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A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

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Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#161

Post by vkou »

iammisc wrote: post #152
throwaway284534 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> 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. Thanks for the reply. You are labeling any kind of deference towards your parents as abuse. Do you not see the absolutism and extremism in your statement? Nowhere did I say children should tolerate abuse. I just s…

Deference-all-the-time is an incredibly convenient fig leaf for 'take whatever abuse I feel like subjecting you to'.

In a healthy relationship, the deference isn't abuse. In an unhealthy relationship, deference enables abuse.

Edit: Additionally, decent people can end up poisoning a relationship, if they never get any negative feedback in response to their poor behaviour. (Or if they completely disregard any negative feedback, because their opinion is the only one that must be deferred to.)

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#162

Post by GavinMcG »

dionidium wrote: post #156
dcole2929 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the thing though. If you hit me with your car, it doesn't matter whether it was an accident or whether you intended to. You still caused me damage and it's still not crazy for me to hold you accountable. I may have more empathy in one case than another but if you refuse to accept responsibility for the harms you caused then yeah that empathy is likely going away. And this is what the author refers to near the…

> Here's the thing though. If you hit me with your car, it doesn't matter whether it was an accident or whether you intended to. It matters a lot! First of all, it matters legally. An entirely different set of laws and procedures will be invoked depending on which it was. But, second, it matters because it tells me something about what to expect from you in the future. It tells me something about how you feel towards…

Don't ignore the sentence that "it doesn't matter" applies to:

> You still caused me damage and it's still not crazy for me to hold you accountable.

Obviously it matters in other ways.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#163

Post by dktoao »

pseudalopex wrote: post #112
kenjackson wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 probl…

4. Abuse. Did you mean they aren't actually new?

I think they meant that their examples are things that would have been "shoved under the rug" or hidden in the past and are no longer taboo. If you were gay in 1900 you hid it, if you are gay in 2020 you are out (usually). Abuse may consist of a lot of things, but using physical abuse as an example. If you beat your kids (more than just spanking) in 1900 it was still taboo (but maybe less so)

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#164

Post by buescher »

delecti wrote: post #153
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?

Do you have a better term to suggest?

First: Why should there be a term at all? Stop thinking of yourself and others in generic bureaucratic or therapeutic terms from a particularly dire era of mass self-absorption.

Second: If you must, "son" or "daughter", and only prefixed by "adult" when necessary for clarity.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#165

Post by delecti »

morpheos137 wrote: post #86
motohagiography wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would divorce increase the risk? In my clinical work I have seen how divorce can create a radical realignment of long-held bonds of loyalty, gratitude, and obligation in a family. It can tempt one parent to poison the child against the other. It can cause children to reexamine their lives prior to divorce and shift their perspective so they now support one parent and oppose the other. It can bring in new people…

I agree the impact of divorce on children is often over looked. In many cases the damage is far worse to the developing child than to the people actually getting divorced. The parents get freedom, the child gets a broken family where the top priority is not as it should be biologically, raising a well adjusted child into a competent adult, but rather with the parents meeting their own needs at the expense of the chil…

As a child of divorced parents, I'm glad they didn't stay together. For as far back as I can remember, it's been very uncomfortable being around while they're interacting with each other. Most marriages don't end for no reason, and I question the implication that unhappily married parents are necessarily better for a child than happily divorced ones.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#166

Post by nitwit005 »

I suspect some of this is just how hard it's gotten to avoid people. People used to just get on a boat or train, move to the other side of the country, and then all they had to deal with was letters and the occasional Christmas visit. Now, with the ease of travel and communications, you actually have to tell people you don't want to see or talk to them.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#167

Post by rayiner »

GavinMcG wrote: post #146
wonderwonder wrote: post #36

Wonder how much of this is driven by social media and the internet today. The word 'Toxic' is just thrown around now and everything is 'Toxic'. Its a word that has ceased to have any real meaning but virtually every behavior that used to just be normal every day activity is Toxic. Everyone has flaws and no one has all the answers. Parents are just people doing the best they can and for the most part making what they…

"Toxic" is just a catchier-sounding synonym for "harmful." It doesn't imply intent — in fact, that's one of its strengths, and one of the major components in the shift in the way we collectively talk about things over the past couple decades. Part of the conversation around race, for example, has been an awareness by more and more people that unintentional harms are far more prevalent than intentional ones, and in to…

Resentment arises from a gap between expectations and reality. Maybe the problem is the idealized expectations. And talking about things doesn’t help that. Kids need to learn that life sucks and then you die and really internalize that in order to bring expectations in line with reality.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#168

Post by helen___keller »

polka_haunts_us wrote: post #142
queuebert wrote: post #56

In my particular case, the rift is due to Rupert Murdoch's media outlets destroying my parents' logical reasoning ability coupled with a particular kind of boomer narcissism. For example, when I was young, my mom stayed home and raised me, fed me health foods, and gave me a head start on education. She was very loving and did a great job, really. These days, she screams at me and says she hopes Trump cancels my resea…

For a politics shifted perspective of this, sometime late last year before prayer before meal, my mom was talking happily about how she hoped Jeff Bezos got the guillotine. Just before "Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts...", "Boy wouldn't it be funny if a mob necked Bezos". Her main news sources are Salon and Twitter threads of various left (Bernie or more) wing writers. I remember referencing the incident a couple…

> I swear the last 4 years drove the vast majority of everyone insane, in a very literal sense.

Just out of curiosity, would you say that this has ever happened to you?

I'm asking because I also see many people around me going 'literally insane' (and yes, in both the 'left' and 'right' ways. Basically becoming consumed by some drip of outrage pieces and provocative online discourse).

But I also recognize that I 'went insane' at one point too. Being a kid who grew up on the nascent internet, I became addicted to reddit when reddit first emerged, and I can look back to around the Occupy Wallstreet era when I became obsessed with rhetoric that was disconnected from my own lived experience, and repeated certain ideas that were often disconnected from reality or evidence.

It pains me to see friends and relatives go through the same process. But I 'survived', and I do hope many others can too.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#169

Post by [deleted] »

UncleMeat wrote: post #49
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…

I think it is easy to look at this and say "wow, look at these dumb young people". But when I look around at people I know who are in this spot, the responses from parents has been truly awful. I know people whose parents have physically beaten them yet the parents still insist they were loving and cannot understand why their child broke the relationship. I know people whose parents raised them to be racist and are n…

[deleted]

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#170

Post by vkou »

morpheos137 wrote: post #86
motohagiography wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would divorce increase the risk? In my clinical work I have seen how divorce can create a radical realignment of long-held bonds of loyalty, gratitude, and obligation in a family. It can tempt one parent to poison the child against the other. It can cause children to reexamine their lives prior to divorce and shift their perspective so they now support one parent and oppose the other. It can bring in new people…

I agree the impact of divorce on children is often over looked. In many cases the damage is far worse to the developing child than to the people actually getting divorced. The parents get freedom, the child gets a broken family where the top priority is not as it should be biologically, raising a well adjusted child into a competent adult, but rather with the parents meeting their own needs at the expense of the chil…

What is the damage to a developing child of living for 18 years in a home where their parents should have divorced, but didn't?

People, especially people with children, rarely divorce just because it's Thursday.

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