All parents are toxic narcissists apparently and all adult children have experienced trauma …

[ElspethBulgeworthythethird]

Is anyone else a bit cheesed off with the on-line rhetoric that teens and young adults seem to be plugged in to nowadays…? That somehow everyone is a victim?

That every parent is toxic or a narcissist and every woman over fifty is a “Karen”?

That everyone is suffering from trauma or needs to “heal their inner child”

Oh and then there are all the “special” on-line morning routines that involve, er, getting up, washing, eating your breakfast and maybe exercising; all of which I thought were just standard things that most people did every day without much fuss.

I don’t mean to sound horrible or unsympathetic. Of course there are some young men and women who have suffered truly awful upbringings and serious abuse which has traumatised them terribly. I am not addressing them in this post as of course they need proper support.

This post is about the comfortable young adults I know (my adult children and teens and their friends) who seem to buy in to the rhetoric of victimhood when I happen to know that they have loving parents and come from good homes where their parents willingly made lots of sacrifices for them.

Don’t get me wrong, I happen to think that the period of life between leaving university and getting your first job is one of the most challenging you experience as a young adult; when the struggle finding a job and a flat and new friends and standing on your own feet financially is suddenly very real all at once.

It’s just the culture of this generation that seems to make everyone in to a victim that I object to? Somehow everyone is “special” and “in need of healing” and I get labelled toxic if I say to my young adults that although you are special to me, we are just a very ordinary family, and life is about getting on with things and working hard and not blaming everyone else when you don’t put in enough effort and commitment yourself.

The sheltered ones always think their parents are the worst. 0 sympathy for them.

The fact you’ve describe my position as ‘toxic’ proves my point nicely.

This can be the case with Childhood Emotional Neglect - it is not one incident it is many but it can be very hard for people to explain as it often looked ok but didn't feel ok.

Just get on with it' is what we were required to do in the old days. It was often quite shit advice.

I don’t know, I used to think that.
As I get older (I’m gen x) I’m starting to see that my generation are far more resilient than younger ones.
Like most things there’s a balance. Current young adults have somehow missed out on this balance and are suffering for it.

Agree totally
whilst some have genuine mental issues most are just self indulgent attention seeking spoiled kids who don’t realise how lucky they are

I didn't describe you as toxic, I wrote if a teen called your position toxic I'd understand where they're coming from

It is really important to try to read what someone has actually written.

Hardly neglect if nothing bad even took place.

most are just self indulgent attention seeking spoiled kids who don’t realise how lucky they are wow. This venom towards the younger generation is awful. It wouldn't be surprising they hate our generation if they hear stuff like this!

My own position is there are nice and awful people in every generation.

This might be controversial, but I think it takes assuming caring responsibilities to truly understand the relentlessness of it and the impact that has on a person. That might be becoming a parent yourself, or caring for elderly relatives or friends or whatever. It can be absolutely exhausting and a bit depressing when you realise this is your lot for the foreseeable future.

I don't agree with a lot of what my mum did when I was younger, but as a mum now I at least understand a bit more the pressure she was under and can see how that might have lead her to making decisions she wouldn't have made had she not been stressed, sleep deprived, a single parent etc.

I agree. I don’t think anyone is saying abuse (for example)should be brushed under the carpet, but life is simply not perfect and will have many ups and downs which just have to be dealt with as part of what makes up being a human in this world.

Childhood Emotional Neglect is bad, obviously.

I couldn’t agree with you more about racism, sexism, homophobia etc and would add ableism and ageism to the list too. Quite right that those things are called out and loudly. ( Incidentally, I wish I could say that misogyny was decreasing with this generation bc I think it’s getting worse in some areas but I digress ...) None of these things should be tolerated at any level and I agree with you that the low level shit that was once deemed acceptable should be called out and loudly and I would never dismiss it as normal or acceptable in any way.

I stand by my words quoted in your first paragraph though. How do you know that they didn’t come with an acknowledgment that being a human can be scary and complicated difficult sometimes? You are assuming an awful lot there.

The actual situation where that arose was when one of my teen dcs was berating a lecturer and calling their actions “unfair” when my teen hadn’t done the required work. I am sorry but I am not going to validate laziness! Of course I asked my ds why he hadn’t done the work and why he had procrastinated and what in particular he was finding hard etc and made suggestions as to how he could put this right in future, but I was not going to indulge my ds in thinking that he was someone “special” and needed to be let off doing the required test because he was basically too lazy to study.

