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I, too, thought a lot about this.
Having kids now and reflecting on my childhood, it’s extremely obvious that my parents truly had the best intentions and tried their best.
But they, too, are fallible and made mistakes.
Some of those mistakes were due to a lack of knowledge or bad advice they received. I think that nowadays, thanks to the internet, it’s quite feasible to get much better advice. On the other hand, there is also a lot of disinformation.
I am optimistic that each generation will get better, because knowledge tends to accumulate and humanity tends to improve over time.
But perfection is still far away in a distant future.
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Yeah, but that’s not because of generational progress.
Many civil rights in the USA weren’t properly arranged for through democratic laws, but by Supreme Court decisions.
They were always at risk. Once you achieve the same level of progress through electoral majorities, they are much more stable and secure.
As for workers rights and inequality, there is a similar story. Between the great depression and globalization there was a time of great progress, but it was never sustainable.
It only occurred because two world wars and a great depression left the world in tatters and destroyed the power of the wealthy, while the Western world still fully enjoyed the fruits of colonialism. Western Middle classes suddenly had all the power for a brief moment in time.
Now, we will have to figure out how to create real equality, without exploiting other countries and without relying on war and depression to break the power of the rich.
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With humanity, it’s always two steps forward, one step back.
The USA ended slavery, then introduced segregation and share cropping.
They ended segregation, then started the war on drugs to imprison minorities.
They elected a black man, then a fascist.
Similar things can be seen in other countries. Russia got rid of communism, then elected Putin. China opened up, now they have a dictator.
But, in general, the direction is forward.
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Then better start getting ready for the barrel roll
I’m convinced that the intentions you have don’t mater that much. It’s how well you’ve managed to solve your own problems that determines how fucked up your kid is going to be.
This is why I appreciate therapy. It’s a tool for better parenting, in a way.
It doesn’t make sense when you’re young … but the older you get, the more you realize that everyone is just making shit up as they go along.
It’s made me realize after a long life that my parents were no smarter (or no dumber) than me.
It’s just that as children, we look up to our parents and think that they should be smarter than everyone else but in reality, they never were. It doesn’t mean that they were dumb either … it’s just that people are people, including your parents.
If people remembered their parents are people too, lots of shit would make sense pretty fast to everyone in the world
Absolutely, my mother thought she was doing great by parenting me to live the childhood she never could, problem was, I was my own person, and absolutely not interested in experiencing all the things she never could.
My dad on the other hand treated me akin to a roommate (his words), which is not ideal for a teenager trying to learn basic life skills.
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I wish I could adopt the mindset of them having good intentions and whatnot, but sometimes parents really shouldn’t have been parents and are just truly shitty people.
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Nah it’s okay! I only said something so that any other people reading the thread who relate could feel like they were heard/seen, I guess? I didn’t think you were discounting it at all.
To me it seems late 90s/early 2000s parents went overboard with helicopter parenting and ignored kids online presence due to their lack of understanding of the Internet.
Then late 00s 10s parents doubled down on Internet and tech ignorance.
am i the only one who had pretty good parents?
Yeah they’re not perfect but like the biggest mistake they made was not getting me diagnosed for autism as a kid, and that’s not really something i blame them for since it’s really a societal problem and you can’t feasibly handle something you’ve heard about in passing twice in your entire life…
Like it’s not rocket science, treat your kids like actual human beings and you’re a good way toward being a good parent.
It’s weird, I think my parents did a fine job of raising me and my brother, even though my father was a raging (but functioning) alcoholic and my mother was (is) manic-depressive. They made sure we were taken care of, put us both through expensive college, and have always been there for us whenever we needed anything. But my brother decided long ago (thanks to therapy) that our upbringing was somehow traumatic and he harbors enormous anger and resentment towards our parents (although he keeps this mostly hidden from them). He has consciously chosen to raise his own children basically the opposite of how our parents did, but they have basically turned out exactly like him: socially awkward, depressed and in terrible physical shape. I asked him whether he blames himself for their problems since he blames our parents for his, and it turns out no, he blames our parents for his children’s problems, too.
Everyone has problems. And everyone thinks they are above them and have moved past them. I think it’s more realistic to just love your kids and hope that you do just a little bit better than your parents did. Just like every generation is smarter than the last maybe in time the planet will be less fucked up.
