It’s easy, David. Parents pay a small fortune to send their kids to college. In college, kids learn their father (and sometimes mother) are part of the white patriarchy. Kids return home to tell their educational benefactors that they are the reason everything about the United States is focused on racial oppression. Inability to communicate with parents and children ensues and Hollywood decides it’s perfect fodder for a sitcom. Parents cry and wonder what they possibly did wrong.
It is a possible story. Do you have empirical evidence to support it, correlation of education and political views with children not liking their parents? That is particularly important with regard to a theory you want to believe, one that fits your own political views.
Purely anecdotal, my own, friends' experiences, and my (obviously biased) reading materials. Your challenge was not ignored though and I spent about an hour searching with Google Scholar, which was not very fruitful. I even tried ChatGPT (v. 4o) and it provided a couple of studies which mostly discussed the role of biased parents in not reinforcing the social justice lessons that students are taught. Unsurprisingly, unless the researchers themselves came from a conservative campus (Liberty University) or was a professional conservative author (David Horowitz) there was very little interest in the impact of social justice indoctrination on families. ChatGPT reported:
• Studies link parental educational involvement and children’s social-responsibility development—but they rarely unpack ideological conflict between generations .
• This suggests a research gap: we lack large-scale, quantitative data on how adopting progressive social-justice frameworks in college affects parent–child relational quality.
I don't suppose Norman Lear's hit comedy "All In The Family" supports my position, but I'm pretty sure it earned him many millions of dollars.
Of course my original quip was only meant to be just that. Intergenerational conflict is documented throughout human history, from the Bible to Les Miserable to Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Ulysses and if I could bring myself to read current literary offerings, I'm sure it would be there as well. Progressive values instilled in our children by educators are just another catalyst for parent-child alienation.
Absolutely. And Kipling’s example is part of the literary canon when it comes to inter-generational conflict. I’m nowhere near to Archie Bunker. I always felt I was giving my daughter the best, most tolerant approach to being a good citizen in a pluralistic society. The child of immigrant grand parents who raised their children with care and as little prejudice as possible. My father was a gentle soul, crossed the Pacific in WW2 with the knowledge his brother had already been killed there. He chose to be a corpsman and wore a cross instead of a gun. Another uncle became a renowned chemist. Another uncle was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by Bill Clinton. My father ended up as an early member of the Nuclear Medicine Association, and spent most of his career training doctors in Nuclear Medicine. Who wouldn’t love this country for what it provided an immigrant family from Sicily? These were the things my wife and I tried to instill in our daughter. Not division and hate. When she was in junior high we sent her to Europe as a student ambassador. When she was in college we paid for her to spend a year studying in France. When she graduated she came home from college and said I was part of the white patriarchy and I was part of the problem with America. So yes, anecdotal, but more toxic than I could ever imagine college would be. Of course, maybe it wasn’t college. Maybe it was Tumblr. She said it was a place where people shared their art. Funny, because tonight I was talking to some young guys that we had hired to move our daughter home (yes, we are still there for her when she gets in financial trouble), and one guy was talking about how he was trying to manage his 10 year old’s push for more freedom as kids want to do, but now it’s just not wanting to walk to a friend’s house but also the desire for a smart phone, and I said at least Tumblr is gone and he didn’t know what Tumblr was. His cousin, who was helping him said, “It was the first social media.” I hadn’t realized that. I have no reason to doubt him. I’m pretty convinced the smart phone and social media has had a horrible impact on children. But back in 1993 when I sat my 3 year old daughter on my lap and started teaching her about computers, I had no idea social media was in the future. So yes, there are contributing factors other than college.
What’s probably more interesting is how this revelation was presented to me randomly by a couple of local movers on the same day I’ve had this conversation with you.
Tumblr was founded in 2007 so far from the first of the social media. I was active on Usenet long before that. What has changed over time is not the existence of social media but the fraction of the population active on them.
In case it isn't obvious, I'm not arguing that you should give your children everything they want or do everything they want — that isn't how you treat adults.
Actually, I totally understand why you raised your objection. The first essay I read of yours was the one where you discussed an online disagreement over facts, and you made a strong case for having a good handle on the facts you based your position on (it was about a position regarding Adam Smith and free markets) and I felt it was a very powerfully correct argument. That’s why when you challenged my statement I searched for back up but couldn’t find it and wrote about that. I’m guessing my emotional response was because of my own experience (a child we always treated with respect suddenly turned deeply disrespectful to me) and your general question about raising children. I now see I was more attuned to general inter-generational conflict which wasn’t the point of this original post.
Here are some real examples from my neighbors friends cousins kids, but definitely not my kids. Details obviously changed.
1. 6yo comes home from school announcing he has decided that A,B,C are smart enough to talk to, but DEFGHIJKL aren't. He proceeds to completely ignore the children he does not view as intelligent enough. It turns out he is judging intelligence based on performance in math. If a first grader can't do division, he views them as useless.
2. Child explains that he is fine writing a book report, but it has to be a book he wrote himself, and he's still busy writing it.
3. Child, when asked if there are any known allergies, tells people that "I'm allergic to ants crawling on the floor of the bathroom when I use it"
4. You get a phone call from school. Your daughter has been deliberately answering everything wrong because she dislikes the teacher.
5. You get a phone call from school. Your kid wrote "classmate name is an idiot" on the classroom wall in permanent marker because the other kid won a raffle.
6. A teacher asks you what to do. Your daughter refuses to write anything. There is no apparent reason for this, and your daughter doesn't attempt to provide one. She simply doesn't want to.
7. At PTA, you are informed that the child's desk is in the corner, and it's upside down because that's how they insist on using it.
8. One of your children develops an interest in tetanus and touching rusty nails. He encourages his friends to experiment with this.
9. Child says they speak their own language called Neh. Neh means "my brother is a fish" and there are no other words in the language. (See my recent post)
10. Kids want to know why they can't run the hose endlessly if there's not a drought
11. You put out glue traps. Kids discover you can scratch out the glue to form very sticky balls.
12. Child insists that they cross streets safely. You observe that this is not the case in reality.
13. Your child tells you a supposedly true story about flying during recess.
14. Child complains their sibling lied. They said it was warm outside and it was only 75 degrees
One possibility for the (also possibly) increasing rate of children growing to dislike their parents is the growing culture of narcissism and safetyism. If parents can't recognize when they don't have solid reasons or even reasons at all for dictates other than "it makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable" kids feel smothered and entirely lacking agency. Adults see questioning why as an attack on them personally, and respond in kind. Eventually children learn to avoid engagement with helicopter parents who simply must dictate rules to make themselves feel better, thus making every engagement with them negative.
