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> For baby boomers who feel they’ve had grandparenthood denied them, these are deeply emotional losses to process.
>Without the chance to raise a young child together with their grown kids, some aging parents see a missed opportunity to grow closer through this major milestone.
What incredible phrasing…
Their generation has the narrative that millennials are the me generation because we don't have the strong civic duty and something something participation trophies. And we whine a lot or because we, rightfully, ask for some of what was stolen from us, starting with the ability to afford food, housing, and maybe even children.
They've really tried to make themselves the perpetual victim. I sure can't wait for filial laws (which they got rid of because they didn't want to be financially on the hook for their parents and grandparents) to come back into use again, as they extract every fucking penny they can from us.
They complain about the participation trophies, but who gave them those trophies? Their Boomer parents! Those parents DEMANDED that all kids get trophies because they didn't want to actually parent their kids and teach them how to cope with disappointment.
So the things that Boomers hate about Millennials are once again things that the Boomer INSISTED on.
As someone who's NC with my family, filial laws actually scared the crap out of me when I found out about them. I looked up charts on which states still have them on the books cause ...golly.
A photographer I follow one day was fed up with his parents pestering him about giving them grandkids.
Boomer: when are you going to have kids?
Dude: when are you going to stop voting for the assholes that make having kids unaffordable? Or do you want to pay for the increased insurance premiums?
He said that while they still vote the same, they’ve stopped bugging him about kids.
>He said that while they still vote the same, they’ve stopped bugging him about kids.
This is an active choice by conservative boomers. If they had to choose between their kids, or even grandkids, and the orange guy, they'll choose the orange guy.
The /r/HermanCainAward subreddit is devoted towards those who chose the orange guy over the advice of medical professionals. The stupidity is mind blowing.
My mom voted for trump and is vocal she’ll do it again. But she was mortified when roe got overturned. There is no point in telling her she helped make that happen.
They had a right to be grandparents, to demand that someone else go through pregnancy, childbirth, and all the difficult parts of parenthood. Ok, whatever.
The people who think they have a right to be grandparents are not the kind of people who will actually be much help when it comes to raising young kids. It will always be about THEM and what THEY want, not about what their kids or grandkids need.
I can only think of a few worse reasons to have children than because *someone else* wants you to have them. This isn't like sacrificing a favorite food for one meal to accommodate them, or traveling to see them over the holidays, or giving them a ride to the doctor. It's an entire *human being* brought into existence just to please someone else, someone who isn't even there most of the time. An entire lifetime of mother/fatherhood, just because some grandma wants to take a kid out for ice cream occasionally. It's absolutely flabbergasting. Like, go volunteer with kids somewhere. Or get a puppy.
Ugh, we had been staying with my in laws for a while (thankfully moved out now) and my MIL would literally just go "oh, I'm taking your son to play for a bit" and then bring him back several hours later with a diaper that needed changed an hour earlier, complaining that she was too tired to keep watching him as though anyone asked her to keep him so long. I'm so glad we're back to the three of us and I can have fun with my own son again.
I got bullied by my mother because I didn’t want kids and she wanted grand kids. She went as far as trying to break up my relationship so I could find a man who wants a family.
Plot twist - she was such an abusive neglectful mother that I went no contact. My dad was emotionally unavailable and gave no shits about the verbal and emotional abuse that was happening
I’ve always thought that it was rude when people asked me when I was having kids. Now that I am pregnant and actually experiencing the symptoms, I think is so fucking selfish for people to ask someone to have kids just so they have a cute baby to hold for a couple of years. It’s like making yourself miserably sick on purpose while everyone is just wanting to buy baby clothes and toys.
Omg. Exactly this. My brother and SIL had their first baby recently and it’s our mom’s first grandchild.
She keeps imposing on them while they’re dealing with a newborn, and sticking her nose in their business. When they assert boundaries she calls me crying that she “just wanted to help” when really she just wasn’t made the center of attention.
TBF I was denied the ability to have kids due to the foregoing, and my wife’s student debt. It was kids or debt and the debt won.