You know your situation better than anyone so feel free to ignore this if I’m way off base.
But I’m guessing two things here:
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Your parents were able to provide you with things you needed as a child. Perhaps things like college and clothes on your back were the things you needed to grow into a fulfilled and happy person. But maybe your brother needed your mom to control her emotions better during an episode. Maybe he needed your dad to be predictable and consistent instead of drinking and behaving in ways that were irritating or unpredictable from a child’s perspective.
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You might not be fully acknowledging some of the things they did (or didn’t do) that made you feel bad when you were little. It doesn’t have to be physical abuse for it to have an impact on you. We know now that children form attachment styles at least partially based on how their parents responded to their cries during infancy. Kids can be amazingly resilient, but also incredibly delicate.
Also, the odds that they treated you differently based on birth order, their age when they had each of you, gender, your personalities, etc. is very high.
You should ask your brother what really bothers him deep down. I’ll bet you get some tears and probably some very deep, very impactful memories/feelings about your parents.
If you asked my younger, more relaxed brother about our parents, he would say, “Yeah man dad’s a dick for drinking and bailing on us, and mom likes to guilt trip us but oh well.”
I would be the one to explain how their constant fighting, dad’s drinking/drugging, mom’s emotional manipulation and authoritarian parenting, etc. made me feel deeply unsafe and insecure as a child. I felt bad about myself and my life. I wished I could get a letter from Hogwarts more than anything. And when our father got so into drugs that he became absent completely, I felt lonely and abandoned. Took me many years to make peace with it and realize he was really sick and struggling.
The thing is, I suspect that I’ve actually come a lot further in my healing than my brother has. I don’t think he’s aware of some of the things he does or why he does them. Any chance your brother is actually onto something here?
Yeah, what you say is pretty reasonable. I just know from talking to my brother that he has sort of invented many of the negative things that happened to him in our house growing up. He has a tendency to describe things that actually happened but then to impart motives or thoughts in our parents’ heads and to be angry about these rather than the events - when of course he can’t really know their motives or thoughts.
One example: our father was a professor and when my brother was in graduate school he was giving a lecture and our dad came to watch him. My brother feels that he was there because he was worried that my brother would do a bad job and embarrass him - when in fact my father has never done or said anything to suggest that he would think in that way. I know from talking to my father that he is just straight up very proud that my brother has gone on to be a professor like him.
So interesting. I wonder why your brother feels so insecure. Sounds like he felt he was under a lot of pressure to be successful with that lecture or something.
One thing I didn’t share with you is that I also have a younger, younger brother who is bipolar. And I’m very fascinated by the fact that you mentioned your brother dramatizing his life and adding bits from movies. My youngest brother actually does that too. Our childhoods had enough shit to complain about but he always takes it that one step further and adds one small detail to make it worse.
The classic example is the time my brother lost his shit (bipolar, remember) and pushed past our grandma on his way out the door. My mom (perhaps rightfully?) grabbed his shirt and pushed him against the wall, angrily explaining that our grandma was old and pushing past her was way out line. My youngest brother recounts that story as the time my mother choked him until he had bruises. My other brother and I don’t recall it that way at all. And to be honest, I think if you’re pushing past your grandmother, whatever happens to you next is pretty justifiable. Had she fallen and broken a hip, that would have been bad. My brother called CPS and they didn’t find his claim to be credible, so that adds to my belief that I’m remembering it correctly.
We were just a regular middle class family but my mom had pretty poor taste in men to be honest. Hence my drunk and absent father plus youngest brother’s bipolar which he inherited from his father, my mother’s second marriage.
I also recall the time he ran away to a friend’s house, which he recalls as the time that my mother “kicked him out and left him homeless for a week.”
I think the truth of all this is probably somewhere in the middle for us all. Our parents treated us differently because we were different kids. I had fewer issues and I’m sure I was easier to deal with. Maybe my mom scared my brother when she jacked him up against the wall. Maybe he felt like she didn’t want him home which is why he ran away. It’s just funny how perception works, especially when you throw in confounding factors such as mental illness and insecurity, different ages, different temperaments.
