What is the generation gap today?

[MiddleAgedandConfused]

My mum - mid 70s, Yorkshire born and bred - is like many of her generation mildly racist, doesn't think homosexuality is acceptable or that gay couples should be allowed to adopt, IVF is flaunting nature, premarital sex is the only thing that separates us from animals... and so on. She is actually a very lovely and kind person who would never be rude to anybody, but she used to occasionally come out with some of this stuff.
She has now learned not to say anything like this in front of me cause I won't tolerate it.
So - my question is what beliefs do I hold that will make my DD17 frustrated with me? What dinosaur ideas does a woman my age have that will make my DD tell me to shut up and stop being so bloody ignorant?

"You have surprised me IUseAnyName! I am almost 50 and I learned as a child that 'halfcast' is insulting! And 'coloured' has been unacceptable for decades. My goodness!."

I am 56 and grew up in South London. In the 1970s is was acceptable to call someone of mixed race half caste (my best friend was mixed race and that is how she described herself). It was also more acceptable to say coloured than black. I only learned fairly recently on MN that coloured was a no no.

So you can stop "my goodnessing"

Even smokers don't smoke in their own homes these days. MlL had a major falling out with her SIL because she asked her to smoke outdoors c. 1988.

Yes, my Mum finds, saying "black" really difficult, having being taught in her youth that "coloured" was the polite term. She knows now, but she finds it difficult to say.

To a degree this constantly changing acceptable use of language is really irritating-its the underlying stigmatizing of certain groups that is the issue-so that any language used to refer to that group gradually becomes seen as an insult.
I don't like the way people are reacting to individuals who are just genuinely getting things wrong by mistake but don't appear to regard anyone as inferior.

Social media. I am 56 and most of mine and OH's generation in our families don't have Facebook accounts. I only opened one because I wanted to understand what it was about. DD (14) has Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and Tumblr, Vine, etc. I just CBA with all of that.

I am also not welded to my phone and still use a landline as the default phone in the house (better sound quality)

Like Bunbaker I grew up in South London and am in my 50s. I also thought "coloured" was acceptable until the "Cumberbatch incident" showed me otherwise.

Oh - and shopping. I hate buying online. I like to see and touch and try on and then buy. My DD can't be bothered with shops - ot is all online. she can't see why I waste my time driving to shops and walking about in them when I could just click.

Well if our recent recruitment drive in the States is anything to go by, it's that people will have differing opinions, with a matured Internet and the rise of mob justice 'slactativism', people are reverting into echoe chambers and expect the 'other' side to be reprimanded by law.

We seem to be on a fine balance of 'tough luck' and 'discrimination' in the coming years

One here in the US has to do with driving. It used to be shocking if a middle class 16 year old was not interested in getting a drivers license and access to a car. I felt like a freak for not doing so (I got my license when I was 23). Now it's becoming a much more normal thing to not be in a hurry to get your license. I'm sure the growth of the Internet and more opportunities for shopping and socializing online has a lot to do with this.
It's also becoming more normal for middle class people to live in cities and have kids. It used to be, you moved to the suburbs before or shortly after having kids, and the people who lived in cities were poor. My generation (I'm 40) and younger have less desire to live in the suburbs.
It's getting less acceptable to have more than 3 kids (unless they're from different marriages or something like that).

Yy to geekmommy. I'm in Portland, Oregon, and we have an affordable housing crisis now in the city due to rapidly rising rents prompted by lots of people moving to the city - not the suburbs. The suburbs, by contrast, are becoming older (younger middle class people not moving out of the city when they have kids) and poorer (people can no longer afford to live in the city itself so they're being squeezed out) with a few wealthy exceptions. It's difficult to generalise from Portland to the US as a whole though because it's such an unusual place. But certainly here people, including my DH and I, have no interest in moving to the 'burbs.

I'm in Pittsburgh, and there's definitely more interest in living in the city among younger people. There's lots of demand for nice apartments in Pittsburgh- I see them going up everywhere. I think my sister experienced this in a negative way- she had trouble selling her house in a semi-rural area of Connecticut.
My theory is that my generation lived in the suburbs as kids, and we didn't like it (I know I didn't). Now we want no part of it. There's also been a huge drop in crime, particularly in urban areas, so cities are less dangerous. That might be because we stopped using leaded gasoline, of all things.

I have just found one this evening. DDad shared one of those obvious hoax things on facebook. I immediately responded with the Snopes page, as I have done the last 20+ times he has posted something.

It made me think - do you think scepticism is a generational thing? As in, because most people under 30 (and especially under 25) have grown up with constant internet access, we are less likely to accept the first instance of something we see and are more likely to double check it before believing it? It does seem to me to be a pattern, and I wonder if it's related to the fact that pre-internet, you'd have limited sources for this kind of information, and the information you did get would mostly be fairly filtered and legitimate. I think because I have practically lived on the internet since I was about 16 (so, for the last 10 years) I have quite a keen sense for when something is legitimate and when something is bullshit. I can spot those kind of posts miles off. Yet there are two groups on my FB who repost them: people my dad's age and older, and young teenagers.

There is a worldwide trend that the richer middle classes are moving back into cities and poorer people are being pushed out to the suburbs, so that's not imagined, it's happening all over the place.

"As in, because most people under 30 (and especially under 25) have grown up with constant internet access, we are less likely to accept the first instance of something we see and are more likely to double check it before believing it?"