Possibly related, I also see a lot of parents who can't actually make and enforce rules. The type who will sit and yell their kid's name for 5 minutes from the playground bench but won't go over and get the little bastard and make him pay attention. The kid clearly knows the parent won't do anything and so just ignores the nagging. Presumably at some point the parent will have to put their foot down, and it is going to feel really arbitrary and confusing to the kid. Worse, the child is learning that other people's stated boundaries and rules are largely irrelevant.
When my girls were very young and they used to ask me "Why is that kid allowed to do X but I can't?" I used to say "Because their parents apparently don't love them enough to teach them how to behave." I will admit it was kind of a "Be quiet and do as you are told" answer at first, but it became the honest answer after a while; those same kids whose parents couldn't be bothered to make the effort to provide boundaries, stick to them, and allow behavior that didn't fall afoul of those boundaries tended to turn out worse. Time will tell if they spend time with their parents later in life.
Also related -- family size is smaller. Some children are getting way too much focused attention from their detail-obsessed parents, because the load they are receiving would be better divided among 5 siblings. They cannot escape excessive parental scrutiny, over-protection, and forced enrichment -- and their parents don't learn to let go and allow their children to make their own decisions and learn from their own mistakes. When these children get older and find that they are socially stunted in the matter of their own agency, it is no wonder they blame their parents.
That’s also a good point, and should be roughly testable through survey correlations between number of siblings and probability of a close relationship with parents.
It probably also has an interaction with only children being spoiled and smothered at the same time, leading to a sense of entitlement and crippling lack of agency and responsibility.
Interesting speculations. Some of the reasons that are given for children liking less their parents than in the past are however cases of children needing less their parents than in the past (eg because fewer people are working in family enterprises). One could make the same reasoning about women ‘liking’ less their husbands than in the past. Note that there is a literature showing a negative effect on fertility of expanding social security, in particular, pension systems: see eg https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp1734.pdf
The bifurcation of reasons strikes me as over-simplified. In reality, kids don’t just know less; their intellectual faculties are not fully formed (at young ages.) An adult who knows less than you can reason along with you and make independent decisions based on your new information. Young children not only don’t know the facts but cannot process them as effectively as you can. This requires a real element of paternalism that doesn’t apply to colleagues who know less than you do. This deficit is especially critical when it comes to education, which is a big part of children’s lives. If one believes, as I do, that a child’s long-term interest requires going over humps that they would not voluntarily go over as young children, this justifies requiring the children to engage in conduct they may have considered and rejected. (This is also my concern about “un-schooling.” If as an empirical matter, the children will be better off long term if he is compelled to learn things his undeveloped faculties would lead him to avoid in the short term, it strikes me as a very clear case where a parent should impose the decision on the child over the child’s objection.)
That you reason better than your child, if true, is a reason to be less willing to accept his conclusions. But the same is true of adults, some of whom also don't reason as well as I do.
I think parents should try to guide their children's education — I describe the process as throwing books at them and seeing which ones stick — but the process should not require coercion. To quote an earlier writer on the subject:
"No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending, as is well known wherever any such lectures are given."
It's true that Adam Smith admits an exception for children or young boys.
I share this perspective too. I frequently tell my kids that they do not yet have a prefrontal cortex and therefore I need to act as theirs. I tell them that I want them to have a happy life, not just a happy childhood. I tell them that the more they try to obey me, even if they don't want to, the faster they will be able to learn from me. I tell them I know it's had to be a kid, and try to describe in detail why I remember it being that way - but I also point out to them, 'you know more than your little siblings, right now i know more than you' etc. The thing that seals the deal is i tell them, I too, try to obey rules that I don't really understand, and i've found that they _do_ end up making me happier.
I would have said that basing your decisions on obeying someone else, whether or not he can offer reasons for his orders, is a poor way of developing your reasoning abilities. Obviously the fact that you know more about many things than your children is relevant to whether they should believe you, but the same is true for interactions between adults.
Maybe your kids didn't have this experience, but how would you handle a situation in which your kid is making obvious and poor decisions? Like, so obvious that it's not a matter of logic and reason but something more base - such as an emotional reaction. Perhaps they are being lazy, or seeking revenge against a peer, or something else that's not pursued based on reasoning.
I think our parenting styles are actually very similar, but there are definitely times my kids do something utterly moronic and I tell them not to, often without going through an argument why their behavior is poor. I just tell them to stop, using my authority as a parent.
And I think it's necessary to hold that line out as a possibility. Having long and reasoned arguments every time they make a poor decision would mean I'm constantly trying to engage them in logic, to the point I'm sure they would tire of it and just come to resent that approach (and me). I would get very tired of it as well, as there always seems to be some new situation arising that I haven't thought of, and trying to walk a solid argument out that would stand up to scrutiny about why they should or should not do something would be overwhelming. Sometimes saying something like "don't hit your brother" or "you need to finish [undesirable activity]" without an accompanying argument is, to me, necessary.
My kids are pretty smart. Maybe not as smart as yours, but definitely more capable of reasoned discussions and arguments than an average kid. I think either of our approaches would fail miserably when dealing with a sub 100 IQ child, and would probably not do very well with 100-110 range kids either.
I can tell them I believe they are wrong. I can offer to explain my reasons.
There are contexts where coercion in some sense is legitimate, such as preventing one kid from hitting another — but it would be legitimate for adults as well. They are living in my house, eating my food, which gives me rights I would have against an adult house guest — no loud music after midnight, if you don't like what we made for dinner you can find something you can make for yourself or not eat. Beyond that I am restrained by courtesy, as I would be for a house guest.
How would you recommend less capable/intelligent/patient parents deal with their less capable/intelligent/patient kids? Do you think your approach would be effective with those families, or are you only talking about your own approach?
That's a good question and I don't know the answer. I'm reasoning largely from my own experience. You might find some evidence on the Treating Children as People site that I linked to or on things written about Sudbury Valley School, which is an in-school unschooling institution.
One possibly relevant feature of our experience is that my wife and I between us cover most of the standard high school curriculum. We weren't teaching it but we could get our kids interested in things and point them at books.
But that could be a disadvantage. My kids found me not useful for mathematics because it was too easy for me and I didn't appreciate that it was new and hard for them.
I think a person ultimately has to obey _something_, because there has to be some tiebreaker when evaluating all the possible courses of action they could take at any given moment. If you aren’t conscious about what you’re obeying - be that a principle, or a person - you’re still ultimately functioning under _some_ hierarchy of values. Obedience is what allows you to be conscious of and reason about that value hierarchy.