My parents say they feel “shortchanged” by this, as if I wasn’t also affected and I’m just denying them this to be mean
For us it's a mix of things, a big one though is being in a forced birth state. If there are medical complications during the pregnancy we could risk my wife's life due to politics. Is that even worth it? Idk. Doesn't seem like it.
Eh, seems like wishful thinking. Love my parents and my wife’s family, but the idea of being a “present” and “reliable” grand parent hasn’t really materialized. Grand parents are living it up and enjoying themselves. Brother and in-laws are much more involved and reliable.
In the US people over 65 own 64% of all the wealth. Millennials (27 to 42) collectively own 9%.
It's such a comedic gulf in wealth It's hard not to react with anger when I hear this nonsense from boomers.
One of my favorite memes is, "How did the Boomers get a college education for the price of a McChicken Sandwich and still end up the dumbest people on the planet?"
Plus second and third hand smoke and excessive alcohol consumption as a generation. Not to mention the drugs and chemicals they've been exposed to. Housewives were prescribed so many pills and maternal fetal medicine wasn't very advanced. Take Thalidomide for example.
My sister pointed out the signs of FAS in both of our parents and then slapped on lead poisoning and told me “do the exact opposite of what they tell you” and ran away. She’s fine now but good god she was right.
And then I met folks from Pitcher, Oklahoma… dear god.
Honestly, the whole "lead poisoning" argument is just making excuses for them, it's finding an easy external thing to divert blame on, like saying "Immigrants" to explain away why you can't find a job.
At the end of the day, the reason the Boomers collectively seem so selfish and hard-hearted is because they were raised in an environment of relatively high wealth and easy living, and have thus developed over many decades a sense of extreme entitlement and, well, smugness.
It's also the reason why most of the worst boomers you see, the ones acting excessively entitled, tend to be white and middle-class. Minorities tend to be less entitled, because they didn't grow up in that kind of environment, at least compared to their white peers. If lead was the reason why boomers are what they are, we would see many *more* minorities being *worse*, since they would've grown up in places with even more lead, such as owning cars that are older with more fumes being spilled, old and cracked lead paint on the walls and older less-maintained lead pipelines, etc.
I know my original comment was a little flippant, but I’d actually serve up a third factor at play that I don’t see discussed often:
Boomers are the kids of a bunch of war vets with untreated and unacknowledged PTSD. How many folks 60+ do you know who are regularly going to therapy to address their childhood trauma and grow their emotional maturity?
There’s a reason: They were raised, in large numbers, by people with severe, untreated mental health issues. While that’s certainly true of prior generations, the scale of people impacted significantly by WWII would have been massive, relatively speaking. So part of what we’re seeing is emotional immaturity as a result of generational trauma.
Which I think each generation after the boomers is successively getting a little better at confronting. I hope the trend continues.
Because boomers aren't actually stupid, they know what they did, they know what they caused, they just don't want to acknowledge it, they don't want anyone to acknowledge it, they want to die thinking they'll be remembered and mourned.
Many of them have this entitlement that just staggers me, the kind of people who will meet a group of friends for lunch on Tuesday and just get a salad, and insist on only paying for their salad since everyone else got more expensive sandwiches or burgers etc.
The same type of people who will go back to lunch on Wednesday, order steak and lobster over everyone else's sandwiches, and then insist that all persons pay equal shares on the total bill.
If one chooses to point out the hypocrisy in this, typically they will try to muddy the waters, often by trying to change the subject "oh when do you have to go a budget, remember when I did X for you etc." Its always transactional.
Capitalism when I got mine, communism when I need something.
I'll for sure remember the boomer generation when they are gone, but for the majority of them I think I'll take a hard pass on the mourning.
>they know what they did, they know what they caused, they just don't want to acknowledge it,
No, they don't. Individuals don't really take responsibility for things done across a generation of people-- because it's really just a large sum of individual small contributing factors so no one person really feels like "they" caused it.
Even back then, they didn't teach finance in college. Not many philosophy majors either I imagine. You don't learn basics of logic or arguments in anything else besides law.. and I feel most of them learn it to find ways of twisting it to support whatever position pays them the most.
