The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Mottizens: do you have a good relationship with your parents? More specifically: do you try to make them proud and live up to values they inculcated in you? Or do you think about failings they had, and try to orient your life toward avoiding those?
Found myself wondering about this yesterday, how in some cases you have children who strive to continue the sort of life their parents led (e.g., multigenerational families I see at church), and in other cases you get total rebellion, children who want to be as little like their parents as possible and adopt opposite positions to what they were raised with.
Thinking about my own case, it's a little bit strange in that it never felt like my parents steered me towards any particular mode of living. I try to be like my dad in certain respects: taking responsibility for things, trying to solve one's own problems with one's own resources, managing money carefully and thoughtfully. My mom is just sort of a pleasant, rather daffy woman who lives a very simple life and isn't trying to impact the world in any way. I observe that neither of them are especially opinionated, and neither am I; they are casual, moderate, Clinton-type liberals and I've gone more conservative, but it's not something we ever fight about - they don't go into arguments about "issues" and don't mind people disagreeing with them. In general it's like they're just sort in the middle of most types of bell curves; even if I were of some rebellious nature, they aren't polar enough about anything for me to take up the opposite pole.
That's... a complicated question that requires a bit of a backstory. In the 90's when the USSR went tits up everyone had to find a new job. My mom managed to make a switch and made a successful career in accounting; she retired this year. My dad did not. He could probably have been a good physicist (he's a MIPT graduate), but long story short, this didn't work out and he started working for various federal agencies, first in IT and then in legal. I don't know why he kept working there.
Anyway, this affected me in two ways. First is my attitude towards money. My mom, being the breadwinner, was in charge of the family budget and she's... very careful with spending. The word "discretionary" didn't exist in our lexicon. This attitude has rubbed off on me. I've gotten better (mostly due to having to compromise with my wife, who's a complete opposite, despite growing up in a much more restrictive financial situation), but I still enjoy bargain hunting too much and obsessively compare prices even of things that should be below my level of attention, like food and random shit from AliExpress. Buying something substantial for myself still feels like some kind of kinky pleasure to me.
The other aspect is masculinity. My dad was the voice of random knowledge (stereotypes about men are true), but not the voice of authority. He was quite capable, as a former amateur boxer and a man with a badge, of defending us in a pinch, but I never considered this as something worthy of emulating. Once again, I don't know why he chose the life of a zoo tiger for himself. Perhaps I should ask him. I guess living in a zoo can sound better than living in the wild: you get free meat, free healthcare, the only thing you surrender is your freedom of movement. Cats love it! I never even realized he himself found it stifling, until I learned some things a few years ago at a family gathering. My parents patched it up, but I think my dad has been completely housebroken by the experience.
The session of impromptu psychotherapy over, where does this leave me? Well, thank God for small mercies, I am in a situation where my own masculinity isn't often called into question. My wife's father died before we met, my only son has developmental issues, I don't have to deal with his neurotypical friends and his fathers. I have a career where my leadership is backed by my experience. My wife is a homemaker. I just need to find the nerve to kick the next tradie that gives me lip out of the house. I fucking sound like Bob Slocum.
Oh, and speaking of values, not driving anyone too hard. My parents didn't try to exploit my precociousness by sending me to a magnet school, enrolling me into seven different after-school classes, or forcing me to get into the MSU or the MIPT. I went to a regular school and delighted every teacher, went to a regular university and delighted every professor, got a regular job and delighted every boss. Maybe I сould've become a greater version of myself via something like 57th-MSU-Yandex, but do you really have to go all-in if you've been dealt a good hand?
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I have a wonderful relationship with both my parents. I strive to live with the values they instilled growing up. My parents raised me Catholic, and I strive to be an active member of my parish. My parents provided all star educational opportunities to my siblings and I that I fear aren't available to truly middle class earners. For failings there are some health and lifestyle choices I know should correct, but fall into the trap of a busy working professional. The love and support from my parents I try to cultivate and grow with my siblings as they a lead their families.
