Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 727 posts

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#521

Post by giantg2 »

ponow wrote: post #343
giantg2 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Protected" vs "unprotected" speech: The distinction itself is an abomination, papering over a more subjective reality.

Objectivity is really just society's collective subjectivity as far as determining what is protected, unprotected, reasonable, who is "wrong", etc. I don't see how societies can exist without this (even anarchists would implicitly be subscribing to the collective rules and interpretations, or lack there of).

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#522

Post by LordHumungous »

zwkrt wrote: post #497
LordHumungous wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that hard to just ignore these things when your parents say them? I have Republican parents and I just smile and nod whenever they say something crazy. It's extremely easy.

That’s fine and dandy if the “crazy” things they say aren’t directly attacking ones way of life or values. My parents seem to have viscerally negative physical reactions to even the sight of black people and gay men (lesbians seem to be fine!?) and it’s disgusting. If conservative news were just about foreign policy and taxes we could have our disagreements but it is more insidious than that because identity politics…

Well I'd say straight up bigotry is something quite different. Dunno what I'd do in that case, sounds difficult.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#523

Post by scotty79 »

kelnos wrote: post #286
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Lots of people are massively fucked up and still have kids anyway, either accidentally or otherwise. And then their kids are put at a massive disadvantage in life and in human relationships." This is an interesting one, and in direct contradiction to the adage: "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” My life experience agrees, tough…

This reminds me of a friend who has gone through some bad life experiences. She once told me that "everything happens for a reason" is the kind of garbage only said by people who have never had bad things happen to them. Yes, dealing with adversity can teach us things and make us stronger. But there are limits, and adversity can also do permanent mental and emotional damage. The latter outcome is way more common than…

Everything happens for a reason ... and that reason is physics.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#524

Post by slater »

pjc50 wrote: post #505
civilian wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MSNBC robbed me of an uncle :(

Explain?

I'm guessing OP is centrist or right-wing, and the uncle watches MSNBC and thus don't eat up the conspiracy theories that increasingly make up the right-of-center political sphere?

Or maybe the other way round, uncle lapped up the Fox News "MSNBC bad!" thing...?

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#525

Post by paulryanrogers »

nsxwolf wrote: post #62
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…

A few years back there was a movement on Facebook with groups called "Survivors of Narcissistic Parents" and similar that encouraged people to cut off their parents. It seemed wildly popular and had tons of engagement. People would diagnose their parents with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, discuss how every problem in their lives could be traced to their parents, and that was that. I've also saw more than one per…

There's a Christian book called "Wild at Heart" which had a whole chapter on wounds from fathers. I bought into it for years. In hindsight I think books like that can lead people into exaggerating imagined or downplaying real problems. IME it's best to talk to a professional, or at least get a variety of other perspectives before passing judgement.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#526

Post by laurent92 »

avidiax wrote: post #374
LordHumungous wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it does seem like many of the "no contact" people are themselves childless. I doubt this is a coincidence.

It's definitely not a coincidence, but it is certainly complicated. Damaged kids become damaged adults, and if they realize it, they may decide that they wouldn't be good parents and rightly opt-out of it. Children that didn't have the right opportunities, whether that's their parent's fault or not may not have enough achievement as an adult to take on the burden of being a parent. One can argue whether it is harder…

Long story short, I don’t call my parents precisely because I’m childless. Failing my love life has everything to do with them.

It’s not like I were divorced. I’m precisely never married, never had a long girlfriend, despite not being ugly nor totally stupid, and my loneliness drove me crazy (in the literal sense – since Covid I’ve honestly snapped a few neurons, so it’s quite over for me). But before that, I used to be a fine person, but they didn’t give me any lead on the love life. EVERY father would be happy if the kid plays with girls at school, just not mine because they don’t want me to pump-and-dump - well they don’t have to worry about this for sure. I really don’t get how people succeed at the love life, it’s totally not working for me.

I’m now workaholic and if I stop working, I’ll go insane with ruminations in a few hours only. I’m quite fortunate my worklife offers me the opportunity of working more, I’m a programmer-entrepreneur.

Anyway, if I were successful at life, I’d certainly be happy to call my parents more. It’s just that their opinion led me to a general failure, so I can’t hear more.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#527

Post by teawrecks »

LordHumungous wrote: post #465
pjc50 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of "Fox News robbed me of my parents" stories out there. https://www.salon.com/2014/02/27/i_lost_my_dad_to_fox_news_h... (2014, situation has generally got worse!) https://captainawkward.com/2020/12/09/1304-fox-news-stole-my...

Is it really that hard to just ignore these things when your parents say them? I have Republican parents and I just smile and nod whenever they say something crazy. It's extremely easy.

You're describing the difference between treating them like a life-long friend and treating them like a dementia patient. Yeah, I can just nod and ignore them, but mentally I have to acknowledge that the person I once knew and understood so well is fading away or completely gone. This is not an easy acknowledgement to make.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#528

Post by BrandonM »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #249
conductr wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the US tradition of leaving next generation better off than the last (whether true or not) is somewhat to blame. There is a societal "failure" to not providing for your kid the same or better than your parents provided for you. Many millennials are the tipping point for; they got the most, and it's down hill for future generations. The great American pyramid scheme is falling apart or so it seems. I think man…

Millennials in their 30's have something crazy like 1/6th the wealth their parents did at the same age.

This cannot be accurate in any absolute sense. How is wealth defined in this context?

25 years ago, the median car and house didn't have (central) A/C. Cell phones and the Internet were expensive and not widely available. Truly portable laptops, usable tablets, and smartphones didn’t exist. Health food options were limited. The world was not mapped for all to access at street level. Translation was far more difficult. Information was less accessible—Wikipedia and Google didn’t exist. Free public preschool (4K) was uncommon. The death rates and crime rates were higher, life expectancy lower. Cash and checks were the primary payment methods. The list goes on and on.

Does wealth here refer to an individual’s relative share of contemporaneous wealth? Should the generation that built all of the great technology and systems of the past 25 years not reap the benefits of their work?

I’m in my 30s, btw, in case I come across as defensive in this comment. It sounds like my parents’ generation did a better job of building lasting wealth than their parents did (though not my parents lol). Should we find fault in that?

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#529

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

js290 wrote: post #219

Religion & culture keeps most people out of trouble most of the time... "the absence of religion... replaced by all kinds of crazy beliefs... you realize there's no religious fundamentalism that's more irrational than an atheist's primitive use of probability" http://bit.ly/2Hi4pNK

I mean not all atheists believe in probability as the definer of someone's life. Even if you pray to God and think he said yes or you shake a magic 8 ball and it says yes, the decision is still the same.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#530

Post by throwawaygh »

kristjansson wrote: post #403
Workaccount2 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Millennials in their 30's have something crazy like 1/6th the wealth their parents did at the same age.

The dual of this is that many more millennials have living parents than their parents did at the same age.

> The dual of this is that many more millennials have living parents than their parents did at the same age.

I dug into some demographics data and I'm almost certain this is false.

OP said millennials in their 30s. Life expectancy hasn't increased in the USA that much since the 70s. Even if the deaths were completely distributed among adults, you'd expect people in the 30s now and the 70s to have about the same number of parents alive/dead. More importantly, almost all of the increase is due to improved child mortality.

There's a much simpler explanation: Boomers were once-in-a-country's-history lucky. They inherited the spoils of two world wars.

Post reply on HN