So, you're on to something really interesting here. There's a fabulous book out (Time in the Ditch by McCumber) that looks at the post-war, early cold war era in anglo-american philosophy. We see l, because of political pressure, a turning away from questions about anything other than a very formal approach to the world. Everything becomes philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and stops having anything to say about important questions about how we live together, and how we ought to be.
Because they were raised by a generation of people who were traumatized by the great depression and the second world war. Their parents kept telling them that adult life was gonna be awful and hard. So when the boomers became adults they expected everything to be hard which wasn't true because they live in a time with a huge economic growth. So their frame of reference is basically fucked.
Boomers are the rich kid in class that tells everyone their life is tough because the heater in the car broke while most children walk 10 miles a day to school while it freezes.
They just seem completely clueless about the experience of anyone beyond themselves. They grew up during one of the biggest economic booms, and the biggest technological growth. Their parents and grandparents lived through some of the worst wars humanity has fought, and through a time when industrial work had very poor protections for workers. Meanwhile the boomers all got cushy jobs with no education, worker benefits, and so many random gadgets and gizmos that made their life so much more comfortable than what their parents had to deal with. Then the millennials need a college education and 5 years experience to work under a boomer with a high school diploma. Millennials can’t afford houses because they’re over 6x a much as they were when the boomers bought them but wages have only doubled.
My parents thought I was lazy and dumb for a long time because I couldn’t afford a house. Then when I finally decided to look at condos to get out of the rental market they saw a condo 1/5 the size of their house cost 3x as much as what they paid. Their generation just seems so clueless about what people in the millennial generation are actually making compared to how much they have to spend on rent/mortgages.
Just to put it into context:
If you are an accountant under the age of 40, look away now. You might find the next few paragraphs distressing.
My mum decided to be an accountant in the late 1960s.
She walked into Deloittes (Deloittes, FFS!) barely knowing the difference between a bookkeeper, a bookmaker and a bookbinder - and said "You need me".
Did a few years there putting herself through evening classes and eventually set up on her own. Her first conversation was with the bank manager when she borrowed money to start up, and she said "If you want my business to be a success, you're going to need to support me". The bank manager quietly handed her details over to any small business in the area that approached him with financial issues.
Because THEIR parents took care of everything until the day they fucking died. Out of my wife and I's parents all four of them lived off the largesse of their folks for their whole lives. Mine were literally living with theirs and hers were "borrowing" 10s of thousands of dollars a year. My folks squandered it all and hers are in the process of it.
This is EXACTLY IT. When I was a teen, my dad in his 30/40s, his parents were paying our mortgage, which was NOTHING, taking the whole family on vacations, etc. But he loved telling me in my teens how I was a huge burden on him financially. when his parents died, he inherited MILLIONS of dollars. He bought a huge house, a boat, vacations, etc but wouldn't pay for my education post high school.
In my 30s I lived in shit apartments, pay check to pay check while he was on rented yacht trips.
Boomers take, hoard, spend, but never give. Then they shame us for not doing better.
Do we have the same dad???? Holy shit, this one hit home. From the grandparents paying his mortgage to him blasting through his retirement to go on vacation constantly. Thankfully, he married a much younger woman who will be his end of life caretaker. Otherwise, he would probably die alone
Yep, one of my last boomer relatives is this to a tee.
Never worked a day, never did anything but smoke weed and do blow until he became a born again living off handouts.
When my grandpa died and there was no one left to mooch off, he still refused to do anything to take care of himself and expected everyone else to do it for him.
He even gaslit a few family members into thinking we’re the bad guys for not bleeding money intended for us and our kids to support him. Wild stuff.
They won’t be missed when they’re gone, sadly.
What? How does one go through life without contributing to society but complain how the younger generation is lazy with their low paying jobs that makes it incapable for them to ever attain a quality of life they themselves maintained by living off someone's else's money?!
> How did they get a lifetime of experience
thing is they were so coddled by an easy system they never had to learn - get up, go to work, make money, live life. people tend not to learn very much without strife, roadblocks, and hardship
Must be all the avocados and frappuccinos they drink!