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My father was a workhorse. I have some very good memories of spending time with him as a young boy in his workshop or getting picked up from school but he was often absent, working weekends or double shifts for the extra money and also, I suspect, as a coping mechanism for my mother's infidelity. When we moved to a small town, he was much more physically present but still preoccupied with work. In adulthood, however, he opened up and started talking, and he and I had what I considered to be an excellent relationship before he passed away. My mother, as you may have guessed, not so much. Like problem_redditor*, I also experienced my mother as being controlling, self-centered, manipulative, frequently dismissive, and derogatory towards my father in particular. She and I saw things quite differently, and as a teenager I wasn't concerned with school, college, or career. My only goal was to become independent ASAP. That earned me a measure of respect from her, and once out of the family household I drank the Kool-Aid and spent decades playing the relatively happy and successful child. A little over a decade ago, Dad started developing Alzheimer's, and my wife and I tried to help. As is common in these sorts of situations, all of my family's unhealthiness came out to play during this time period, primarily, my mother's unhealthiness. That almost undid my marriage and I've kept her at arm's distance ever since. She has also developed Alzheimer's and between that and the damage that was done to my life and my marriage, I don't really speak to her anymore.
In navigating life, I've pretty much learned by doing and did not receive much guidance from either of my parents, which is in part a generational thing. That said, I think in a lot of ways my father set a wonderful example for me to follow and I try to do that. He was the kind of guy that spent several years building his own garage/workshop and I'd like to think I have some of that focus and persistence in myself when it comes to the important things in my life, and that his example helps me to believe that I can do just about anything I set my mind to. He also had a pure and loving heart, and I try to live up to the love and acceptance that he was able to show people as well.
*In linking that Wikipedia page, please note that I am referring only to my own mother.
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I am one of the lucky ones. No risk of growing up with anything but a secure attachment style. I have never had a moment when I wondered whether my parents loved me or would pick me first.
Then I went to medical school and discovered that lots of people did not have such good fortune, for all that I took it for granted. Classmates from broken homes. Friends who talk about their parents like cautious diplomats. I remember feeling almost offended on their behalf. If you cannot trust your parents to have your back, who exactly is left?
Scotland has not helped my selection bias. The proportion of intact, ordinary, quietly wholesome families in my immediate orbit feels surprisingly small. I keep wanting to file a quality improvement report for society.
As for the usual question, do I try to live up to the values my parents gave me, or do I optimize against their failings? Yes, although the first part dominates. They taught me the obvious trilogy that turns out not to be obvious in practice: work hard, be honest, treat people with respect. That is not a complicated moral philosophy, but it is a rather reliable recipe to becoming content. My parents are, like every human I've ever known, flawed people. That is not incompatible with them being good people, which they very much are. I'm lucky to have them as my parents.
Culturally I am not particularly Indian. They never treated that as a crime. They are mildly religious. I am aggressively antitheist. Everybody made peace. We have literally never argued about politics. I do not want to. If there is a place I refuse to import culture war into, it is the family group chat.
My father is the canonical example of work as a form of love. The night before a colleague in India asked him to see his granddaughter with an ovarian tumor that needed immediate surgery, so he stayed. Later last night, he did an emergency C section for his nephew’s wife. At the end of all that he still called me before sleeping. It is hard to nurse any pride in my own work ethic after that sort of data point.
Have I been a decent son? Mostly, with detours. The plan is to pay compound interest. Give them grandchildren to cuddle. Raise my kids the same way, with the understanding that the money I make and the effort I spend are more for them than for me. I will consider it a success if my children are half as fond of me as I am of my parents. If love compounds at that rate, the long run will take care of itself.
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Both. My parents are flawed people with some good in them. I have a good relationship with my father, and try to retain a good relationship with my mother, despite having a lot of memories of what I would describe as serious narcissism and controlling behaviour from her directed towards many members of the family (particularly towards my dad, who is probably the most loyal person I know of). At one point it was very difficult for me to talk to her without experiencing a visceral disgust reaction, and I often consciously try to avoid acting like how she did when I was growing up. My politics are also probably the opposite to what hers was then.