Obeying doesn’t mean “not thinking about it.” I agree this is how it’s often taught, but that’s wrong. True obedience is a form of commitment based on knowledge that you’re loved by that which you are obeying. Reason then has an aim: understanding the mechanism by which that love provides for your own betterment.
I think that is a specifically Christian, or at least theist, view. I do not obey anything I think I am loved by. I have values but they are not a person, cannot love me.
Is your account, in your view, true of God? Does he need to obey someone who loves him? If not, why is it true of other beings, as you seem to be claiming?
It's definitely associated with Christianity, but i think it's something we can eventually prove using computer science: any computational system that acts in the real world has to have _some_ mechanism by which it decides how to allocate computational resources - in particular, which motion plan to execute _right now_. That mechanism could be a principle, it could be an external source, it could be rolling a random number, it could be 'which ever process happens to be running right now." Given that human brains are computational systems, i think the same thing applies.
Intentional obedience - either to a principle or to an external authority - has the effect of allowing a person to consciously iterate on, i.e. evolve, their internal scheduling algorithm - towards some end. You're saying you have values, but because they aren't people, they can't love you. For what it's worth, I've been SERIOUSLY impressed by your patience and aspire to be more like that.
If, for 'love', we use the definition of Thomas Aquinas - to will the betterment of another - and then ignore the question of consciousness and instead ask, "do those values you're following _actually help you_?"
And if they do, I think they can reasonably be said to 'love' you in the
sense that they provide for your welfare. Is this just animism? Possibly - but we still don't know what consciousness is, and we also know that people can treat animals or other humans as if they didn't have consciousness. What I've found is that the more I treat these principles as being attached to a specific person, the more emotional salience they have. That emotoinal salience makes them more likely they are to interrupt when, e.g. i get the bright idea to tell my wife precisely how i feel about her right now. This might be just some stupid hack, maybe primates are wired to place higher emotional salience to other primates than we are to 'systems' or 'principles' - but after a long time of treating the principles as coming from a person, I have begun to consistently feel love _from_ that person.
Your question about "does God need to obey" is a great one. Christians believe that God the son became man and obeyed God the father, even to the point of dying on the cross. So Christians believe that Yes, even God needs to obey. We could ask, 'why does God the father not need to obey', but my answer would be that God the father is being itself, and there's nothing outside of God for God to obey. Obeying something means acting in alignment with it, and God always acts in alignment with Himself (tautologically) - so he's always obeying himself.
To bring it back to physics: i think obeying the laws of physics means acting in a way that maximizes the expected value of your long term participation in the physical universe. It's what evolution selects for, but once you get to the point where you can represent that axis in software - i.e. have verbal beliefs - we can have this failure mode where we imagine we can correctly compute that vector ourselves, and then really make a mess of things, eventually falling totally out of alignment with the cosmos, suffering and dying as a result of a busted prediction vector. The solution is to accept that the cosmos is continually transmitting the ideal trajectory to us, but we can only accept it if we are open to it and choose it over our own imagination. I think a person can find this to be true, experimentally.
Is not something you do by choice. It's something that just happens. Even the word "obey" is not really correct in this context, nor is the word "laws" with the meaning you are implicitly putting on it. The "laws of physics" are just our best current descriptions of what physical things do. They're not laws that physical things can choose to obey or not.
re:The obvious case is an immigrant family where the parents conform to the culture of the society they came from, the children to that of the society they now live in
Over here in Sweden the problem of cultural differences is often the reverse. The second generation, born in Sweden are *less* well-assimilated and more unhappy with life here than their parents are. We spend considerable resources in efforts to help the first generation assimilate, but are now see that we will have to spend a lot of effort on their children as well. The notion that they would 'develop Swedishness' through school and socialising with other non-immigrant children, naturally, hasn't worked out all that well. Some of this is a problem in that if your school is 80% immigrant, then there is a shortage of non-immigrant peer role-models. But some of it is that cultural norms persist in ways we did not expect.
One thing that we never learned in school was that in the successful 'melting pot' societies of the19th and 20th centuries was about 1/3 of the people who immigrated returned to the old country. see: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2017/09/returning-home-age-mass-migration (mostly about Norwegians, because the records are good.) Some of these are people who failed in their endeavours, but it seems that more of them were successful, and returned to the old country having become prosperous enough to live there at a higher standard of living than they were before they left. Integration was never their goal, just prosperity, so it is no surprise that they never integrated. This means that the immigration-and-intgegration success story has survivorship bias to the max.
This creates a particular parent/children conflict which we are seeing in schools. You end up with children, who hate it in Sweden, concluding that their parents did them a terrible wrong in moving here. They become strongly more religious than their parents, and end up hating them for their impiety as well. In the worst case, they end up joining IS and other militant jihadist organisations and criminal gangs. They have an idealised vision of how great it was in the old country before their foul parents made the disasterous decision to leave, and they blame them for it.
Many Swedish and Norwegian second generation immigrants returned, and only some of these did so with their parents. I don't know any Swedish records that kept track of this thing, but the Norwegians kept better track and it was significant. That Stanford paper I listed discusses it some, I think -- if not I am remembering a different Stanford paper. The Irish set up a department for returnees at one point, so I presume it was significant there too.
In Sweden there is a known problem that hundreds of Swedish citizens joined the Islamic State and went to Syria to fight for them. Figuring out what to do with them is a hard problem. We don't want them back, but understandably nobody else wants them either. We're spending a heck of a lot of effort in trying to de-radicalise these people, but it doesn't work very well. About the only people who say they have an effective program for de-radicalisation are the Saudis, and they say that it can only work if you can isolate the young person from his radical friends and make him live in a law-abiding, non-violent Islam community where he is forced to live a different sort of Islam. Thus, you pretty much need an Islamic society to integrate back into for this to work. Plus the Saudis have no problem executing those who will not renounce IS, giving them the martyrdom they claim to want so much. This won't happen here.
Now that the Syrian civil war is over, we are working to make sure that people who want to return there -- or who were born in Sweden but want to return to their ancestral lands are able to do so. We'll even pay for this, and many are taking us up on it now. Figures due out at the end of the year for how much this program to pay them to leave has cost us financially, but there is pretty widespread agreement among all by the Communist Left parties that whatever it cost is money well spent.
I'm not sure this problem is really getting worse, but if it is, I imagine the cause is mostly cultural. In the past, and particularly in Asian cultures, it was seen that children have a duty to obey their parents, that you were not peers, parents did not have to give explanation or evidence. I think this is changing mostly because of the influence of media.