Somehow parents nowadays are meant to put up with their teen and young adult dc speaking to them disrespectfully, but the parent in turn has to be perfect in every way and respond calmly and promptly and help with any emergency but not discuss the cause of why said thing went wrong.

It does make you anxious about discussing things frankly.

That. I'm very wary of what I say to my adult kids. Even the slightest thing can be seen as criticism, and I massively over think a lot of what I say. And they're really good kids!
There's a real over-sensitivity going on I think.

The consequences of overbearing, too granular parenting.

Somehow parents nowadays are meant to put up with their teen and young adult dc speaking to them disrespectfully, but the parent in turn has to be perfect in every way and respond calmly and promptly and help with any emergency but not discuss the cause of why said thing went wrong.

It does make you anxious about discussing things frankly.

Exactly this.

Thank you @ProtectorExtraordinaryOfTheCantonsOfNim , for reminding me of that fabulous Pome. I have a faint recollection of him reciting at least the first verse on TV, or maybe it was Roger McGough (sp?) quoting it? Long time ago, anyway.

True, every word of it, 😁

I’m not convinced it is though.
I think there’s a consequence of socialising on SM, where you offload to an echo chamber. If someone disagrees they’re trolling and are easily blocked. It doesn’t teach growing teens to deal with life’s shit effectively.
You can see this happening all over the place, it’s far more reaching than affecting young adults relationships with their parents.

This is so true.

I took my terminally ill mum to A&E recently for something that couldn't be dealt with at home and she was admitted.

Whilst there, I witnessed a young lady come in with her dad. He announced loudly that she is 20 and a student at Oxford University. She has a small scratch on her forehead and he'd like it looked at, cleaned up and a tetanus shot.

She stood there silently whilst daddy spoke for her.

Aside from the fact they used A&E for a bloody scratch when they could have cleaned that up at home, was this 20 year old student of Oxford incapable of dealing with herself

It's quite shocking.

I suppose ultimately I don't agree that 'life is about getting on with things'.

I just don't recognise these problems with the generation below, I think they're the same balance of nice/not nice as the older generations. I don't recognise the communication issues, I don't recognise the entitlement as widespread. I read about it, but I don't meet it much. I work in a place with young adults.

I was at school long ago. A lot of people were absolute cunts to each other!

One example:
I never allowed phones at the table, or TV dinners, or phone in the room overnight. That was one of the main issues I had with DD when she was a teenager, the main source of conflict.

Fast forward 10-15 years and I just stared at DD complaining about children at the table with their tablets: they don’t even have any idea what they are eating, mum!!!!! They can’t have a conversation around the bloody table!!!
Nooo, seriously?!!😂
I always joked when she was a teen that my life savings are going to be spent on therapy for her, because I was such a controlling mother 😂.

^^ Absolutely this! You’ve hit the nail on the head Jamtartforme it’s the inability to recognise that life is hard for everyone, not just themselves.

Of course being young nowadays is not easy and this generation have a lot more pressure on them to succeed in all fronts and be perfect in every way. No one expects young people to be perfect but I think they out a great deal of pressure on themselves because of what they see on sm.

I think a lot of parenting nowadays focuses so much on a child being self-confident and self-fulfilled and proud of themselves and loving themselves (all good things) but forgets to emphasise that life is lived with and among others. And how others feel around you and how your behaviour affects others, is also very important too.

My own experience of motherhood was actually similar to the poem. Here was this wondrous perfect little person and absolutely everything that happened to her was going to take from that perfection and spoil it. I felt that when I even so much as touched her I was tainting her with my own Worldliness, the germs, the corruption - not just of the flesh but also of my own experiences thoughts feelings everything. Nothing in me was perfect and so I had no way of keeping her Perfection and everything I did would therefore only lead to her corruption. It was terrifying.

I didn't ket it stop me though. I did at least know that there was NO ONE else better fitted to bring her up, love her and care for her than her parents and they were me and dh. She's an amazing 24 year old now, and yes, she's got a lot of what OP has described, but she's mainly reasonable and rational.

The blame for this situation seems to rest with the domineering father. That young woman has had that man doing that to her since birth, presumably.

It was the father who was the actor here, but you are blaming the daughter.

In what ways? Different for each of you or similar things?

Thank you for that 🙂 . I love my DD and have always "had her back ". She has nearly destroyed me .and has somehow learned ( from online precious fuckers) that blaming others will get her what she wants ? . It doesn't it actually creates true abuse and trauma.