Cognitive dissonance re. parents' lack of intelligence making me truly miserable

[lancia24]

My parents are in their seventies but this is not an age-related issue, they've always been the same.

I've come to realise that 24/7 my whole life I've been psychologically bending over backwards and tying myself in knots to not to acknowledge just how airheaded my parents are.

I know it sounds cruel, but the evidence is simply overwhelming, and it's caused real problems.

Examples my seem trivial but this is hour-by-hour, day-by-day, week-by-week, year by year...:

My eight year-old niece visits DM/DP & wants to go to a Disney Store. DM/her grandmother insists there's one in the nearest town. Swears blind. Literally refuses to check online and insists 'nicely' nobody else needs to. Family trip to town, no Disney store, devastated (and confused) niece, and no apology (just a lot of 'well I could have sworn' etc.).

Problem with mice. They have bird feeders too close to the front door. The birds drop food, which attracts the mice, who end up venturing into the house. Takes literally years to persuade them of this. Finally, after bird feeders have been gone for a few months, no more mice. Their response? Put the bird feeders back out, because the mice have gone.

I could go on forever. It has always revealed itself when we've watched films/TV together too - they honestly don't pick up on any subtlety whatsoever, no emotional grey areas, no piognancy etc. If it's not white hats vs. black hats and the white hats win, they don't understand.

And yet when I was a child - as I'm sure all children are - they seem to have indoctrinated me with programming that makes it impossible to see that they are stupid. I seem cursed to entangle myself with trying to figure out why they do the hundreds of things they do, as in, why non-stupid people would do the things they do...

There must be people out there experiencing something similar, surely...? How do you deal with it?

"Is the mum Korean or American?!"

My point was that I totally get the logic of the mum getting confused with centuries.

But not when you’ve lived in the uk all your life and been told and see pictures of the 19th century and surely you think oh that’s before my time!

frustration there must be that they don't listen to you, or don't learn from their past mistakes.

Gosh
And I'm sure you never make mistakes

@SnowFrogJelly

Wow what an unpleasant person you must be
Using phrases like 'thick as mince' 'woefully stupid'
There are many different kinds of intelligence, I suggest it's pretty stupid to give people labels like that

There are indeed many types of intelligence. Some people have none of them. I hope, in time, you are able to develop the type of intelligence to listen to different experiences and see that some people are incredibly damaged by being raised by stupid mothers and fathers.

It's very clear from your posts that you do not have the first clue about what the OP is talking about.

It would help, in this instance, to employ some of the critical thinking that the OP's mother and father are lacking in.

"Everyone makes mistakes." Yes. We know that 🙄 A trite saying if ever there was one which adds nothing to the discussion. The point being made is that some people never learn from their mistakes because they are quite literally intellectually incapable of doing so. Add a dose of narcissism to the mix where they stubbornly refuse to see the chaos they cause everywhere they go because of their stupidity and you have a recipe for a very difficult childhood.

I agree, so unkind and superior.

God, this is a real cultural sore spot, clearly. I don’t have any difficulty in acknowledging that someone of average intelligence who does not disadvantage their children by their stupid decisions is superior to someone who is too intellectually under endowed to recognise they are disadvantaging them.

DS2 is a genius according to IQ. But, guess what, that doesn't mean he'll be a genius level parent and elevate any potential DCs lives. He's also autistic and ADHD. He has poor social skills, despite 'training' from primary school. The best he can do is be a good enough dad despite his autism/ADHD. Hell, some dads are not good enough with no autism/ADHD.

So is he stupid? What does stupid actually mean here? It seems to mean not good enough parent.

I've never seen anything that correlates good enough parenting with educational level or IQ or qualifications. How would you quantify love or care? But you seek to argue that level of intelligence, vaguely defined, is the hall mark of bad parents.

Some parents are not good enough. Some are very bad. But to think that no parents are good enough creates a victim/martyr perspective and holds the adult offspring in a child mentality. Perhaps you need to recognise that no parent is perfect before you can properly move on to the next stage of life where you are an imperfect parent to your children and imperfect adult to your aging parents.

Maybe you need to recognise your parent's imperfections and limitations before you can stop viewing yourself as a victim. And therefore be the parent to your own children or carer for your own parents that you want to be.

My parents were a holy shit show but they are dead. You're stupidly annoying parents will die. You understand time. Why are you so 'stupid' that you don't realise that it's not all about you. It's a normal development stage for young adults but abnormal to be retained beyond that stage.

Be a good enough parent. Know your kids will criticise you about the details of modern life. They will never criticise you about love and care.