Children see now that it's reasonable to expect explanations and to be treated as peers, and so when this conflicts with how their parents treat them, they recognize the situation as unjust and develop a dislike.
Anecdotally, the peers I have who I'd consider more in line with NPR-think have a much higher likelihood if disliking their parents. I
The idea of always being able to defend assertions to my kids is something that I am at, but the thing is, there's cost to that. When your kids tend to ask a LOT of questions, this can make an exercise like 'getting everyone into the car' quite the ordeal. In some cases I say, there is an answer, but I can't give it to you right now, and I need you to trust me on this. I will be able to explain it later, etc. That seems to have worked OK, I guess i'll find out in 20 years if they hate me. 100% agree on keeping promises to them - that's very important to me. I figure that the only channel i'll have with them, when they are older, is if they trust me and think highly of me. If they don't trust me and feel like i'm always forcing them to do things, i'll lose the ability to help them when it really matters.
I think this last part is the basis for the idea of not contradicting your elders - I agree that this rule doesn't really work and contravenes the idea of the search for truth.
I think your advice is good, but I'm not sure that the particular dynamic you're talking about explains very much. I can see why intellectual respect from your parents was important for you, and it matches my values as well, but not everyone is like that. No kid likes "because I said so" but I think for many of them, it rounds to wanting something and having mom say "no" = the form of the "no" doesn't matter much. I'm also not sure how many families really have discussions about issues outside of everyday concerns where kids might disagree with their parents. Sure, it happens - and maybe now more than in the past - but there are *so many* ways relationships can run into trouble! How much of familial disunity can be explained by kids-as-talking-pets? I'd guess it's in the single-digit percent range.
Another interesting single-digit-percent range cause may be lack of family enterprise more broadly. My family ideal enterprise is religious practice. It's not just that having everyone on board eliminates friction from different beliefs. It's that in a way everyone is working together toward a shared goal. Maybe "bowling alone" individualism is part of the problem within families these days, if things really have gotten more difficult?
Still, I think the main problem is that people are people, and we're tough to get along with!
I've been thinking about your binary division 'pets who can talk'/'small people'. I think there is a large third group of people who think of their children as their personal science and art projects in a contest of competitive child-rearing. Some of these people may believe they have their children's interest at heart, but a good many of them seem just to be doing it to impress the neighbours as a form of social one-upmanship -- 'Keeping up with the Joneses' reworked for the twenty-first century.
Your discussion of children as peers resonates with my experience growing up. I was born in the 1960s. My father, with a math background, taught me early on to ask how I know what I know, to think rigorously, and to conduct experiments. (This isn't how we talked about it at the time; it's what I later realized he was doing.) My mother, on the other hand, was a product of women's education of her time and fell back on "because I say so" a lot more. While I got along fine with both of them in adulthood, I was always much closer to my father. My sister, who lacked either the interest or aptitude for my father's style of thinking and interacting, was closer to our mother. Anecdotes are not data, but I share this nonetheless.
The sliding handicap makes playing games with children fun for everyone. The handicap is obvious, and the kid knows that if he won, he really won. I did not LET him win. I may have spoted him a queen and two rooks, but then I did my very best to beat him.
I'll have more to say in a future comment but I want to point out two things:
(1) You are missing the third (and fourth as they are identical, just opposite sides same coin) cases of "duty/chore", I.e. apathy. Many parents simply see their children as a job/burden and as such treat them as an albatross. The child (or five) wasn't wanted nor planned but now you have to deal with them. I'd argue this is the most prevelant case, especially among the poor / middle class.
(2) I think it's a normal cycle, or at least something I see with Midwest generations from boomers to Gen Y (I assume Gen Z will follow the same pattern) in that you have a period of hostility/apathy to your parents and then at some point in your middle ages you reconcile and become best friends again. I feel coasties have a different cycle, especially East Asian variants, as they never quit sucking the off the parental teet and so if they make a break, it's hard and permanent. I feel, maybe wrongly, it's because we no longer have age of majority rituals and so kids have to do it on their own and force the issue ala a rebellious rumsprungen though I know Germany doesn't use that word (though I know at least in the south the same concept exists even today).
Your first point is a reason why John Anthony's account might not fit the evidence, since it predicts that kids who go to college, hence not poor, are the ones who don't get along with their parents. Your second reminds me of someone's comment that it was amazing how much his parents had learned between the time he was sixteen and twenty-one (maybe older, I'm going by memory).
Yeah I don't think it's an affluence thing, I know a lot of young poor people, the abject poverty sleep at bus stops shoot meth with dirty needles sort, and many of them even in that state would be fully welcomed home, no rules attached, but they refuse to go as they have to "prove" they are adults and independent i.e. "you can't control me" ala that old saying "better to rule in Hell than bow in Heaven". I've seen a lot of them age too and nary a one didn't reconcile by fifty at some point, usually once they grew up in their late thirties.
In fact the only person I've ever met that was genuinely truly hateful of their parents until death was my grandmother and she carried it to her grave as if the wound was fresh and made yesterday. I don't remember the why, my mother told me the story once as she heard it from her father but I do remember it was pretty petty to me; my mother as well. I honestly think it was over some remark by her mother (so my great-grandmother) about a clothing decision she made in 1947. I do know my grandmother and great grandmother never spoke again after '47 until her death in 2008 and my mother said among her last words was a curse on her long dead mother.
I've heard enough black people speak very differently on this topic that I believe race (or at least the customs that have developed that are predictably different for black and white people) has everything to do with it. The prevailing black view is that white parents who help their children with their homework are being unfairly "nice" parents, and some even say that that kind of "privilege" should be outlawed. So I guess if you're black you will probably get shamed into not doing favors like that.
Am I "racist" then because I expect parents to do them? I don't think so. I think paid troublemakers like Al Sharpton have gone out of their way to foster the bad attitude that it should not be done.
Do you have any idea whether parents following the black view are more or less likely to end up getting along with their parents? I could imagine it either way.
I'm not sure what "generation" I am (born in 1965), but while I did have to assert my independence a few times with my parents, I never went through a period of "hostility/apathy" towards them. We were always in touch and always friendly.
It’s easy, David. Parents pay a small fortune to send their kids to college. In college, kids learn their father (and sometimes mother) are part of the white patriarchy. Kids return home to tell their educational benefactors that they are the reason everything about the United States is focused on racial oppression. Inability to communicate with parents and children ensues and Hollywood decides it’s perfect fodder for a sitcom. Parents cry and wonder what they possibly did wrong.
