What a sick society! Over a month of nobody checking in on their elderly? I doubt all these people were all childless.
Previous studies have revealed some differences between canine and feline scavenging. Dogs tend to eat the face and throats of humans, then break the ribs and chew on bones. Cats, on the other hand, often strip skin from the nose, upper lip, and fingers (the same places, Rando notes, that they nip at when playing with a living owner). Scavenging is more common with dogs than cats, Byard adds, “but I don’t trust either of them.”
Calling this decay is an incredibly short sighted view of the actual changes that are happening. Kids used to grow up in toxic households with parents fighting and hating each other. Just look at old TV shows like Married with Children and The Honeymooners.
Now they grow up with an absent parent. I'm the latter and I'm really happy my parents chose divorce over keeping up appearances and giving me a shitty life. Domestic abuse in general has also been on a pretty steady decline because of the decrease in societal pressure to stay married.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10666570/#:~:te....
I.e. on average your life would have been even better if your parents were awesome.
But that wasn't an option, since they had an awful relationship. So the options were either divorce or doubling down on a shitty relationship. They chose divorce and I'm happy for it.
Also, your study doesn't seem to have any comparison to the impact of abusive relationships vs. father absence, which is what I was talking about. If you can find anything about that, I'd love to see it.
That's pretty profound! You should write an article!
There are still plenty of people in religions where divorced is frowned upon (to put it lightly) and there are also plenty of people who are mentally unable to pull out of a toxic relationship. But the reduction in societal pressure that 'marriage is forever' definitely has an impact.
And don't get me started on the vicious interactions between the "soft deprecation" of fault divorce, the abolition of adultery laws and economic aids for single parents. Clearly not the best mixture of choices.
Lets flip that coin... Religion/tradition forces people to get married before they actually knew each other well. Then they move in together, have kids and must stay together forever. I feel like 'we need to get married to live together' is way more in the realm of perverse incentives.
In the 70's, people on average married around age 22. Right now that's closer to age 29. Which one seems more carefree to you? To me it's the getting married at 22 without having lived together.
This is a bad position to begin with because neither parent stands up with the child. A single parent could be a friend the child would not otherwise have. And on top of that it could fall below the threshold for outright removal of child by support services if there is no "obvious" problem (divorce, physical abuse, abandonment). Because a certain degree of emotional abuse for a young child is near totally invisible to others if the child thinks they're the one in the wrong and doesn't defend themselves (which both parents agree on so it is stronger). And invoking those services can severely damage one's working future due to material concerns about college the parents would not have paid otherwise.
That in turn creates a sense of entitlement to opinion (we did everything for you, this is all you do to pay us back, etc...), feeling of creating debt/attachment to that past, and so on. Because they didn't hit or spank, but merely taught an important lesson in a more subtle way, they're not abusive like everyone else, so there is no problem, so on.
I know I'm just venting by now but these sorts of issues take years or decades to come to light after venturing into an adult life and might not be easily quantifiable in the way "this couple divorced" or "this child was removed from the household" would. There are grey areas in between, some of which still have some support by the public (like some types of corporal punishment being acceptable to an undefined degree)
Of course it's better if the relationship is healthy, but both sides need to work on that. There are subreddit of estranged parents too and communities like https://www.rejectedparents.net/forums/ but often the stories turn out to be "we're so alone, why are the kids so bad and don't talk to us anymore? (oh yeah, we did try to force them to do X, but that's irrelevant)"
Putting the individual first and it will likely make sense to put little value in family structures and community connection.
Putting community first, or specifically the people who are in a stage of life that really need help day to day, and valuing family connections makes more sense.
Neither are an absolute fix to everything. Like everything else, a mix of both likely makes the most sense.
They should have thought of that before they fucked up their kids.
If you really think that a large percentage, or even a majority, of parents have fucked up their kids we have much bigger problems to deal with than how many elderly people may be living alone.
My relationship with my parents is extremely complicated at best. Therapy is literally why I have a relationship with them at all.
This is fairly common in the particular circle I grew up in (deeply religious and very conservative), and I didn’t see a healthy parent/child relationship until I started dating someone from a very different background. It was eye opening.
A causal factor is the tendency to normalise early experiences, even if they are neglectful or abusive. This means many are unaware or reluctant to realise their upbringing wasn't that good when they are older. Without critical examination the early experiences and the assumptions you had as a child are carried into adulthood. So a lot of people will say their parents are 'loving' even if they were far from it.
Honestly, I know only a few people who have near zero issues with their parents and would happily have them move in when they get older.
Yes, young adults today are more willing to "cancel" their parents. Often enough it is for issues which a generation ago would have been seen as the child not accepting adult responsibility; suddenly the parent is the bad person for doing what their parents considered made them a good person.
Parenting is hard.
Can you give me a specific example of this?
I fired both of them 8 years ago and haven't missed them even one time. They were always an emotional cost center. Whenever I had one problem, if they found out, I'd have two: the original problem and providing emotional support to them for having upset them.
When I first moved to uni, I was utterly confused by everybody saying they were looking forward to going home for Christmas - why on earth would you want to go back to that? I remained baffled for another 12 years until I finally realised what had happened. I drew a poor hand.
Unless a child has the grace to grant a parent forgiveness for their (forgivable) failures, and unless a parent was able to create a safe and loving environment in which a child could grow up with such a mindset, estrangement is inevitable.
Usually, the crux which this revolves around is the realization that each child is a unique person with their own potential, and hopes, and dreams, and that it is not fair to the child if the parent does not make providing the best possible environment for that child a central focus of their life.