Probably the biggest failing they had was anything even remotely relating to academic achievement. They had such a focus on academics that I failed to learn other essential life skills because of just how much stress was placed on it. I was expected to study an undergraduate degree in a subject I really had no interest in at the ripe old age of 12, and getting anything below the very highest grades was treated as failure (upon which point my mother would lose her shit and scream her head off for three hours). The thought of this induced nothing short of primal fear in me, and eventually during a particularly stressful period I ended up developing a chronic inflammatory disorder that resulted in constant, unremitting pain and discomfort.
Even long after I have gotten that degree, after I have recovered from my health issue, after I have progressed on to bigger things, I still think about that whole period of life and shudder. It's all too easy for an attempt to foster an environment that creates excellence to slowly slip into an attempt at forcing one's wishes through, and while I think the former is beneficial, the latter certainly isn't. If I ever found myself taking care of a small human, I would definitely try to do the opposite of all that.
But they had a lot of good values I still try to hold onto. Taught me to avoid substances as much as possible (something I notice a lot of western people are fairly laissez-faire about and which has always weirded me out), taught me how to save and invest, taught me the value of delayed gratification, taught me the value of self-reliance, and so on. My dad is probably also partially responsible for fostering a love of travel and photography that has persisted until the modern day, either that or I'm inherently more similar to him in more ways than I would care to admit. I wouldn't say I try to make them proud anymore and if anything have tried not to care about that, but I do try to live up to certain values they instilled in me.
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I have a good relationship with my parents, but I wouldn't say I particularly care about living up to their values. Maybe it's because their values were generic suburban apolitical secular centrism. They had no clear values to live up to. I had a good childhood and they've been generous now I'm an adult, but growing up there wasn't really a strong culture for us to preserve.
I think I do want to give my kids the same kind of childhood I had, so if that counts then I definitely want to preserve that. But I'd say it's more that I had a good childhood (quite a lot of freedom, being outside a lot, no digital panopticon yet) and I think that would make my kids happy.
I definitely want to have lots of children, which I know will make them happy.
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I have what I think is a very good relationship with my parents. They currently live with my wife and I through the working week, and help care for and teach our children. We attend church together. My father and I take walks in the evening where either he listens to me lecture about the news, or I listen to him lecture about theology and church history. It's a really good way to live.
My parents both certainly have their flaws, but I still consider them a model for myself and for my children. They did their best to filter out their own trauma when raising me and my siblings, and our childhoods were, I think, much better than theirs. I aim to do the same for my children, and try to help where I can with my numerous nieces and nephews.
You are truly blessed to have them in your lives like this.
I'm aware, believe me. We're trying to make the best of the time we have. And at the same time, our family situation would be much worse-off without them helping with the kids during the workweek. It's been really, really good for all of us.
This is lovely. Really beautiful to hear it's working out for you all. It gives me hope for my own kids, if the Lord blesses me.
Thank you for sharing.
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I resent my parents' making me join a zillion stupid extracurricular activities, and don't trust them too much. I had to pester my mother for months before she finally retired on the basis of my calculations showing that she had more than enough money to do so, and even now she whines about wanting to go back to work. I like to refer to my father as "Mr. Untrustworthy" (despite my mother's admonishments), after various escapades over the years:
Using superglue on a model rocket when the instructions told us to use rubber cement
Buying a telescope and using it approximately once
Buying a motorcycle and selling it within a few months
Failing to properly execute a quitclaim deed to a house for multiple years after divorcing my mother, to the point that she had to hire a lawyer
Claiming that the word "blackmail" is racist
Texting to me links with no explanation of why I should click on them
Allegedly converting to Islam
But I can't say that my relationships with them are bad. Call them lukewarm instead.
They told me to wear polo shirts rather than T-shirts, and I have maintained that fashion. While I was homeschooled (through seventh grade), they encouraged me when I developed cool hobbies (reading voraciously, translating English to Latin, folding origami, etc.), and I have continued to develop such hobbies. They speak good English, and I certainly am thankful for that. My father is (or at least was; I don't know his current status) a six-figure bigwig, and I also managed to attain similar exaltation.
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