True story.
It is a possible story. Do you have empirical evidence to support it, correlation of education and political views with children not liking their parents? That is particularly important with regard to a theory you want to believe, one that fits your own political views.
Purely anecdotal, my own, friends' experiences, and my (obviously biased) reading materials. Your challenge was not ignored though and I spent about an hour searching with Google Scholar, which was not very fruitful. I even tried ChatGPT (v. 4o) and it provided a couple of studies which mostly discussed the role of biased parents in not reinforcing the social justice lessons that students are taught. Unsurprisingly, unless the researchers themselves came from a conservative campus (Liberty University) or was a professional conservative author (David Horowitz) there was very little interest in the impact of social justice indoctrination on families. ChatGPT reported:
• Studies link parental educational involvement and children’s social-responsibility development—but they rarely unpack ideological conflict between generations .
• This suggests a research gap: we lack large-scale, quantitative data on how adopting progressive social-justice frameworks in college affects parent–child relational quality.
I don't suppose Norman Lear's hit comedy "All In The Family" supports my position, but I'm pretty sure it earned him many millions of dollars.
Of course my original quip was only meant to be just that. Intergenerational conflict is documented throughout human history, from the Bible to Les Miserable to Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Ulysses and if I could bring myself to read current literary offerings, I'm sure it would be there as well. Progressive values instilled in our children by educators are just another catalyst for parent-child alienation.
That’s one example of the conflict between different cultures I discussed, not very different from Kipling’s example.
Absolutely. And Kipling’s example is part of the literary canon when it comes to inter-generational conflict. I’m nowhere near to Archie Bunker. I always felt I was giving my daughter the best, most tolerant approach to being a good citizen in a pluralistic society. The child of immigrant grand parents who raised their children with care and as little prejudice as possible. My father was a gentle soul, crossed the Pacific in WW2 with the knowledge his brother had already been killed there. He chose to be a corpsman and wore a cross instead of a gun. Another uncle became a renowned chemist. Another uncle was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by Bill Clinton. My father ended up as an early member of the Nuclear Medicine Association, and spent most of his career training doctors in Nuclear Medicine. Who wouldn’t love this country for what it provided an immigrant family from Sicily? These were the things my wife and I tried to instill in our daughter. Not division and hate. When she was in junior high we sent her to Europe as a student ambassador. When she was in college we paid for her to spend a year studying in France. When she graduated she came home from college and said I was part of the white patriarchy and I was part of the problem with America. So yes, anecdotal, but more toxic than I could ever imagine college would be. Of course, maybe it wasn’t college. Maybe it was Tumblr. She said it was a place where people shared their art. Funny, because tonight I was talking to some young guys that we had hired to move our daughter home (yes, we are still there for her when she gets in financial trouble), and one guy was talking about how he was trying to manage his 10 year old’s push for more freedom as kids want to do, but now it’s just not wanting to walk to a friend’s house but also the desire for a smart phone, and I said at least Tumblr is gone and he didn’t know what Tumblr was. His cousin, who was helping him said, “It was the first social media.” I hadn’t realized that. I have no reason to doubt him. I’m pretty convinced the smart phone and social media has had a horrible impact on children. But back in 1993 when I sat my 3 year old daughter on my lap and started teaching her about computers, I had no idea social media was in the future. So yes, there are contributing factors other than college.
What’s probably more interesting is how this revelation was presented to me randomly by a couple of local movers on the same day I’ve had this conversation with you.
Tumblr was founded in 2007 so far from the first of the social media. I was active on Usenet long before that. What has changed over time is not the existence of social media but the fraction of the population active on them.
In case it isn't obvious, I'm not arguing that you should give your children everything they want or do everything they want — that isn't how you treat adults.
Actually, I totally understand why you raised your objection. The first essay I read of yours was the one where you discussed an online disagreement over facts, and you made a strong case for having a good handle on the facts you based your position on (it was about a position regarding Adam Smith and free markets) and I felt it was a very powerfully correct argument. That’s why when you challenged my statement I searched for back up but couldn’t find it and wrote about that. I’m guessing my emotional response was because of my own experience (a child we always treated with respect suddenly turned deeply disrespectful to me) and your general question about raising children. I now see I was more attuned to general inter-generational conflict which wasn’t the point of this original post.
Here are some real examples from my neighbors friends cousins kids, but definitely not my kids. Details obviously changed.
1. 6yo comes home from school announcing he has decided that A,B,C are smart enough to talk to, but DEFGHIJKL aren't. He proceeds to completely ignore the children he does not view as intelligent enough. It turns out he is judging intelligence based on performance in math. If a first grader can't do division, he views them as useless.
2. Child explains that he is fine writing a book report, but it has to be a book he wrote himself, and he's still busy writing it.
3. Child, when asked if there are any known allergies, tells people that "I'm allergic to ants crawling on the floor of the bathroom when I use it"
4. You get a phone call from school. Your daughter has been deliberately answering everything wrong because she dislikes the teacher.
5. You get a phone call from school. Your kid wrote "classmate name is an idiot" on the classroom wall in permanent marker because the other kid won a raffle.
6. A teacher asks you what to do. Your daughter refuses to write anything. There is no apparent reason for this, and your daughter doesn't attempt to provide one. She simply doesn't want to.
7. At PTA, you are informed that the child's desk is in the corner, and it's upside down because that's how they insist on using it.
8. One of your children develops an interest in tetanus and touching rusty nails. He encourages his friends to experiment with this.
9. Child says they speak their own language called Neh. Neh means "my brother is a fish" and there are no other words in the language. (See my recent post)
10. Kids want to know why they can't run the hose endlessly if there's not a drought
11. You put out glue traps. Kids discover you can scratch out the glue to form very sticky balls.
12. Child insists that they cross streets safely. You observe that this is not the case in reality.
13. Your child tells you a supposedly true story about flying during recess.
14. Child complains their sibling lied. They said it was warm outside and it was only 75 degrees
Definitely not your kids. Definitely.
Incredible.
One possibility for the (also possibly) increasing rate of children growing to dislike their parents is the growing culture of narcissism and safetyism. If parents can't recognize when they don't have solid reasons or even reasons at all for dictates other than "it makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable" kids feel smothered and entirely lacking agency. Adults see questioning why as an attack on them personally, and respond in kind. Eventually children learn to avoid engagement with helicopter parents who simply must dictate rules to make themselves feel better, thus making every engagement with them negative.
