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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

#271

Post by giantg2 »

lazide wrote: post #230
tolbish wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But mental/emotional abuse and neglect are perfectly fine? Those can be just as irreparably damaging as physical abuse.

Considering the posters background, they may have just not taken it into account. One challenge with abuse on all these fronts is that there is a huge amount of grey area in all of them, and judgement that would need to be drawn on what is and is not abuse. Sometimes/often it is REALLY clear cut (yeah, someone doing munchausen by proxy on their kids, or beating them, or whatever is clearly abuse). Other times, you'll…

The thing about abuse is that it has to be excessive or misuse of some power. Generally, mental abuse should require that the person being abused say that they don't like whatever is being said and for what is being said to be objectively meant to harm them (serve no legitimate purpose, phrased vulgarly). If it does serve a legitimate purpose and was delivered in a decent way, then I don't see how that could be abuse. That is protected speech. Forcing someone else from expressing their views just because someone else doesn't like it would then also fall under mental abuse and restriction of of their protected speech.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#272

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

Our current situation reminds me of the brain-eating computer on the book Diamond Age that somebody created to crack passwords. It's like a lot of people are simply gone, and some superconciousness too over their bodies, and it's on the controls 24/7.

I still hope this reverses once the simplistic ideas get hit again and again by reality. Those groups are working very hard to shield themselves, but I imagine some portion of them must always be exposed to the real world.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#273

Post by Apocryphon »

triceratops wrote: post #242
morpheos137 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rapid change already has slowed down. Not too much significant has happened over then past decade. The period of greatest change is already behind us in the early 20th century. Technological and social change can not be ever accelorating. It follows a logistic curve. I agree that macro scale change did fuel a lot of micro social behavor changes like increase in divorce rates, etc. In the past family was more sacrosan…

> Not too much significant has happened over then past decade That's a bold statement, and IMO a very incorrect one. You just can't see it right now because you're too close. Electric cars, batteries, and solar power in general have taken off. Autonomous driving draws ever closer. Covid has changed work culture, education, and lifestyles the world over, probably permanently. And mRNA tech could revolutionize healthca…

What's the difference between FAANG now and IBM, HP, Dell, Sun, Yahoo!, and Apple of yesteryear?

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#274

Post by anp »

gpt5 wrote: post #264
mleonhard wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is a humblebrag. :( My parents modeled and explicitly taught me a judgmental mindset. It became my worst fault. Can you feel the judgement in this comment? Thanks, Dad & Mom.

The moment you stop blaming others on your faults is the moment you'll start improving.

It's very difficult to improve oneself without understanding the mechanisms, context, and history that contribute to one's behavior.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#275

Post by mcguire »

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…

What happens if one party, either parent or child, will not "understand the other's perspective"? What happens if "talking them through" just turns into another replay of the same argument?

I have come to the conclusion that my parents, who of course had their flaws, were damn nigh perfect.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#277

Post by coldtea »

gumby wrote: post #203

I really wonder how much of this actually is a problem, how prevalent it is, how new it is, and how much of the problem is socially induced. Just anecdotally, my sister and I have different relationships with our parents. They had different relationships with their own parents, and different from their respective siblings. My adult child is quite close with me. My ex had yet different relationships with each of her p…

>And all that leads me to wonder: how much unhappiness about the structure of a given relationship stems simply from its deviation from society's stereotypical model of what an ideal relationship should be?

My opinion: less than we think.

Plus, the ideal stereotype is usually there for a reason.

We're social animals. A broken bond is a broken bond, whether it's with parents, community, friends, or our own family. We can pretend that we're fine, but then we don't get to be a society full of self-reported depressed people, with great levels of psychological brokeness, addiction, and so on, and have a big majority lamenting how they are "so lonely".

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#278

Post by zwieback »

burgessaccount wrote: post #223
zwieback wrote: post #35

I don't think parent-child relationships were fundamentally better in the past, just read some Dickens or George Eliot or Henry James and you'll find plenty of agonizing both ways. The article headline suggests there's a "shift" but doesn't really go into enough detail to explain why a shift from relationships based on duty to relationships based on fulfilment would fuel estrangement. A little more data on that would…

I think the article really under-emphasizes the role of capitalism in this. If I need help with my kid, I don’t call my mom, I hire a babysitter. If my mom needs medical help, she won’t call me, she’ll pay a nurse. Goods and services that used to be procured through social bonds are now procured with cash - which creates a feedback loop where people then neglect their social bonds to acquire more cash.

Yeah, my pet theory is that there were two major shifts in human societies: nomadic to settlers and barter to money - everything else is details.

Of course I'm an engineer and know next to nothing about anthropology.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#279

Post by bostik »

jdavis703 wrote: post #214
samatman wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but for many of us in the West, without the tradition common to East and South Asians of reciprocal obligation. This used to be nigh unto a human universal: your parents raise you up from a helpless infant to adulthood, and this obliges you to love and care for them for the rest of their lives. I'm as deracinated Westerner as it comes, and yet I'm fairly traditional in this regard. I can think of three acceptabl…

What about people raised by single parents? What do they owe to the absentee parent?

An apology?

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#280

Post by throw58942 »

wonderwonder wrote: post #172
GavinMcG wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I think if your kid grows up knowing you love them and you do your best to educate and teach them right from wrong then you are probably a good enough parent. "Personally, I think putting that reckoning front and center is a good thing" I really disagree. If you parent was a monster, then absolutely. Otherwise, if they met the 3 points above then what good does calling them out and telling them that what they did was…

> My parents were far from perfect, but they loved me and did their best

Not all parents do that, when a divorce happened at least one of them thought that as well. The thing is: not everything is abuse but things can still be bad enough as also pointed out in the article. That's when you call it toxic I guess. It's this fuzzy new word to describe some hard to grasp behaviour that is maybe only so hard to grasp because it's that outlandish. One time I was with my sister and my father on holiday - my mother gave us a cell-phone so we could call in case he would abduct us. In any case, my mother was completely overwhelmed with raising 2 kids and cut some corners. Also my father did his best to put pressure on my mother, mostly financially. (He moved far away and blames anything bad that happened on my mother or me) And the list goes on. My sister is completely unwilling to talk about any of this. My father is like described in the article saying I'm rewriting history and having a complete lack of empathy. Is this abuse? Probably not, unless you go with a crazy strict definition. But toxic for sure. What upsets me the most that this is just some really fuzzy stuff that happened, I cannot pin-point any isolated root cause. So to come up with a reasonable explanation why I chose estrangement, I would have to tell quite a long story and some details are too personal. Still I'm much happier now.

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