Do Parenting Styles Recycle Each Generation?
Page 286 from Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1854 to 2069 by William Strauss and Neil Howe, a description of the Silent Generation (1925-1942) childhood during the Great Depression and World War II:
“a layoff, a foreclosed home, the combat death of a father.” “… midlife Lost adults who regulated the child’s world with the heaviest hand of the twentieth century.” Sound familiar?
I wonder how many of my Gen-X peers over-protecting their children realize they’re not the first generation to take this approach during an era of naive utopianism in the White House, economic collapse at home, and genocidal antisemites arming themselves for war abroad.
See from March, Megan Fox’s 5 Problems with Gen-X Attachment Parenting
And published today, Rhonda Robinson’s 5 Insane Fads New Parents Swallow
Related, at The Wall Street Journal last month Daniel Henninger declared: It’s 1936 All Over Again:
But faced with the rather unhappy challenge of mounting a re-election campaign coincident with three years of rampant unemployment and next-to-no growth, little wonder Mr. Obama is looking for help from afar. And so it is that the ghost of a president past is indeed haunting the Obama White House—the ghost of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
FDR ran his first re-election campaign in 1936 when the United States was mired in the Great Depression. Barack Obama is running for the last time amid what he himself immortalized as the Great Recession. No surprise that Mr. Obama in his campaign speeches is channeling the master of Depression-era politics.
It worked back then. FDR walloped a somnambulant Republican candidate, Alf Landon, of whom the columnist Westbrook Pegler wrote: “Considerable mystery surrounds the disappearance of Alfred M. Landon of Topeka, Kansas.” But will Roosevelt’s politics work against Mitt Romney, who we presume will report for duty?
I’d say the difference is that the ‘children’ we’re protecting are 35 years old.
And what does that say? If you bind their wings so they won’t take off and crash, they can never leave the nest.
It’s not current events that have GenX overprotecting their children, it’s a reaction to growing as the latchkey kids of divorced parents. Many Grunge artists of the early 90′s cited their unstable upbringings as a major reason for their expressions of negativity and self-hatred. See: Kurt Cobain, Billy Corrigan, et al.
It might he too early to write off the GenX parents. Didn’t the silent generation and the tail end of the “greatest generation” give birth to the that paragon of narcissism, the baby boomers? (I am at the tail end of that group) How do you explain that? Did they just get tired and give up trying to enforce the values they learned? That said there were plenty of things that tarnished the reputation of the greatest/silent parents: Jim Crow, limited opportunities for women, etc., so the boomers didn’t get it all wrong.
Hopefully the Genx’rs can take the best of their elders parentage, and with a little mentoring from someone they love and respect, find a way to avoid the over-protectiveness you fear.