Well, best of luck to you and your brother. The best parents in the world still fuck up kids on some level. We can only try to be better for our own kids. This has been on my mind a LOT now that I have a newborn at home myself. I just want to be there for him and break the cycle of absent, drunken fathers. It’s a cycle that goes back to my great grandpa on my dad’s side, so even though I don’t do drugs or drink in my adult life, I worry about the family curse, haha.
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Wow, this is kind of fascinating. If anything it points to nature over nurture, which I would think your brother would find a relief.
You’d be surprised how many parents struggle with even basic stuff like “don’t scream at your child all of the time”. It should be easy and common sense, and yet so many fail at this…
man i don’t even understand why they do that, it very obviously doesn’t work and means that when you actually need to shout at the child they’ll ignore it since you always shout at them
oftentimes it’s straight up more effective (though maybe not quite the correct option) to simply ignore them, which i would think is easier than screaming, but what do i know
I think there’s a lot of people that never got to the point of examining whether their emotional impulses are at all effective at driving them towards their immediate goals, let alone their long term ones. And they don’t realize that things don’t just go back to normal after they bully someone into going along with their way.
My parents are great as well. Very supportive and loving.
My parents were top notch but I was a fucking monster and made their lives hell, and I would not have blamed them for beating the fuck out of me.
I too could have used a 'sperg diagnosis, and they probably could have fostered my civil engineering and architectual design traits better, or given me more books on the subject. From as early as I can remember, I was designing and building detailed models of cities from whatever I could get my hands on. Sand, twigs, blocks of wood from dads carpentry business, cotton thread from mums sewing kit for powerlines, etc. I feel like that was a missed opportunity, now that I work in tech. But at least I have Factorio to scratch that itch.
I can stop this. I can just never have kids.
Yes, but that alone won’t heal someone’s trauma.
It will heal in death. Our deaths. And then no one will be traumatised ever again! Because no more humans exist! The system is perfect!
Edit: I seem to have had a stroke: If we do not have children, only THEN will no one be traumatised again. Please excuse my sieve of a brain.
It’s a pretty miserable existence when we focus only on the negative.
Death doesn’t have to be negative. Just imagine going out guns blazing as flames erupt all around you, or going to sleep never to wake up again, peaceful. Because it is only natural to die one day. You don’t have to run from it. Just embrace it and make the best out of it.
Death is a trauma, I’d argue. Also we evolve in more complex ways than just genetically, since we have the ability to spread and store information among and over generations.
I’m not so sure about this. If you die and you leave debt, someone makes a loss. Now in the abstract case of monetary debt, that may not be a problem. But there is also an emotional debt. It is not healthy to carry that to one’s grave, I beliefe. Scars must be properly healed instead of ignored, ideally within one’s lifetime.
🤔🤔🤔 Debatable. And the fact that it is makes me sad, because I want to believe what you’re saying is true.
Death is inevitable. It has to happen at some point. Thus you should settle your affairs in due time. But that is up to you. And has little to do with my point does it?
Break the cycle,if you’d like to, and go /c/childfree @lemmy.world (community reoated links also at childfree.cc.).✨
My dad died recently.
He was definitely a flawed man, and there were tons of problems between the two of us over the years. But I also heard plenty of stories about how he grew up, and about his parents—both from my dad and from other family members. Without a doubt, he managed to be a better person than his parents, and a better parent to me than his parents were to him. They were straight-up cruel to him, whether physically or simply using him for the family’s gain.
That doesn’t absolve everything, and I’ve still got plenty of my own issues. But what I respect most of him, in hindsight, is that he played the hand he was dealt and managed to be a better man. Not perfect, but better. I want to do the same.
Sorry for being sappy, it’s only been a couple of weeks. I also know that this doesn’t apply to everyone, since some parents are indefensibly cruel and abusive. In general, though, I hope people can be easy on each other, easy on themselves, and stop letting “perfect” be the enemy of “good.”
I’m very sorry for your loss. it’s really touching to see how much you understand him and accept his imperfections. May your grieving be as smooth or intense as you need it to be.
Thank you. The grieving has actually been both smooth & intense, with ups & downs, but I’m gradually doing better, as is my mom.
But anyway, the meme is accurate. :P I just have a more sensitive feeling about it given recent events.
This Be The Verse
BY PHILIP LARKIN
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Well i do agree with this. The best way to win the game is by not playing at all.
