A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

Invention of the Pill (and similar biotech medical advances) changed everything forever in ways we still don’t understand. And the consequences/reasons don’t cleanly break along Culture War fault lines. (The Culture War was, in many ways, created by The Pill, too.)

I am estranged from my father for a number of reasons, but mainly because my parents divorced when I was young and my father spend the next 15 years trying to destroy my relationship with my mother through basically any means at his disposal. It came to a head when my father called me late one night while I was in college, and he told me "We did it, we won, we beat her". I was very confused and asked him to elaborate, and he told me that he sued my mom in court for child support that she paid while he was paying for my college attendance. He told me that he loved me more than my mom and that he was paying for college because he loved me and that my mom wasn't paying because she didn't love me. He had previously used money as a weapon in my relationships before and we had discussed and agreed that he cannot talk about finances like this with a 19 year old who is (1) needs financial support to make it through adolescence and early adulthood and (2) wants to maintain relationships with both parents. It was impossible for him to get over the anger and resentment he had for my mom and to keep that out of our relationship, so I cut ties with him. Having talked with him about this a lot before cutting ties, he would consistently gaslight me about how (1) my mom never cared about me (2) his remarried family were the only family that cared about me and (3) that everything he did, he did for love of me and not out of spite for my mother and (4) that he never did any of the stuff I specifically asked him not to do to help me maintain my familial relationships.

I'm halfway through your essay and it resonates strongly.

My parents constantly fought when I was a child. They eventually went for a divorce. My father tried to get my mother institutionalized through bribes and connections, but ultimately failed. Eventually, he kidnapped me to his home country. My mother didn't pursue me. My teenage years were spent getting berated for everything and being told I will be a weirdo failure. I was ignored for years as my father pursued women. I found refuge in online forums, video games, and a bunch of friends who had bad homes. We helped out each other. I survived this time, counting down the years until I was 18.

Today, I am married to one of those friends and we have created a happy life together. I too wanted to be comfortable and loved.

My father tells me that he did all of this because he loved me. He saved me from growing up a junkie in the spoiled west. My mother tells me how hard it was for her to lose her child, how hard she cried. There is no point at which they ever asked me how I felt or what I experienced. I am merely a background actor in the grand drama of their lives.

I realize that a lot of parents fumble bringing up their kids. Everyone makes mistakes. But what I and others experience growing is not a fumbling. This is HN - imagine you an engineer responsible for a system that produces incidents every day. Management tells you to never fix anything. Actually, they berate you for even suggesting that, saying that you're just complaining and this is normal.

This is what it feels like.

throwaway284534, my thoughts go out to you. You're not alone. There are a lot of people like us. Many don't make it and fall apart in different ways. The lucky ones build a happy life.

If you can explain to me how government controlled production has ANY relationship to culture or the acceptance/rejection of homosexuality, I'm all ears. Bare in mind, communist governments have routinely banned homosexuality. [2]

To the likes of Skousen, everything that isn't accepting mormonism as the one true religion is a communist plot.

[1] https://sites.google.com/site/heavenlybanner/crtool

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_China