I'm 56 and have become even more sceptical with age. DD is 14 so I get very suspicious of wild internet claims out of a desire to protect DD.

I can't ever imagine wanting to live in an urban area again. I grew up in a leafy suburb and liked it very much. I worked in central London but was pleased to escape back to suburbia at the end of the day. I now live in a semi rural area and love it.

drudgetrudy makes some excellent points.

Agree with Bunbaker about drudgetrudy - excellent points about language.

Language changes and all of the people here who are young-ish and using language that they believe is "right" will find that it is "wrong" as things change and the words you use are no longer "appropriate" or "acceptable" to the changed times. (Exhausting and impossible to keep up!)

Previous generations were not all bad people using dreadfully offensive terms - those terms reflected the times - just as today's do.

Manners also change and we will all find ourselves behaving in a way that is considered ridiculous or even offensive to a much younger generation at some point.

The key things are how the person truly behaves towards others and whether they are a good person or not.

Manners also change and we will all find ourselves behaving in a way that is considered ridiculous or even offensive to a much younger generation at some point.
I completely agree - and I really want to know what it is I say that is like that.

I think once a few generations have gone through university looking at European culture through the lens of continental philosophy, we'll be shocked by how simultaneously critical and poorly educated the younger generation is about many of the greatest achievements of European civilisation.

I'm 20 so my DD will probably find things that my DM, in her mid-40s, does to be shocking.

Personally I find it hard to believe that smoking in restaurants was acceptable, although I vaguely remember walking through a fug of smoke to get to the kids area in Morrisons restaurant. I don't understand how that was deemed acceptable.

I also find my parents generation's views on sexuality to be quite surprising - a lot of the people in late 30s/40s consider themselves to be very 'liberal' and accepting of sexualities, but in many cases that only extends to gay and lesbian. Bisexuality is seen as 'just greedy' and pansexuality is 'oh why can't you just call yourself bisexual'. I think my generation will be more accepting of different sexualities and asexuality.

But I have noticed there are certain issues we're less liberal on. People my parents age were largely supportive/accepting of me when I was pregnant. People my age and slightly younger called me a slut.

I think the generation below mine will realise at quite a young age that the geeks shall inherit the earth, rather than mocking them.

I agree that they'll find how much we wast waste to be shocking.

Oh, and I'm always continually surprised by how people managed without computers etc, as I've never known what it's like to be without technology.

Blimey, that's a quick change. I'm only six years older than you and I remember the computer being just a thing in the house which was separate from other things, general life etc, not so tangled in it. We didn't even have a computer at home until I was 11. And for the next five years it was still pretty disconnected - we used encarta encyclopaedia on CD, internet was slow and expensive and there were no real search engines so you had to know the web address for where you wanted to go. I still remember using the house phone to talk to school friends (and the agony when the brother you have a crush on answered the phone) and mobile phones didn't really come in until I was 14 or so.

Now I put it like that it's clear that those six small years did make a difference. I was on one side of a fence and you were on another. I wonder if it's possible to pin down to a certain year of birth.

I was there in the pre-Google era (born 1975), and I still wonder how we did it.

My mum can't understand bisexuality. I told her a friend of mine is bisexuality (married to a man)

Mum : does her husband not mind her sleeping with women.

Me: she doesn't.

Mum: well how is she bisexual?

Me: it means that should she and her husband separate her partner could be male or female.

Mum: So she's straight now but may be lesbian at a later point.

Me: I give up

Also finds it strange that two gay men could just be mates and not a couple.

I was there in the pre-Google era (born 1975), and I still wonder how we did it.
There was a post a while ago from someone young who simply couldn't fathom how people drove anywhere unknown before Satnav. They just didn't understand that it was possible to drive using a map.

I did a computing course in 1993 - we started the course learning MS-DOS, typing commands in white letters onto a black screen, but the next year Microsoft had brought out Windows, graphics on a screen and we used a mouse (I think, or maybe just arrow keys). (or at least that's when they arrived at the college, maybe in use elsewhere before that). So 20 years roughly from basics to to Whatsapp etc.

I wonder how all the violent images and info that young people see and hear now is going to affect society.
Hard to believe it will have no effect.
Relatives of mine who were in WW II would never talk about what they had seen and experienced. Now people can see similar stuff any time at the press of a button.

Driving using a map without satnav was easier for some people than for others. I don't do well at spatial thinking, so it was never easy for me. Don't assume that everybody was able to do it easily. There are some advances that are making it easier to live without certain skills. Backup cameras, satellite navigation, and the like are a godsend to people with poor spatial skills. I would guess that screens in cars and the visual indicators they make possible probably make driving easier for the deaf or hearing impaired (I am not deaf, so this is a conjecture on my part). I'm sure paved roads made it easier to get around for people who used crutches or wheelchairs or had balance problems in an earlier era, too. Some technologies make it easier to include people with disabilities in more aspects of everyday life.

Middleaged, predicting the future is always a tricky thing. And it seems to me that science fiction authors more often got technological advances right than they did social changes, so maybe the latter is even harder.

"Personally I find it hard to believe that smoking in restaurants was acceptable"

So do I, and I'm 56. I remember sitting in a smoky fug in the cinema, on buses and trains and in aeroplanes.

"Oh, and I'm always continually surprised by how people managed without computers etc, as I've never known what it's like to be without technology."

Ha ha ha ha ha. Although, I do wonder how we coped without mobile phones.