The Guilt of Generation X
Every generation of parents fails its children differently
Watched a dad carry every bag while his teenage son walked beside him empty handed.
That is how weakness gets inherited. Every time you spare a boy from weight, you rob him of evidence that he can carry it. Give him the bag. Give him the shovel. Give him the hard thing.
Love without burden makes soft men.
The guilt of the Baby Boomers was abortion, divorce, and abandonment. They may have been the very worse parents, collectively speaking, since the Carthaginians were offering their first-born children to the flames of Moloch. At least two-thirds, and possibly as much as four-fifths of Generation X was directly affected by those three things, and the indirect effect left a mark on the remainder.
Now we’re beginning to see some of the negative effects of Generation X’s reaction to its parenting, as we see that perhaps what the Boomers scornfully described as our “helicopter parenting” and what we considered “caring about and paying attention to our chldren” had its downsides too.
Smaller families meant more only children, less team spirit, and a tendency to look to the parents rather than brothers, sisters, and friends for solutions. We don’t blink an eye at requests and expectations for things that we have never, ever, thought to ask of our parents.
Psychological weakness. The number of meltdowns and the trivial nature of the things sparking those meltdowns is bewildering. We now see much bigger emotional reactions to trivial, day-to-day things like responding to a government form than we did when someone our age was hit by a car or discovered a family member fatally shot himself in the head. I’m not exaggerating, both things happened on my nice suburban street before I was 13 years old.
Excessive dependence. It’s good to be there for your children. But it’s not good to be there for them all the time, or to the point that they expect you to be an option on demand.
Indecisiveness. One benefit of Generation X’s nihilistic apathy is that when your subconscious truly believes that the world can end in nuclear fire at any given moment, but can’t be expected to do so, it removes the weight of every decision and prevents overthinking. The sun is shining, so go make some hay and don’t worry about the fact that you’re not necessarily making it in the optimal manner, or that there might be a better place to make it somewhere else.
Knowledge transfer. We did a lot better than our parents did in showing our children how to do the things that we know how to do. But we didn’t fight to make them understand the way the world worked, we were probably too prone to thinking that it was going to hit them in the face sooner or later anyhow, when it wasn’t going to do so until after their formative years.
I’m not condemning Generation X’s children nor am I blaming Generation X for overreacting to the appalling parenting of the Boomers. I’m simply pointing out that improvement isn’t perfection, and now that our children are getting older and starting to become parents themselves, we need to be honest with ourselves about the mistakes we made so that we can help them learn from them.
I'm a younger millennial, so my Boomer parents weren't the worst of the worst like the older Boomers, but when I was in the Scouts as a young adult I could very clearly see the difference between me and the young kids raised by GenX parents. They were kids who never packed their own bag when we went hiking - they often didn't know IF they had a raincoat with them nor WHERE it was, because Mom packed the bag. They were completely passive unless specifically told to do something, and you always had to hold their hand through it or they would just stop. Nobody knew how to cook. Many of them didn't know how to do the dishes because they never had to help at home. The were scared of knives and axes and completely clueless about how to handle them safely. If something happened, say it started to pour down, they wouldn't scramble for their raincoats - they would just stand there, still, until you told them to "get out your raincoat!" And even then they looked confused, like they were surprised you weren't doing it for them. Learned helplessness is doing your kids a great disservice.
Very true. Though I think people your age and mine, Vox, are probably less prone to it. The closer GenX gets to being millennials the worse it gets. My wife being on the cusp is far more of a “child spoiler” than I am, which is fine as she is the mom after all, but there is a very marked difference with how the kids behave around her when compared with around me. Probably quite a bit more than there should be. “Do you want me to call your dad” is a refrain used probably a bit too often for my liking, but the closer to the Millennials the other GenX I know are, the more the pattern is clear. There seems to be a sharp divide between GenX born before about 1975 in this regard.