Tag: Parents and Children

When people in a named generation have children, these children will grow up in a new culture that is actually two named generations younger. Children learn about the world by being different both from their parents and from the intermediary generation that is closer to them in time. Generation using children will be helped by both these sources. They can afford to learn from the nearer and closest generation, while being materially supported by their family from two generations back. This mixture of family and adjacent young people offers a creative mixture of 30 year older parents and a 15 year or so younger generation that is closer in time to the current world.

Being around 30 years younger than their parents, and 15 years or so younger than their unrelated adjacent generation, a country with generations is gifted with many sources of learning about life and innovating in society. This system gives childhood and youth rich sources of copying and innovating about how to live.
Media using generations first began being supported by their families after 1950. The first generation was named the ‘Baby Boomers,’ and its next successor was ‘Generation X.’ What challenges faced the pioneers of these new arrangements? Each new generation carried original ideas. How did they get along with each other? Some descriptions of the earliest families will give us answers.

The first challenges were that everything was new. Author Ron Suskind (1998) presents a rare but revealing clash within one family whose members are in the two earliest generations. Their hostilities reveal challenges between family members born in different generations. We are grateful to Suskind for this account of how older family members brought up youths with new generational powers. Suskind describes an example of a parent and her child getting into a ‘different generations’ conflict. A ‘Baby Boomer’ mother, Bernadine Dohrn, was a peace activist in the 1960s, and later a law professor in Chicago. A family family conflict emerges when Bernadine and her husband, Billy Ayers, are on a weekend visit with their son Zayd, who is an undergraduate at Brown University.

Bernadine is proud of her son for his intelligence and creativity but she cannot accept some of his behavior in personal life. She and her son have strongly held commitments to different generations. As a ‘Boomer’ in the 1960s, Bernadine was fighting for larger causes. She was politically aware and wanted an end to wars. She embraced good causes that could improved society.

In contrast, Zayd had grown up as a ‘Generation Xer.’ Very much a member of his own generation, he put personal behavior in top importance. Bernadine’s perception was that Zayd looked for group identity, with everybody a one man show, displaying themselves through consumerism and fashion. Bernadine held on to her Baby Boomer beliefs, taking up good causes and fighting against the dehumanization of women. To his mother, Zayd’s current life in college appears narrow and frivolous. She sees Zayd as ‘using all his sexual sway to treat women like targets.’ Suskind catches Bernadine wanting to change her son; Bernadine is heard saying, “What Zayd needs is a beautiful, brilliant girl to kick his ass. A girl sort of like she was, at twenty.” Clearly, Bernadine is prioritizing her own ‘Boomer’ generation’s ideals. She is not thinking about how she might feel differently had she grown up in Zayd’s generation.

The flip side of this is family conflict is Zayd faulting his mother and her Boomer generation for having their own failings. Zayd tells his parents that they paid a price for ‘losing themselves in ideology,’ not ‘taking care of yourself” and your own fulfillment, ‘before you start saving the goddamn world.’ Zayd is a strong and valid ‘Gen Xer.’ When they meet as a family the two generations’ ideals turn into a clash. Bernadine gets exhausted by this. The two first generations have ideals that are totally out of sync. They are too new and different to be compatible.

It will take later generations and more time for grown up parents to accept their children as belonging to different and distinct generations.

Parents may support their child’s activities in a generation. Most parents seem to have enjoyed growing up in their own generation. So with this understanding, parents usually recognize and tolerate their own children being in a new generation. They may be amused or puzzled by some the slang children use, but they will accept their children’s new games and different enthusiasms.

The majority view is supportive, but some parents oppose the children’s current culture. For various reasons, particular parents want to take control of what their children learn. A parent in opposition will discourage or even punish their children for belonging to the youth generation. Parents who oppose generational activities likely grew up without belonging to any generation themselves. As adults they may want to be the educators. Schooling may be compulsory but authoritarian parents can bring in after school extra lessons and homework.
Forcing children into extra hours of study has mixed effects; it may get children higher scores in school work, but the children will lose enjoyment of friends their own age and be cut off from learning through generational activities.

One widely read example of a parent who opposes children’s free choice is Amy Chau (2011) author of ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.’ This book’s big impact occurred in America where the family live, and was discussed in China. Amy Chau wanted her two daughters to learn from extra studying after school. Her girls had to study serious musical instruments like the piano and the violin. As a parent, their mother forced them into activities after school hours. Enjoying friends, a school drama or playing sports, she regarded as being idle and wasting time. The purpose of her strict education was to prevent personal life being from being fun with friends. Instead, Chau makes clear that her daughters had to received good educational grades and practice at length to gain skill in orchestral music. This mother believed that extra work after school would get her daughters admitted to high status universities. Other activities were seen as a waste of time and an embarrassing failure.

Chau reports that most of the parents at her girl’s school were modern ‘Western’ parents who opposed her authoritarian style of parenting. They thought it bad for children never to pick their own activities, play with other children, or choose their own friends. Without using the word explicitly, Chau tells us that most parents support the ‘new generations’ that come along with each cohort of children. In her book there exists a sociology of happier children and better living in society that has not been recognized or named.

Interestingly, the empirical evidence in ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’ does not entirely support the author. In practice it did not turn out that Amy Chau got her own way with everything. She admits that her daughters gave her ‘a bitter clash of cultures.’ Her younger daughter won concessions such as being allowed to play tennis. What Chau ends up telling us is that those supporting the use of modern media using generations will be a large majority. There will exist a few who, perhaps from having authoritarian traditions in their past, oppose youth generations but these won’t be more than 20% of the adults and will have trouble passing their methods on to future generations.
The deep question here is why the popular majority of families accept new media using childhood and youth, but seem unable to advocate for it against the small minority who come from generationless backgrounds.