to them about serious subjects in case they get upset etc. They are the most anxious teens I know.