A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement • Hacker News Board

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#101

Post by kenjackson » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

iammisc wrote: post #18

cogman10 wrote: post #8

As someone that was raised in a highly religious home, I have to wonder how much of estrangement has to do with the younger generation's abandonment of religion. Go to nearly any church and you'll see the primary demographic is older individuals. In my younger days, it was quite a bit more even. Millennials and Gen Z have dumped religion and with it a lot of the social norms. For example, homosexuality. Most Millenni…

I agree... I don't relate to these articles at all. My parents are religious, and yeah, in some ways they're out of touch, but they're not so out of touch as this article makes them out to be. All old people tend to be slightly out of touch with the younger generation. My grandparents didn't always understand my parents. Such is the way of the world.

The article isn’t saying this happens to all families.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#102

Post by derbOac » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #80

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, isn't there some boundary at which a belief is completely unreasonable?

In the original definition, a "gaslighter" would have to know and agree on the same facts as the victim, and then intentionally lie about them to sew doubt in the victim's mind. In your scenario, the "jerk" (for lack of a better term here, since he is not a classical gaslighter) honestly believes that the victim is incorrect, and is arguing from good faith. Good faith arguments can certainly be wrong, and can certain…

I actually think this is an interesting exchange, as I think this issue -- the boundaries of real versus perceived reality -- and the use of the term "gaslighting" reveal a lot about the psychology of the parties involved.

I was going to say something similar to you, that correctly or incorrectly, I do feel like there's this increase over time in people (maybe generational, maybe not) treating their perceptions as real. It's like there's no room for a Rashomon effect or something, and there's this lack of recognition societally that self-identified victims can sometimes have false recollections.

In that case, if you and another person strongly disagree over what happened, in a factual sense, the only room for explanation, if you thought you were a victim, is that the other person is gaslighting you by denying the "reality" of what happened, or lying outright, or has a false memory.

FWIW, I agree the meaning of the term gaslighting has shifted over time, in that I think originally there was more of a connotation that the victim didn't question what was happening, until maybe after everything was so blatantly obvious, and, as has been pointed out, the perpetrator either knew what was happening at some level, or at least didn't truly believe it themselves.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#103

Post by drewbuschhorn » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

mizzack wrote: post #93

drewbuschhorn wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you cite Skousen as proof of anything, you've made a real mistake. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society They're the seed of QAnon.

I'm not spouting anything as proof of anything. Just demonstrating as a matter of record that culturally this battle has been waged before.

>The communists won the culture war.

You then cite Skousen's talking points as if those were the "communists" actual goals and not his fever dreams.

The JBS lost, "communists" or "progressive orthodoxies" (conflating the two shows your priors) didnt win.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#104

Post by antisthenes » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

There's no mystery here, at least as far as the article describing divorce.

Children of divorced parents usually end up staying with a parent that manipulates them into hating the parent that doesn't have custody, because there's no opportunity to tell your side of the story. It's like state-mandated propaganda, except coming from your parent.

Is it any surprise then that if an authority tells you to hate something in your developmental years, that you end up hating it, and thus estranged?

Also, calling it a shift is pretty disingenuous. It's more like a deliberate eradication.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#105

Post by mizzack » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #99

mizzack wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Tying everything you don't like to communism, like Skousen LOVED to do, is a pretty poor argument. EVERYTHING that these quacks and racists didn't like was tied to communism [1]. 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 lik…

Added scare quotes to "communists". I'm not talking about literal communists. 50's boogeyman communists. Maybe I _did_ mean that flippantly.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#106

Post by throwaway284534 » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

iammisc wrote: post #73

throwaway284534 wrote: post #14

IMO, these parents are often narcissistic people who aren’t prepared or even capable of recognizing what their grown children want from them. Ironically, both sides want the same kind of acceptance from one another: “Will you unconditionally accept me and my lifestyle?” “Will you accept that I’m not fully capable of understanding your needs, and therefore cannot respect you as you’d like?” Contemporary expectations a…

> They may not admit it, but they’re not looking for a stronger relationship as equals Your parents will never be your equals. Have you considered that your expectations of equality are themselves a misaligned cultural values? My goodness, my mother was deferential to my grandmother up until the day she died.

