anyone else have parents who were young in the 60's?

[CherryPicking]

If so, did you ever feel, growing up, like you'd missed everything?

I've been mulling things over and started to realise how being raised by 60's survivors in the 80's might be something other people can relate to?

I just remember this melancholy nostalgia permeating everything. And all the music in our house was either recorded between 1962-75 or classical... I think I know both my parents mainly my through the music they made me listen to - that's the main insight I have into them emotionally... Anyone else?

There was a feeling of being part of something when I was young,
I should imagine young people now have their own version of that too. It isn't exclusive to the 60s.

It's not exclusive to the 60s, but it was a time of great social upheaval and there was a very conscious sense of doing things differently from our parents' generation. In the US, there was the Civil Rights Movement, in the US and the UK (I'm American but I was a student in the UK in the 60s), there was the anti-war movement, the Women's Liberation Movement, the reverberations from the murders of JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, and then all of the cultural aspects of music, clothes, more liberal attitudes about sex, etc. Of course not everyone embraced the whole "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" thing, but it was a very exciting time to be alive and to be young, and I think it has left its mark indelibly on my generation and of course, by extension, on the generation that we raised.

I have heard all that but why are your generation so conservative as a rule now? Why do your children lack the self-confidence you describe?

I might just be talking about England here.

I can't speak at all for the UK, but our generation in the US is far less conservative than previous older generations.

Absolutely not the case in the UK, sadly.

I know EXACTLY what you mean cherry picking I've always felt it too.

My parents were students in London at the end of the 60s. My Dad worked his way round California summer of '69. I've grown up on the music, the stories, the photos. I've always thought it was weird that I feel a sense of nostalgia for a decade I never experienced.

Interestingly I was a major indie kid too...

This thread has been so interesting because it's not something I've ever thought to discuss with anyone.

DH's were, and they were older parents so this was in the 90s!

They had their first children in the 70s, so he got a 70s childhood 20 years later - the good parts and the not so good :(

From what one poster said upthread...maybe there is something in the idea that we will never feel as "cool".

My parents were both first in their families to go to university, first to live in a major city, first to travel abroad(unless you count grandad travelling as a soldier in WW2) living on full grants (plus coal board scholarship!) so qualifying with no financial burdens in a time of high employment. They were experiencing and achieving things their parents could never dream of. I worked hard, went to a great uni , became a professional, but I felt I was just following in their footsteps. And they will always be far richer than me.

My parents were real hippies. I was born when my dad was at Manchester poly. We lived in Manchester in a big house with lots and lots of other people - I think it was quite commune like. I was the only child and my teenage mum became the 'mum'of all the other students. Mum says we were at a market with one of the lads and he picked up an orange and held it like it was a precious item. He started talking to it. Mum says she paid for it and managed to drag him away.
I vaguely remember being there and I have some memories of lots of people who loved me. Most are still in touch with mum and dad.
They are all educationalists or artists now (mostly retired) .

I was taken to gigs and marches quite a lot and we always went camping for holidays.

My parents are now very middle class - they are still quite trendy though and still very arty.

I was brought up on the music of the time and still listen to it ( see my name)

Rolling Stones all the way.....

I'm so glad I started this thread - thanks for all your insightful replies. Its made me realise that although the sixties and early 70s remain a constant 'cool' reference point in fashion and the media, its actually very rarely something we discuss honestly.

Hugs CleverPlans I know what you mean - I've been mulling this weird inherited nostalgia over my whole life, but this is the first time I've really articulated it. We should form a society for the sharing of experiences of indie kid offspring of hippies (SOIKOH) xx

My parents were born in late 40's/early 50's so quite young in the 60's but their musical taste was probably established then. They tell some good stories about their separate OE's in the UK and Europe in the early 70's and experimentation with drugs. I don't feel I will have comparable stories to tell my DC (e.g my mum was invited to a party at Eric Clapton's but couldn't be bothered going... and similar for parties she did go to).

The thing about my parents (young in 60s) is they worked so hard. Their parents went to Uni, but my folks inherited no wealth. The had family support but they paid their own way thru university (fee charging country), they had children very young, they worked all hours before during & after Uni to pay rent & bills. They scrambled for childcare.

Weirdly, they are much less risk-adverse than me, and probably overall much more adventurous & idealistic (even now). Maybe because they started with nothing, so they could gamble it all (and mostly won).

Go SOIKIH! I'm in!

I don't really understand the thread at all.

How can your own experiences not have been exciting in their own right, even though you were born later?

I don't really get what this thread is talking about - can anyone explain it?

I think some parents go on so much about their heyday that they brainwash their poor kids!

Far kinder to encourage the next generation in their own adventures towards adulthood.

I heard Hugh Laurie mention that he had discovered his father's Olympic medal, it had never been mentioned. Now that's perhaps a little extreme!

I'm with Absent, my experiences in the sixties were no more exciting than my children's teenage years in the seventies and eighties.

And people who constantly play the music of their youth are bloody boring and need to move on.

I was 18 at the end of the 60s . I had a last when I went to college.

It was a great time to be alive.

Non taken clinksy

My parents were ultimate 60s young people. Born in 45 and 49 they were 15-25 and 11-21 in the 60s. One was at art college!

However what I see different from the OP is that my parents did not embrace conservativism in the 80s. They were bringing their own kids (us) up from the late 70s until the millennium and they did so with wellies and mud, camping and all kids of wholesome outdoorsiness. Not hippy and drugs or counter-culture but also not materialistic or pursuing the economic dream - they scoffed at the whole "keeping up with the joneses" thing.

20thcentury, But it wasn't really the music of your youth, if I understand you correctly, it was your parent's music.

Anyway you should still move on 'cos you're still a youngster.

My parents were born in 1950. They were hippies who met while hitchiking in Morocco. They have embraced most of the subsequent decades with similar enthusiasm.

The 1980s involved lots of political activism (demos, boycotts, writing articles for feminist newspapers, holidays in Greenham Common, going to fundraising cabarets etc).

The 90s were more about work, home and friends and cooking.

Now they are divorced and their current take on contemporary life is that my mum lives on a smallholding and is all about Reddit and Gamergate, while my dad hangs out with artists and does swing dancing.

My problem is that my parents are far cooler than I will ever be.

Again as I said .... None taken

I was 16 in 1960 and my own dc were born in the 70's.
I didn't much like rock music or the Beatles although I liked Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. We went through the Cuban crisis and thought that if everyone listened to Dylan singing Masters of War the world would be a better place.
Then we grew up.
We were just the same as every other generation.
Now I guess we are boring old farts looking back to the glory days of barefoot in the park, flowers in our hair, smoky folk clubs and the faint smell of cannabis.
In other words we were you, you will become us!

The thing is, pranmasghost, all those things you did were new at the time, pretty much. We 90s indie kids, as were, many of us feel for some reason we were living a pale imitation of the youth your generation had - there was a cynicism and a self consciousness to it. Blame fashion, blame the NME, blame ourselves for buying into in authenticity it you will..