Possibly related, I also see a lot of parents who can't actually make and enforce rules. The type who will sit and yell their kid's name for 5 minutes from the playground bench but won't go over and get the little bastard and make him pay attention. The kid clearly knows the parent won't do anything and so just ignores the nagging. Presumably at some point the parent will have to put their foot down, and it is going to feel really arbitrary and confusing to the kid. Worse, the child is learning that other people's stated boundaries and rules are largely irrelevant.
When my girls were very young and they used to ask me "Why is that kid allowed to do X but I can't?" I used to say "Because their parents apparently don't love them enough to teach them how to behave." I will admit it was kind of a "Be quiet and do as you are told" answer at first, but it became the honest answer after a while; those same kids whose parents couldn't be bothered to make the effort to provide boundaries, stick to them, and allow behavior that didn't fall afoul of those boundaries tended to turn out worse. Time will tell if they spend time with their parents later in life.
Also related -- family size is smaller. Some children are getting way too much focused attention from their detail-obsessed parents, because the load they are receiving would be better divided among 5 siblings. They cannot escape excessive parental scrutiny, over-protection, and forced enrichment -- and their parents don't learn to let go and allow their children to make their own decisions and learn from their own mistakes. When these children get older and find that they are socially stunted in the matter of their own agency, it is no wonder they blame their parents.
That’s also a good point, and should be roughly testable through survey correlations between number of siblings and probability of a close relationship with parents.
It probably also has an interaction with only children being spoiled and smothered at the same time, leading to a sense of entitlement and crippling lack of agency and responsibility.
Interesting speculations. Some of the reasons that are given for children liking less their parents than in the past are however cases of children needing less their parents than in the past (eg because fewer people are working in family enterprises). One could make the same reasoning about women ‘liking’ less their husbands than in the past. Note that there is a literature showing a negative effect on fertility of expanding social security, in particular, pension systems: see eg https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp1734.pdf
Thanks. That is interesting.
The bifurcation of reasons strikes me as over-simplified. In reality, kids don’t just know less; their intellectual faculties are not fully formed (at young ages.) An adult who knows less than you can reason along with you and make independent decisions based on your new information. Young children not only don’t know the facts but cannot process them as effectively as you can. This requires a real element of paternalism that doesn’t apply to colleagues who know less than you do. This deficit is especially critical when it comes to education, which is a big part of children’s lives. If one believes, as I do, that a child’s long-term interest requires going over humps that they would not voluntarily go over as young children, this justifies requiring the children to engage in conduct they may have considered and rejected. (This is also my concern about “un-schooling.” If as an empirical matter, the children will be better off long term if he is compelled to learn things his undeveloped faculties would lead him to avoid in the short term, it strikes me as a very clear case where a parent should impose the decision on the child over the child’s objection.)
That you reason better than your child, if true, is a reason to be less willing to accept his conclusions. But the same is true of adults, some of whom also don't reason as well as I do.
On your other points, I have discussed the arguments for unschooling, against trying to make children learn things you think they should and they think they shouldn't, in two earlier posts: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/unschooling-1 and https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/unschooling-2.
I think parents should try to guide their children's education — I describe the process as throwing books at them and seeing which ones stick — but the process should not require coercion. To quote an earlier writer on the subject:
"No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending, as is well known wherever any such lectures are given."
It's true that Adam Smith admits an exception for children or young boys.
“[I]f true.” Ouch! Appreciate the engagement.
I share this perspective too. I frequently tell my kids that they do not yet have a prefrontal cortex and therefore I need to act as theirs. I tell them that I want them to have a happy life, not just a happy childhood. I tell them that the more they try to obey me, even if they don't want to, the faster they will be able to learn from me. I tell them I know it's had to be a kid, and try to describe in detail why I remember it being that way - but I also point out to them, 'you know more than your little siblings, right now i know more than you' etc. The thing that seals the deal is i tell them, I too, try to obey rules that I don't really understand, and i've found that they _do_ end up making me happier.
I would have said that basing your decisions on obeying someone else, whether or not he can offer reasons for his orders, is a poor way of developing your reasoning abilities. Obviously the fact that you know more about many things than your children is relevant to whether they should believe you, but the same is true for interactions between adults.
Maybe your kids didn't have this experience, but how would you handle a situation in which your kid is making obvious and poor decisions? Like, so obvious that it's not a matter of logic and reason but something more base - such as an emotional reaction. Perhaps they are being lazy, or seeking revenge against a peer, or something else that's not pursued based on reasoning.
I think our parenting styles are actually very similar, but there are definitely times my kids do something utterly moronic and I tell them not to, often without going through an argument why their behavior is poor. I just tell them to stop, using my authority as a parent.
And I think it's necessary to hold that line out as a possibility. Having long and reasoned arguments every time they make a poor decision would mean I'm constantly trying to engage them in logic, to the point I'm sure they would tire of it and just come to resent that approach (and me). I would get very tired of it as well, as there always seems to be some new situation arising that I haven't thought of, and trying to walk a solid argument out that would stand up to scrutiny about why they should or should not do something would be overwhelming. Sometimes saying something like "don't hit your brother" or "you need to finish [undesirable activity]" without an accompanying argument is, to me, necessary.
My kids are pretty smart. Maybe not as smart as yours, but definitely more capable of reasoned discussions and arguments than an average kid. I think either of our approaches would fail miserably when dealing with a sub 100 IQ child, and would probably not do very well with 100-110 range kids either.
I can tell them I believe they are wrong. I can offer to explain my reasons.
There are contexts where coercion in some sense is legitimate, such as preventing one kid from hitting another — but it would be legitimate for adults as well. They are living in my house, eating my food, which gives me rights I would have against an adult house guest — no loud music after midnight, if you don't like what we made for dinner you can find something you can make for yourself or not eat. Beyond that I am restrained by courtesy, as I would be for a house guest.
How would you recommend less capable/intelligent/patient parents deal with their less capable/intelligent/patient kids? Do you think your approach would be effective with those families, or are you only talking about your own approach?
That's a good question and I don't know the answer. I'm reasoning largely from my own experience. You might find some evidence on the Treating Children as People site that I linked to or on things written about Sudbury Valley School, which is an in-school unschooling institution.
One possibly relevant feature of our experience is that my wife and I between us cover most of the standard high school curriculum. We weren't teaching it but we could get our kids interested in things and point them at books.
But that could be a disadvantage. My kids found me not useful for mathematics because it was too easy for me and I didn't appreciate that it was new and hard for them.
I think a person ultimately has to obey _something_, because there has to be some tiebreaker when evaluating all the possible courses of action they could take at any given moment. If you aren’t conscious about what you’re obeying - be that a principle, or a person - you’re still ultimately functioning under _some_ hierarchy of values. Obedience is what allows you to be conscious of and reason about that value hierarchy.