Easily one of my favorite poems. Glad someone else is aware of it too.
Nobody escapes childhood unscathed.
This comment section is gonna be pretty depressing.
Anti-natalist sentiment definitely pretty strong on Lemmy, which makes sense considering the crowd but sometimes it gets pretty brutal and uncalled for. Like at the end of the day we’re a species because we make babies lol.
I don’t want to be anti-natalist. I wish we could make sure that our children will have better lives than we do, and I will fight to make that true. But for now, the guilt is too much for me.
what do you mean anti-natalist?
Like anti human. People who think it’s immoral to have kids.
I actually had my real story typed but then didn’t submit it because it’s way too depressing for most peoples standards and could make people feel sick in their stomach.
did the 2me42me4meirl (i may have misspelled that) community migrate to lemmy? if so, that sounds like a story that might fit there.
depending on the stiry, it could also fit in somewhere like the’ raised by narcissists’ community/support-group.
withe way, good practice would still probably be to add a content warming first, if you do decide to share that story somewhere.
Always is
The “the world is fucked and you better be miserable all the time” vibe can be a bit much sometimes
Her: “So, hear me out: We’ll give them every one of our issues and then take away all of the safety nets we enjoyed.”
Him: “I’m so down. This is gonna be great!”
Society needs to change on a fundamental level. The school system is flawed. The government is flawed. Social expectations are flawed. The tech industry is rotten to the core. The environment is collapsing under the weight of random stuff humanity wants but doesn’t need or benefit from. Our generation needs to fix this and clean up after our ancestors.
One of the larger problems is the government of the USA anyway providing zero healthcare/mental healthcare or any social help/care to it’s own citizens then somehow expecting in the future to have a functioning country.
Our generation needs to fix this and clean up after our ancestors.
that sounds exhausting
Can’t somebody else do it
People are flawed. Never gonna get a perfect system. Be happy with what you got
while i agree that perfection doesn’t exist, i disagree to be happy with what you got. you can make improvements without seeking perfection.
Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis Why not have both. One can appreciate the good things while also improving on the bad parts. Nobody ever should expect any system to be perfect, but rather seek its steady and never-ending improvement.
Obviously that goes without saying.
This is the kind of bullshit that leaves us living in filth
How do imperfect people make a perfect society.
“Are you traumatized in any way? No? Think again! Did I do anything traumatizing? Tell me, I’m willing to admit and learn from my mistakes. So tell me, what did I do that traumatized you and don’t look at me like that! I’m really trying to help you!”
Meanwhile my parents don’t remember any of their abuse and say I’m imagining stuff.
Literally what every one of my clients with childhood trauma says. I’m a therapist. I can think of one exception where the parents kind of listened and tried to atone, but that’s it.
My step mom beat the shit out of us and says all five of us, two of her own children, are making it up. Needless to say, no contact going on 7 years.
I’m sorry that happened to you. That’s exactly the kind of denial I hear about, and then these (step) parents wonder why there is no contact…
Thank you. To be honest, I was willing to have a relationship with her, if she admitted to harming us, but she wouldn’t and I chose to move on.
In my country, there’s a saying, “The one who hurts forgets, the one hurt remember.”
The axe forgets, the tree remembers.
Oh, hey me!
my favourite is the one that shows 2 people at the park with a stroller, arguing about which one of them needs to go to therapy, and the baby in the stroller thinks that they’ll be the one to go to therapy since neither parent will.
Don’t you find it easy to blame how fucked up you are on your parents? Coz, me too and guess my child is gonna do the same in turn.
Some are worse than others though, for sure.
Yes when someone has trauma that impacts them from their parenting, it’s reasonable to do so. Sorry that’s news to you, welcome to 20th century psychology.
Can I stay single my whole life? I really kinda want to.
It can be difficult later life with no one obligated to attempt to care or find care for your frail body. But no one says I have to live that long.
I don’t even need to live that long either, as long as it’s amazing it’s good enough for me.
Long life doesn’t matter if it’s gonna be completely miserable all the time.
People expecting perfection from imperfect beings: the thread
Everyone who has kids or plans to have kids should go to therapy, it’s the only way to stop the cycle of trauma
My trauma was prescribed by therapists.