Hey, thanks for replying. I can’t say I agree with your reasoning though. I’ve seen first hand what kind of damage a generational chain does to a family. Daughters hating their mothers until their dying breath, only to carry that same trauma into a strained relationship with their children. The cycle repeats until a grown child decides to either consciously change this behavior with their own children, or distance themselves from their parent.

Not to be too dramatic, I believe abusive parents will metaphorically poison their families well beyond their own lives. Cutting that rot out of the tree is sometimes a way to save the healthier branches.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#107

Post by buescher » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

diplodocusaur wrote: post #88

buescher wrote: post #74

I really dislike the term "adult children". Check out the google ngram: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22adult+child... The peak in 1992 is especially intriguing. How would the Victorians have expressed the same relationship?

please note that the y-axis is scaled, I compared it with the words 'transgender' or 'hacker' and the "intriguing peak" you mention flattened out. Which raises the question of at which point is a change significant in that graph.

Yes, it's not as common as those words. But going from zero use outside of legal documents - as a contrast to "minor children" or less precisely "small children" - to a post-seventies psychobabble and recovery movment term of art is easy to read off that graph.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#108

Post by throwaway284534 » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 3:54 PM UTC

throwaway23429 wrote: post #67

I was estranged from my parents, and I am also in the process of adopting a child. This led me to think a lot about the sort of relationship I want with my children, versus what my parents and I have. I believe my parents had me because they feel like it was their duty, and they fulfilled their parental obligations fairly well in that regard. The trouble is that they didn't consider what it was like to have an adult…

You’re almost living my life! My parents were less than thrilled with who I grew up to be. I think they would’ve been mildly happy if I married the first person I met and settled in their neighborhood, living out a life that fit into theirs.

I’m sure that they would’ve found faults, but at least they could brag about how good of parents they were.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#109

Post by kenjackson » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 3:54 PM UTC

pmichaud wrote: post #55

Daishiman wrote: post #30

I think if anything, the "shift" is more like an unveiling. There are and have always been extremely problematic issues in many families, it's just that in the past you would be denigrated for severing ties with your family for those reasons due to a sense of duty. So we now finally see the elephant in the room. We cannot go back to unseeing it, but we have to deal with it gracefully. To me this is just the continuin…

Yeah I mean, this is the claim / supposition: this isn't new, it's just not hidden anymore. But I think it's worth questioning whether the supposition is true or not, and not in the sense of "can I think of any examples of a dysfunctional family being exposed now that would not have been back then?" because when you're talking about a large population you can find examples of pretty much anything (including that a lo…

The three biggest things I’ve seen cause estrangement are:

1. Coming out. I suspect that gay people always existed, but just didn’t come out.

2. Interracial relationships. Far less common in the past. And society doesn’t view them as negatively now, which changes the power balance.

3. Parental affairs. I suspect this is the one that always happened, but people just lived with it more.

From my anecdotal list the problems are actually new. And except for the third, likely to get better.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#110

Post by pseudalopex » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #26

>Estranged parents often tell me that their adult child is rewriting the history of their childhood, accusing them of things they didn’t do, and/or failing to acknowledge the ways in which the parent demonstrated their love and commitment. Adult children frequently say the parent is gaslighting them by not acknowledging the harm they caused or are still causing, failing to respect their boundaries, and/or being unwil…

Psychologists talked about unintentional gaslighting at least 40 years ago. "The motivation may be conscious, although it is usually unconscious; and almost invariably the conscious motives are rationalizations and/or distortions of deeper, more complex, and less acceptable motives."[1]

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21674086.1981.11...