Many people who are (rightly or not) disappointed by their parents and troubled by aspects of how they were raised will view this as something private and will only open up in therapy, or some other private interaction --- some folks consider the anonymity of online intercourse to have a privacy of/distance from their real life that it is safe to mention things --- I guess in my day it was the "bartender effect".
Consider your question as coming from a position of grace/luck and count your blessings.
Unwise of you to state "realization of" to a statement that is not broadly agreed upon. I bet you also believe "you didn't choose to be born"?
While politics are something I prefer not to discuss, I hope that every woman who has ever found herself in need of a tampon, and every person with a concern for how laws requiring that society investigate every reported miscarriage as a potential crime shows up to vote in the next election, and that that coalition then puts in place a legal framework which makes giving birth a free and uncoerced choice.
When the sperm and egg fused, thus you began, and you very much wanted to be alive: it is literally programmed into your genetic makeup. It was you who decided to divide and divide continually at that point.
My point is that when you use the word "I" you seem to imply only the little bit of yourself which exists in your prefrontal cortex is you, and the rest is !you.
If you regret being alive, that is different from claiming you didn't want to be alive at one point. Wasn't it you who suckled on milk? Who cried for care and love?
Do you also think rape victims "enjoyed it" if they climax?
I'm sorry, I don't talk to people who think a single cell is a person. I'm too old now to waste time pointing out fanaticism and trying to correct it in random Internet encounters. Good day to you.
- children are a burden to be complained of and minimized
- children are a resource to be exploited
- children are incidental and may be ignored
- children are a way to increase one's social security payout
- children are inherently sinful; nothing they can do is good enough in god’s eyes; the most important thing in existence is to believe in this particular story and to dedicate one’s life to this belief
I truly believe it was love for their kids that drove my parents to instill such an extreme and harmful worldview. Primarily because of some pretty major unresolved Traumas with a capital T in both of their lives. Decades later, I’m still unwinding what remains a complex relationship in therapy.
The point of this anecdote was just that there’s a subset of us who had parents extremely focused on their kids and who really did invest the time into focusing on what’s “best”.
They just saw the world very differently, in ways that turn out to be extremely harmful, and I’m a messy product of that.
>...realization that each child is a unique person with their own potential, and hopes, and dreams...
That your parents labeled how they treated you as "love" does not make it an act of lovingkindness (to pull from my wife's Master's thesis) --- it is important that people should evaluate things without considerations for labels applied by others, and then arrive at a reasoned, impartial perception which is valid in terms of logic and correlation with the facts of the past. (Q: How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg? A: Four, calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.)
The drunken and enraged parent who claims, "This will hurt me more than it does you." as he unstraps his belt is lying to himself and to the child, and it is important for the child to realize that --- understanding the self-deception which makes such an act possible may be helpful, but it is more important to understand the facts of the matter --- by way of contrast, the toddler who bites another person has to be slapped because their intellectual engagement does not yet admit of other people having feelings (which is why they are able to inflict pain since they do not realize that others will feel pain), and since they are on the cusp of that realization, explaining afterwards along with some natural consequence will help guide them to that realization.
I am someone who has truly horrible people as parents; they abused me physically and mentally/emotionally, neglected my needs, broke me down, told me they hated me and wished I was never born, and told me I ruined their life for existing. Nothing I ever did or said was "right," I was always criticized. There was also severe mental illness, domestic violence, criminal activity, and substance abuse going on my entire childhood. It's not hyperbole to describe my childhood as 18 years of torture. I've been diagnosed with PTSD due to my childhood experiences.
I talk about it openly online with stranges, I talk about it with my various mental health providers over the years. However, most of my friends don't really know the full extent of the terror I experienced and I'll never talk about it with stranges or just acquaintances.
It doesn't really come up in conversation very often and it's kinda hard to talk about in person. It's hard enough telling my therapists about it. It's also just really embarrassing and I have to REALLY trust you before talking about it IRL.
We have an extremely pronatalist society and nobody really casually wants to hear about the victims that produces. It's not socially acceptable outside an extremely close relationship.
I don't feel the same typing about it semi-anonymously online. I also REALLY feel that I need to correct the cultural idea that "all parents are inherently good."
> Odds also are their public behavior is their best behavior and their private behavior is much worse.
They had very clear rules about how we (bro and I) weren't supposed to talk to other people about our home life, and they went full personality cult propaganda on how amazing they were as parents, and how other people wouldn't understand. And yes, they were shitty to service workers, anyone socially below them really. And they were worse at home.
It's not a contest; all child abuse is a tragedy.
(I suspect you don't know a lot of queer people?)
Wait hold on. Let's not conflate a strained family relationship with not loving them. Both my parents had an extremely abusive relationship with their parents, to the point where they could not be around them (And by extension neither was I), but they always loved them — And so did their parents, they were just extremely flawed.
I get along well with mine, but completely understand how complicated family relationships are.
There are a lot of other problems in the world people bicker about here and elsewhere like urban planning or regulation. Things that seem like solutions can be enacted if only big movements are made, people cooperate.
Narcissistic parents are best cut off at first realization. That is a black hole of effort. You were dealt a bad hand and no social safety net would have helped (they were even tricked by the propaganda). No entrepreneur or startup is going to meaningfully address the root of people who are simply born to the wrong parents, only the aftermath. Because the parents are always right and won't be told otherwise, until it's too late. And there is no crucially important meaning behind this happenstance. It just is.
Better to spend the effort undoing the years worth of damage on yourself instead.
Paraphrasing, "All happy families are the same; all broken families are unhappy in their own unique way."