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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

#451

Post by slacktide »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #340
msbarnett wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely none of “climate change, nuclear war, biological warfare” constitute a natural disaster, nor has this quasi-neo-confucian conception of societal cohesion via filial piety historically triumphed over anything worse than any of these modern extinction scenarios.

None of those things would result in the complete extinction of human beings. The Black Death was pretty horrible and yet European society still exists.

European society exists today, but experienced societal collapse at the time, which extended for hundreds of years. Y'know, the Dark Ages?

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#452

Post by mullingitover »

dragontamer wrote: post #268
thereare5lights wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain

I don't fully understand the legal issues myself. But it appears that when Brittney Spears was put into a mental ward in 2008, her father + lawyer was granted "Conservatorship" and therefore was placed in charge of Britney Spears and all of her assets. There's a court case going on right now about whether or not this conservatorship should end. I'd talk more about the subject, but that's all I'm willing to say in my…

My layperson's understanding of conservatorship: if there is any possible doubt about your ability to care for yourself and money can be made from the conservatorship, you are very likely to find yourself in a conservatorship and will have great difficulty in getting out of it.

If you are absolutely unable to care for yourself and are in desperate need of help but there is no money to be made, you will probably find yourself living on the street in a major metropolitan area.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#453

Post by cogman10 »

erdos4d wrote: post #404
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…

Rather than religion, I would expect the real driver in this is just a shift in culture between the generations, with religion being one of the fault-lines. If one looks at the boomers or gen X, for all the countercultural ideals they may have experimented with, they have turned out to be remarkably conservative once into later life, following closely in their parent's cultural footsteps. I feel the millenials and ge…

It may be my upbringing, but it's really hard for me to pull the two apart. In my small home town, religion was (and to a large extent is) the local culture. Everything revolved around the local religion. 90% of the town practiced the same faith, so edicts from that faith's leadership would invariably effect everything. Cultural acceptability was measure by the standards of the faith. Granted, that was a VERY controlling faith.

For me personally, what drove me away from my childhood religion was simple research into it's history. Why should I care if my leaders claim homosexuality is a sin when they've done far worse in the past also claiming to come from god?

Yet for my parents, going against the leader's edicts is unthinkable.

All that comes back to my thoughts on estrangement and religion. While that's not a route my parents have taken, it happens a lot from the online stories I've read.

I guess this is a long winded way to say I'm still trying to figure out how much culture causes religion and religion causes culture. How many of these wild generational differences are due to just general cultural shifts from things like media, and how many of these changes came from things like leaving a faith behind? Did A cause B or B cause A or is it too complicated to be answered in a HN comment section.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#454

Post by fyfgfjgfy78 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #216
hackeraccount wrote: post #139

We're all living that Asian family joke. Parents spend their whole lives waiting for their kids to thank you. Kids spend their whole lives waiting for their parent to say "I'm sorry." That said I've never felt that way about my Mom and Dad. I've faults and problems a plenty but I wouldn't ascribe any of that on them; indeed the best things about me seem to clearly come from them and the worst are just as clearly thin…

For me personally there are aspects I don't like about myself that are clearly a result of how my parents raised me. As a much younger man I was bitter about this, but I came to realize that my parents are human and made some mistakes, but over all did sacrifice a lot for my and my sister's well being. I also realized we didn't do a lot to make raising us any easier. So rather than remain resentful towards them, I ju…

Sadly, when I was young adult, I knew my parents were not perfect and was happy with everything they did for me. They, like typical Asian parents, were always criticizing but I learned to ignore it.

It wasn't much later when I had my own child, they finally broke me. Not only they set high expectations for how I will help them have relationship with their grandchild, and criticizing our parenting, but also started criticizing 2 year old. For their part as grandparents, they did bare minimum, that is attend a birthday, ask for pictures because relatives are asking for photos. Never made an effort to come visit us. That is when they broke something in my brain.

Now I resent them more than ever, I wish I had never let them criticize me as an adult. I lost faith in God since they are so religious. I am trying to be complete opposite of them. I have mostly stopped feeling joy. I live mostly to fulfill my duty as a father. I really want to pack everything and move to the other side of the world but wife doesn't agree with that.

And as a father, I realize that there is no sacrifice in parenting. You choose to be a father. That was your choice. My kids are the only things that bring me joy right now. Yes sometimes they push my limits and I am tired, but it was my choice to have them. Thinking that my kids are making me sacrifice will probably make me resentful towards them. When I am playing video games while tired because I am so close to finishing a level, I don't say I made a sacrifice.

EDIT: I want to add that I have lost joy in everything related to my parents like my culture, songs that I grew up with, religious festivals, food, stories, career, etc. I hate it.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#455

Post by Domenic_S »

spideymans wrote: post #401
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #70

This article doesn't go far enough to hold parents accountable for their actions IMHO. It's completely justified to go 'no contact' with a parent who was physically abusive, who is homophobic, etc. I bristle at the implication that parents are owed anything. My relationship with my parents is based upon mutual respect as adults. Had they not at least made an effort to reconcile, we would not be on speaking terms toda…

A lot of parents unfortunately believe that respect is a one-way street.

