A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

I don't see the contradiction there, it's pretty much the thing that saying is talking about.

A community full of emotionally damaged, unhappy people is also generally full of tough, no-nonsense people who know the dangers from personal experience, know how to avoid or eliminate them, do what needs to be done, no matter the cost and then afterwards perhaps drink themselves to death while abusing their family, but many of them also ensuring that their kids have a much better life than they did - slowly creating the good times.

And a few generations later a community of happy, emotionally well-adjusted people haven't had horror in their childhood, and they don't know how to handle real adversity and recognize abusive evil because they don't have the skill and experience for that, and spend their struggle/effort over meaningless trifles and status games; are emotionally principled and don't let ends justify the means - so when eventually push comes to shove (often due to some external circumstance or an interaction with another, exploitative community) they are unwilling or unable to take decisive action and sacrifices (including moral sacrifices) to prevent someone much more violent and unprincipled from taking over and causing hard times for you (and perhaps better times for themselves at your expense).

It's essentially about a cyclic change in the tradeoff between the qualities required to be happy, satisfied and cooperative versus the (very different and often incompatible) qualities required to be effective in the face of brutal adversity. Warrior mindset is harmful in peacetime, and pacifist mindset is ineffective in wartime. And perhaps it makes sense to raise "weak" men - friendly, open-minded, forgiving, sharing, optimistic and perhaps just naively expecting the best in others - whenever we can afford to, because it's just better and more sane, and we raise disproportionally strong, brutal, ruthless, efficient (and also damaged and abusive) men and women when we're forced to by circumstances that would just grind down people like those described in the previous sentence; damaging them until they either become "strong" or just break down.

Perhaps a bit related is the issue of parenting styles. Maximizing potential of kids is often quite abusive and results in unhappy and perhaps "damaged" kids; when looking at biographies of e.g. olympic champions it often (but not always - there certainly are exceptions) seems clear that they would have been much more emotionally healthy without as much early age pressure; but they also wouldn't be champions then, they would be outcompeted by someone just as lucky in the genetic lottery but willing (or, more likely, pressured) to sacrifice more and live a less balanced life.

You'll have to go back a very long way to find stable families that didn't have children leaving because they were bored, ambitious, abused, angry, or - in royal families - literally wanted to kill either or both of their parents and perhaps also their siblings so they could take over.

One difference now is freely available contraception and a much lower birthrate, combined with more economic stability. (At least for the boomer gen.)

When parents have two children and both are estranged, it's a tragedy. When parents had ten children, five of them made it to adulthood, and two decided to leave, it was acceptable attrition.

The other difference is the absence of extended family and friends who can step in with childcare help. So parents + kids going through adolescence under the same roof becomes a pressure cooker. No one gets much of a break for 4-8 years.

Repeating annoying phrases that casually dismiss suffering seem to be human nature. It likely irritated Voltaire so much he wrote the tragic novel Candide in 1759. In that book the phrase is "everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds" is thoughtlessly repeated during times of unspeakable cruelty and horror.

My parents...are a mixed bag. They weren't or aren't abusive. At least, not physically or sexually or anything like that. Emotionally...that depends on how you want to interpret events and what your perspective is.

But.... there's a gigantic cultural (rural vs suburban), generational (Xenial/Milennial vs Boomer), political (die hard Republicans vs Greenwald-esque progressives) and religious (baptist vs atheist) divide between us.

To complicate matters - they, especially my mother who's suffering depression from chronic illness, can be quite toxic and stress-inducing at times. They're judgemental, my mother can be a tad manipulative - nothing is every enough. I could call every day, i could see them once a week, they freaking moved within a 20 min jog of my house ffs. They're pushy.

To quote Kill Bill Vol 2: "Because he's a very very very old man. And like all rotten bastards, when they get old, they become lonely. Not that that has any effect on their disposition. But they do learn the value of company."

And that's the conundrum of them. They are characters and they are a lot to take in and a lot to ask my wife to habitually tolerate.

But on the flip side, they're incredibly thoughtful, giving, will stop anything at the drop of a hat to help with problems big and small, physical, financial, you name it. (though i never take them up on the $$). They... were incredibly flawed parents and i didn't walk out of childhood without issues.

But man, does being a parent change things. It makes me hypersensitive to just how i'm going to fuck up my kid, what kind of an annoyance i will be to him. The bond i have with my child is already something i can't explain to people who don't have kids and even to a few who do. And the idea that one day he'll just be too busy for me, or even being a teenager and being too cool for me.. it depresses me.

I didn't have him to burden him with me. but it's a relationship that i value higher than anything else.

i'm getting older - i've had medical ordeals, watching my mom suffer medical problems and it's just hit me how short and temporary all this is.

And i dunno. I understand a bit more now, and am tolerant a bit more now. I'm more grateful for what was done for me and less judgmental about differences. Life is hard, life is fragile, relationships are hard but... they're worth the extra effort (on both sides).

I don't have a lot of friends. I just never fit in anywhere. But whether i did or didn't, it really strikes to the core of just how important family is, looking down and up generationally. No one wants to die alone.

No one wants to pour all that effort, love, attention, money, heart-ache, struggle to doing the best you can for a kid, just for that kid to be like "fuck off" (for whatever reason, sans abuse). To dedicate 18-25, sometimes more, of your life to someone and them to just ...be too good for you now?

I was that kid at 25. At 40 with a 5 year old, i am not. And i will not be.

It's interesting - because if you work with really rich / spoiled kids, they are sometimes being sent on these summer / camp type programs as a punishment. So some kids have been mowing lawns to try to pay for the program (thinking of it as something super special - which it is), and other kids are being sent as punishment.

Reality is underneath most kids are good. Get them out of the environment and if you can get peer pressure going the right way, they'll drop right into it. Seriously, their parents wouldn't recognize them (cooking, cleaning, being very physically active etc).

But early days can be a shock to the system. If you've been jetting to paris to shop on weekends, and then are being asked to eat a meal cooked by other kids (no meal choice at all - just one big something) and/or need to cook it, it can really feel like something way out of comfort zone.