Obeying doesn’t mean “not thinking about it.” I agree this is how it’s often taught, but that’s wrong. True obedience is a form of commitment based on knowledge that you’re loved by that which you are obeying. Reason then has an aim: understanding the mechanism by which that love provides for your own betterment.
I think that is a specifically Christian, or at least theist, view. I do not obey anything I think I am loved by. I have values but they are not a person, cannot love me.
Is your account, in your view, true of God? Does he need to obey someone who loves him? If not, why is it true of other beings, as you seem to be claiming?
It's definitely associated with Christianity, but i think it's something we can eventually prove using computer science: any computational system that acts in the real world has to have _some_ mechanism by which it decides how to allocate computational resources - in particular, which motion plan to execute _right now_. That mechanism could be a principle, it could be an external source, it could be rolling a random number, it could be 'which ever process happens to be running right now." Given that human brains are computational systems, i think the same thing applies.
Intentional obedience - either to a principle or to an external authority - has the effect of allowing a person to consciously iterate on, i.e. evolve, their internal scheduling algorithm - towards some end. You're saying you have values, but because they aren't people, they can't love you. For what it's worth, I've been SERIOUSLY impressed by your patience and aspire to be more like that.
If, for 'love', we use the definition of Thomas Aquinas - to will the betterment of another - and then ignore the question of consciousness and instead ask, "do those values you're following _actually help you_?"
And if they do, I think they can reasonably be said to 'love' you in the
sense that they provide for your welfare. Is this just animism? Possibly - but we still don't know what consciousness is, and we also know that people can treat animals or other humans as if they didn't have consciousness. What I've found is that the more I treat these principles as being attached to a specific person, the more emotional salience they have. That emotoinal salience makes them more likely they are to interrupt when, e.g. i get the bright idea to tell my wife precisely how i feel about her right now. This might be just some stupid hack, maybe primates are wired to place higher emotional salience to other primates than we are to 'systems' or 'principles' - but after a long time of treating the principles as coming from a person, I have begun to consistently feel love _from_ that person.
Your question about "does God need to obey" is a great one. Christians believe that God the son became man and obeyed God the father, even to the point of dying on the cross. So Christians believe that Yes, even God needs to obey. We could ask, 'why does God the father not need to obey', but my answer would be that God the father is being itself, and there's nothing outside of God for God to obey. Obeying something means acting in alignment with it, and God always acts in alignment with Himself (tautologically) - so he's always obeying himself.
To bring it back to physics: i think obeying the laws of physics means acting in a way that maximizes the expected value of your long term participation in the physical universe. It's what evolution selects for, but once you get to the point where you can represent that axis in software - i.e. have verbal beliefs - we can have this failure mode where we imagine we can correctly compute that vector ourselves, and then really make a mess of things, eventually falling totally out of alignment with the cosmos, suffering and dying as a result of a busted prediction vector. The solution is to accept that the cosmos is continually transmitting the ideal trajectory to us, but we can only accept it if we are open to it and choose it over our own imagination. I think a person can find this to be true, experimentally.
> obeying the laws of physics
Is not something you do by choice. It's something that just happens. Even the word "obey" is not really correct in this context, nor is the word "laws" with the meaning you are implicitly putting on it. The "laws of physics" are just our best current descriptions of what physical things do. They're not laws that physical things can choose to obey or not.
re:The obvious case is an immigrant family where the parents conform to the culture of the society they came from, the children to that of the society they now live in
Over here in Sweden the problem of cultural differences is often the reverse. The second generation, born in Sweden are *less* well-assimilated and more unhappy with life here than their parents are. We spend considerable resources in efforts to help the first generation assimilate, but are now see that we will have to spend a lot of effort on their children as well. The notion that they would 'develop Swedishness' through school and socialising with other non-immigrant children, naturally, hasn't worked out all that well. Some of this is a problem in that if your school is 80% immigrant, then there is a shortage of non-immigrant peer role-models. But some of it is that cultural norms persist in ways we did not expect.
One thing that we never learned in school was that in the successful 'melting pot' societies of the19th and 20th centuries was about 1/3 of the people who immigrated returned to the old country. see: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2017/09/returning-home-age-mass-migration (mostly about Norwegians, because the records are good.) Some of these are people who failed in their endeavours, but it seems that more of them were successful, and returned to the old country having become prosperous enough to live there at a higher standard of living than they were before they left. Integration was never their goal, just prosperity, so it is no surprise that they never integrated. This means that the immigration-and-intgegration success story has survivorship bias to the max.
This creates a particular parent/children conflict which we are seeing in schools. You end up with children, who hate it in Sweden, concluding that their parents did them a terrible wrong in moving here. They become strongly more religious than their parents, and end up hating them for their impiety as well. In the worst case, they end up joining IS and other militant jihadist organisations and criminal gangs. They have an idealised vision of how great it was in the old country before their foul parents made the disasterous decision to leave, and they blame them for it.
Interesting. Is there a pattern, in Sweden or previous melting pots, of the children actually going back to the countries their parents came from?
Many Swedish and Norwegian second generation immigrants returned, and only some of these did so with their parents. I don't know any Swedish records that kept track of this thing, but the Norwegians kept better track and it was significant. That Stanford paper I listed discusses it some, I think -- if not I am remembering a different Stanford paper. The Irish set up a department for returnees at one point, so I presume it was significant there too.
In Sweden there is a known problem that hundreds of Swedish citizens joined the Islamic State and went to Syria to fight for them. Figuring out what to do with them is a hard problem. We don't want them back, but understandably nobody else wants them either. We're spending a heck of a lot of effort in trying to de-radicalise these people, but it doesn't work very well. About the only people who say they have an effective program for de-radicalisation are the Saudis, and they say that it can only work if you can isolate the young person from his radical friends and make him live in a law-abiding, non-violent Islam community where he is forced to live a different sort of Islam. Thus, you pretty much need an Islamic society to integrate back into for this to work. Plus the Saudis have no problem executing those who will not renounce IS, giving them the martyrdom they claim to want so much. This won't happen here.
Now that the Syrian civil war is over, we are working to make sure that people who want to return there -- or who were born in Sweden but want to return to their ancestral lands are able to do so. We'll even pay for this, and many are taking us up on it now. Figures due out at the end of the year for how much this program to pay them to leave has cost us financially, but there is pretty widespread agreement among all by the Communist Left parties that whatever it cost is money well spent.