Don't know about you, but I've never been stupid enough to

1. Leave a fishtank in the grass in the garden
2. Tell off the kid for smashing the fishtank they didn't see in the grass in the garden and slicing their leg open by tripping over the hidden fishtank and falling through it
3. Leave the smashed (and bloodstained) fishtank hidden in the grass in the garden
4. Tell people that the kid was so destructive, they even smashed a fishtank once
5. Believe that fleas only live in the carpet on one side of one room
6. Tell kid they're not allowed that side of the room because 'that's where the fleas live'
7. Tell kid off when they've got flea bites because that means the kid has obviously gone over to the side of the room they're not allowed
8. Still not deal with the fucking fleas
9. When a teacher notices the flea bites that are still happening, tell the kid off for letting the teacher see the bites
10. Buy a tiny tin of flea spray. For dogs. When the animal is a cat. It was cheaper, you see - and the 'do not use on cats' was only because 'it's how they get more money out of people who have cats, because it's not as if the fleas can read, ha ha ha ha'.
11. After reflection, decide not to spray the cat with dog flea spray because 'they're not on the cat, they're in the carpet'
12. Kill the goldfish by spraying it over the remaining tank
13. When seeing a flea on them in a different room, have a go at the kid for 'obviously bringing the fleas in from the other room, as they're far too little to walk all the way from one room to the other by themselves'
14. Still not actually treat the poor bloody, scratchy cat for fleas
15. Decide that it's probably the vacuum cleaner that's spreading the fleas around the house and annoying the fleas when personally bitten by a flea in another room, so decide to stop vacuuming.

My mistakes are things like missing a black sock in a white wash, not sniffing the last of the milk before tipping it into my tea or forgetting to add toothpaste to an online order. Because I'm not - unlike my mother - fucking stupid.

Ok, I will spell it out. If parents can’t read and write, it makes their children’s lives very difficult. They can’t read to them, help with homework, write sick notes, engage with school stuff that comes home in written form, often won’t engage with parents’ evenings if they’re ashamed, and their children are parentified from a very young age — dealing with bills, household admin, making shopping lists and reading labels in supermarkets, deciphering signposts, reading their own reports out loud etc etc. Refusal to move jobs to anything with more responsibility so we were very, very poor, which I knew all about because I was the one reading out the overdue bills. Denigration of reading, staying in school past legally mandated age, pressure to leave, complete refusal to even contemplate university etc etc.

And this is my own childhood I’m talking about.

My mistakes are things like missing a black sock in a white wash, not sniffing the last of the milk before tipping it into my tea or forgetting to add toothpaste to an online order. Because I'm not - unlike my mother - fucking stupid.

Thank god some people get it. There are a lot of "nice", well meaning types on this thread who don't seem to understand that genuinely stupid people exist in the world. Perhaps they've never encountered them for any length of time to have suffered at their hands.

I'd much rather be unkind than stupid. Unkind people can be perfectly competent at life.

@Huldrafolk I can understand that being unable to read and write would have profound impacts and these would include parenting. It is a shame that your parents didn't receive support and that you didn't receive support in your own right.

Do you still blame your parents?

And you think that this is your parents fault? Not that their illiteracy was caused by the system in which you are happy to live?

they seem to have indoctrinated me with programming that makes it impossible to see that they are stupid
You are programmed to be unconditionally loyal to them. I think this just happens by default to most children- because your best chance in life is if you align yourself with and obey the adults who are in control of things.

I taught them to read, but they were never fluent. I don’t actually ‘blame’ them at all (they were failed by their own semi-literate parents who took them out of school aged 12 because of poverty, and the education system of their day), but they should never have had children, far less so many children they couldn’t afford, financially or emotionally. I was sexually abused aged 9, and never told them, because I knew they couldn’t have coped, or done anything. They have no idea they weren’t perfectly good parents, and are puzzled by the fact that four of their five children are childfree by choice, and I have one by choice.

I got to Oxford and did ok, but I won’t lie, I’ve had a lot of therapy, and it’s left me with lingering issues which have proved very difficult to deal with. I teach literacy in prisons as a volunteer.

I think that having children when you can’t cope with the world in several fundamental ways, literacy among them, is a deeply selfish act that disadvantages your children. Only, if you are of low intelligence (and both my parents are), it isn’t something you have the intellectual capacity to think about.

But no, I don’t blame them. I love them. They don’t have the capacity to understand. But it was a miserable way to grow up.

@Huldrafolk or it drives some children on. The most successful of my son's former school friends was brought up by a mother with some of the lack of intellect described in this thread. She deliberately latched onto friendships with the bright kids at school, got a degree and now at 28 is now one promotion away from the board at the big creative agency where she works. VERY successful.

I went to Oxford, have four degrees, and am comparatively successful. I still had a needlessly difficult childhood whose effects I still live with.

I don't dispute that at all @Huldrafolk , and that sounds horrible. But I can also tell you that all kinds of family dynamics can f@ck their children up.

I

I’ve never disputed that. My best friend is from a spectacularly fucked-up, but highly-educated background. Both parents are RG professors in social science fields. But I’m a bit impatient with some posters on here deciding that people whose lives have been made measurably more difficult by having parents with low intelligence should be greeted by accusations that they’re being unkind’, or that they’re rather have ‘kind’ than clever parents.

The meaning behind this kind of comment is unclear. Are you saying you don't believe that anyone is less intelligent? That adult children are unable to assess their own parents' intelligence? That intelligent children must have intelligent parents? It seems like such a knee-jerk response, which is automatically posted on any thread ever about someone else's intelligence: "Oh, and I suppose you are a genius," etc. etc. etc. Why can't it be acknowledged?

You are clearly blissfully unaware of how clueless you are about this subject

That was difficult to read (from an empathy point of view, not grammatical). I'm sorry that happened, and I'm sorry some posters are being so deliberately obtuse.