I don't remember where I read it, but this is a big description of my childhood experience:

> Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”. And sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”. They think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#456

Post by bckr »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #319
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…

It also might be a reversion to the mean. E.g. One reason ancient Christianity was such a big deal according to historians (and resulted in billions of followers, etc.) was their profoundly different family structure when compared to what was happening in the roman culture and throughout the world. They brought Jewish traditional family structure to the ‘gentiles’ (read: everyone else who wasn’t omitted by blood line…

I like this perspective. There are so many folds to it, though.

First fold: Christendom and its 2,000-year-old siblings/cousins Islam (also Confucianism? Buddhism?) have been around long enough to form a sort of base social reality.

Second fold: These 2,000-year-old cultural regimes are crumbling and we are moving into new cultural regimes.

Third fold: The crumbling is actually, as you said, a reversion to the mean.

Fourth fold part A: This so-called reversion to the mean is itself impossible because cultures from 2,000 years ago were themselves much different from the cultures that came before them, and so on in both time and space dimensions.

Fourth fold part B: This so-called reversion to the mean is impossible also because we don't have enough context about ancient cultures to say that we are reinstantiating them, and things have changed so much (technology, residual effects of the most recent cultural regimes) that, even if we had enough information about the ancient cultures, there's no way we're really doing what they were doing.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#457

Post by im_down_w_otp »

starik36 wrote: post #443
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...

I think the outrage culture is prevalent with pretty much all the news networks starting with CNN and on down the list. You can replace %foxnews% with any of them. At family gatherings, find something else to talk about. I mean, people did have conversations 30 years ago, right?

For my part, in an effort to try to understand where the deterioration was coming from, I tried to trace the lineage of the different seemingly pre-packaged outrage nuggets. Trying to see if I could make sense out of the respective roles that things like 8Chan, weird PACs and foundations, Facebook, Twitter, email chains, online news, and television news were playing in ultimately crafting the "junkie" that used to be a person I could talk to about rafting, or skiing, or cars, or whatever. Where every possible topic of conversation would inevitably devolve into looking for any opportunity to inject some sound bite or meme. Anecdotally what I found was that the television media part of it was never the progenitor, it was always the legitimizer. A narrative was always seeded first through other preliminary means (e.g. Facebook or astroturfed email chain), and then eventually that narrative would be confirmed through some corner of television media, and then this acts as a legitimizing function seemingly due to the role that broadcast media used to play in their lives historically.

Eventually I gave up on trying to unpack it any further because it was clear I had no means to do much about it regardless of what I could unearth and understand about how it was happening or if I could get ahead of the curve on some facets of it by avoiding topics that could even incidentally be connected to upcoming "hot buttons".

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#458

Post by Wolfenstein98k »

jakubp wrote: post #441
hellbannedguy wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It was only much later that I found out that she basically cried for three days straight after that call." That got me crying.

Many people cry, shout or even try to manipulate you when you tell them their behavior (based on excessive attachment or dependency of some kind) is an issue for you. Many of the same people's loved ones realize that and are in a clinch: do I distance myself, hurting them? do I not distance myself, hurting self? It's not something you can just ask about: "I'm not as attached to you as you are to me, what do we do?"

There was no attempt to manipulate here - as the author stated, they didn't find out about the mother's crying for a long time. It was never made known.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#459

Post by [deleted] »

jakubp wrote: post #441
hellbannedguy wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It was only much later that I found out that she basically cried for three days straight after that call." That got me crying.

Many people cry, shout or even try to manipulate you when you tell them their behavior (based on excessive attachment or dependency of some kind) is an issue for you. Many of the same people's loved ones realize that and are in a clinch: do I distance myself, hurting them? do I not distance myself, hurting self? It's not something you can just ask about: "I'm not as attached to you as you are to me, what do we do?"

[deleted]

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#460

Post by BarryMilo »

someguy321 wrote: post #82

I am seeing a lot of resentment in this thread. My best guess is that some of it is deserved and some of it isn't. Something that this thread reminded me of is the fact that several of my friends (millenial like myself) think that bringing children into this world is a bad thing to do- with global warming and other social problems making it so that this choice is just going to cause more suffering. I wasn't too surpr…

People on HN speak their armchair sociology with such confidence it astounds me.

Even the idea that resentment can be "deserved" or not seems meaningless to me. People don't resent people because they think they deserve it, they resent people because things happened to them. We obviously can't assign blame for such infinitely complex causal chains, hell we can't even assign agency. Who's fault is it that someone's grandfather got brain damage in the war he was conscripted into, then went on to be abusive to his children, who went on to become addicted to alcohol. Who should say if these people then deserve resentment for being bad parents?

Life seems to me too random to comprehend, yet everyday I find people to tell me I should or should not condemn or condone people for their actions.

Maybe shit just happens and we look for reasons afterwards?

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