I'm not sure this problem is really getting worse, but if it is, I imagine the cause is mostly cultural. In the past, and particularly in Asian cultures, it was seen that children have a duty to obey their parents, that you were not peers, parents did not have to give explanation or evidence. I think this is changing mostly because of the influence of media.
Children see now that it's reasonable to expect explanations and to be treated as peers, and so when this conflicts with how their parents treat them, they recognize the situation as unjust and develop a dislike.
Anecdotally, the peers I have who I'd consider more in line with NPR-think have a much higher likelihood if disliking their parents. I
The idea of always being able to defend assertions to my kids is something that I am at, but the thing is, there's cost to that. When your kids tend to ask a LOT of questions, this can make an exercise like 'getting everyone into the car' quite the ordeal. In some cases I say, there is an answer, but I can't give it to you right now, and I need you to trust me on this. I will be able to explain it later, etc. That seems to have worked OK, I guess i'll find out in 20 years if they hate me. 100% agree on keeping promises to them - that's very important to me. I figure that the only channel i'll have with them, when they are older, is if they trust me and think highly of me. If they don't trust me and feel like i'm always forcing them to do things, i'll lose the ability to help them when it really matters.
I think this last part is the basis for the idea of not contradicting your elders - I agree that this rule doesn't really work and contravenes the idea of the search for truth.
I think your advice is good, but I'm not sure that the particular dynamic you're talking about explains very much. I can see why intellectual respect from your parents was important for you, and it matches my values as well, but not everyone is like that. No kid likes "because I said so" but I think for many of them, it rounds to wanting something and having mom say "no" = the form of the "no" doesn't matter much. I'm also not sure how many families really have discussions about issues outside of everyday concerns where kids might disagree with their parents. Sure, it happens - and maybe now more than in the past - but there are *so many* ways relationships can run into trouble! How much of familial disunity can be explained by kids-as-talking-pets? I'd guess it's in the single-digit percent range.
Another interesting single-digit-percent range cause may be lack of family enterprise more broadly. My family ideal enterprise is religious practice. It's not just that having everyone on board eliminates friction from different beliefs. It's that in a way everyone is working together toward a shared goal. Maybe "bowling alone" individualism is part of the problem within families these days, if things really have gotten more difficult?
Still, I think the main problem is that people are people, and we're tough to get along with!
I've been thinking about your binary division 'pets who can talk'/'small people'. I think there is a large third group of people who think of their children as their personal science and art projects in a contest of competitive child-rearing. Some of these people may believe they have their children's interest at heart, but a good many of them seem just to be doing it to impress the neighbours as a form of social one-upmanship -- 'Keeping up with the Joneses' reworked for the twenty-first century.
Your discussion of children as peers resonates with my experience growing up. I was born in the 1960s. My father, with a math background, taught me early on to ask how I know what I know, to think rigorously, and to conduct experiments. (This isn't how we talked about it at the time; it's what I later realized he was doing.) My mother, on the other hand, was a product of women's education of her time and fell back on "because I say so" a lot more. While I got along fine with both of them in adulthood, I was always much closer to my father. My sister, who lacked either the interest or aptitude for my father's style of thinking and interacting, was closer to our mother. Anecdotes are not data, but I share this nonetheless.
The sliding handicap makes playing games with children fun for everyone. The handicap is obvious, and the kid knows that if he won, he really won. I did not LET him win. I may have spoted him a queen and two rooks, but then I did my very best to beat him.
Unlike letting someone win it is what you would do with an adult who happened to be less skillful than you.
I'll have more to say in a future comment but I want to point out two things:
(1) You are missing the third (and fourth as they are identical, just opposite sides same coin) cases of "duty/chore", I.e. apathy. Many parents simply see their children as a job/burden and as such treat them as an albatross. The child (or five) wasn't wanted nor planned but now you have to deal with them. I'd argue this is the most prevelant case, especially among the poor / middle class.
(2) I think it's a normal cycle, or at least something I see with Midwest generations from boomers to Gen Y (I assume Gen Z will follow the same pattern) in that you have a period of hostility/apathy to your parents and then at some point in your middle ages you reconcile and become best friends again. I feel coasties have a different cycle, especially East Asian variants, as they never quit sucking the off the parental teet and so if they make a break, it's hard and permanent. I feel, maybe wrongly, it's because we no longer have age of majority rituals and so kids have to do it on their own and force the issue ala a rebellious rumsprungen though I know Germany doesn't use that word (though I know at least in the south the same concept exists even today).
Your first point is a reason why John Anthony's account might not fit the evidence, since it predicts that kids who go to college, hence not poor, are the ones who don't get along with their parents. Your second reminds me of someone's comment that it was amazing how much his parents had learned between the time he was sixteen and twenty-one (maybe older, I'm going by memory).
Yeah I don't think it's an affluence thing, I know a lot of young poor people, the abject poverty sleep at bus stops shoot meth with dirty needles sort, and many of them even in that state would be fully welcomed home, no rules attached, but they refuse to go as they have to "prove" they are adults and independent i.e. "you can't control me" ala that old saying "better to rule in Hell than bow in Heaven". I've seen a lot of them age too and nary a one didn't reconcile by fifty at some point, usually once they grew up in their late thirties.
In fact the only person I've ever met that was genuinely truly hateful of their parents until death was my grandmother and she carried it to her grave as if the wound was fresh and made yesterday. I don't remember the why, my mother told me the story once as she heard it from her father but I do remember it was pretty petty to me; my mother as well. I honestly think it was over some remark by her mother (so my great-grandmother) about a clothing decision she made in 1947. I do know my grandmother and great grandmother never spoke again after '47 until her death in 2008 and my mother said among her last words was a curse on her long dead mother.
I've heard enough black people speak very differently on this topic that I believe race (or at least the customs that have developed that are predictably different for black and white people) has everything to do with it. The prevailing black view is that white parents who help their children with their homework are being unfairly "nice" parents, and some even say that that kind of "privilege" should be outlawed. So I guess if you're black you will probably get shamed into not doing favors like that.
Am I "racist" then because I expect parents to do them? I don't think so. I think paid troublemakers like Al Sharpton have gone out of their way to foster the bad attitude that it should not be done.
Do you have any idea whether parents following the black view are more or less likely to end up getting along with their parents? I could imagine it either way.
I heard that as a line attributed to Mark Twain, and I remember it as seventeen and twenty-one. I haven't verified either, though.
I'm not sure what "generation" I am (born in 1965), but while I did have to assert my independence a few times with my parents, I never went through a period of "hostility/apathy" towards them. We were always in touch and always friendly.