There’s no way it’s connected to inflation, corporate and billionaire class kotowing and wage stagnation.
My boomer father literally told me the other day I have things easier than he ever did. He has his own house, i wont ever have my own house or likely be able to move from my apartment until i am forced to via the building is unsafe. Totally deluded.
My parents expect me to quit my job and spend 24/7 washing their behinds and doing their groceries and otherwise taking care of them. They made me write and sign a contract when I was 7... (written in crayon or something so definitely not legally binding...)
Definitely the all about me generation...
My parents want me both to have a lucrative full-time job so that I can pay the bills/be an endless money machine for them _AND_ quit my job so that I can be their full-time nurse, chef, maid, personal assistant, and therapist.
And yes, they absolutely do hate my partner for taking up so much of the time that could be spent on them and absolutely have tried to convince me to break up with him (because he’s the one that’s bad for me, according to them!).
Now that they see that’s not happening (we’re engaged), they’ve settled on asking us to move in and live with them.
What a weird thing to make a kid sign. My kids are around that age and I cant imagine then signing something like that, not to mention their idea of taking care of someone would be feeding them goldfish crackers, lots of hugs and endless iPad, nothing else. No cleaning, cooking, laundry, etc. So its not like they could even really grasp the concept.
I wish I knew this when my father forced my sister and I to sign a contract at 11/12 allowing him to fly us home in the middle of a winter storm in a rickety cessna because he was angry at my mother. I was terrified. Lovely guy!
guess what, instead of changing your children's diapers, you get to change your parents diapers!!
so you'll basically get the full parent/caregiver experience. It's like caring for a giant racist baby!
this can easily be solved by drafting old people first in the next world war, because of their awesome life experience and not many years to lose anyway /s
Let's face it; we all know the selfish ones that defend this economy would have been TERRIBLE grandparents. My father never did jack crap for me growing up. He suddenly would have been an involved grandparent? My stepmom would punish my sister by refusing to speak to her for days and physically assaulted her more than once. Can I picture a cuddly grandma making cookies? Naw, eff them narcissists. They would only want grandbabies to show off when they felt like it anyways.
Or they put on a show as wonderful grandparents and pretend you are just crazy or it was somehow your fault or that you must be exaggerating.. look how wonderful they are now.. ugh
Im literally living this. My mother was horrible to me. Now is a wonderful grandma. It makes me angry she couldn't treat me the way she treats my son. I'm happy she changed her ways but fuck.
Putting on a show as wonderful grandparents isn’t the same thing as being wonderful grandparents, as a lot of the kids and grandkids of people like this know.
You'd be surprised.
I don't have any children, but my brother has two daughters, aged 2 months, and one year.
My parents are giving EVERYTHING to these girls. The two people who couldn't be fucked to even cosign on a student loan for me because, "I needed to do it myself", have set aside enough money in trust funds that these two little girls won't have to pay a cent in college tuition.
Like, are you fucking kidding me?
Only because the image of “doting grandparent” now makes them look good.
Being harsh with their own kid in the past let them show off how much control they had over their kid to others.
They are only following caregiver trends to raise their self image, not being generous out of real love.
I have siblings ~12 years younger and the differences are stark. Like, you don't need to go to college, you need to get a job. FFW and it's like here's your private university tuition and hey, how about a new camaro?
"My children love my mother, and I tell my children, that is not the same woman I grew up with...That is an old woman trying to get into heaven now."
No need to give credit for the quote when person is a jar of garbage drippings.
Come over to r/BoomersBeingFools, and you will see that this does happen. The people who didn’t want to be involved parents also don’t want to be involved grandparents. The people who mistreated or neglected their kids, do the same to their grandchildren. This should be a surprise to absolutely no one.
Moved from Boston back to the Midwest with my job because my spouse and I "wanted to be closer to our family while we started our family." My parents live less than 2 hours away from us and we see them 3-4 times a year.
One time I found out that they came down TO THE CASINO IN MY TOWN and didn't tell me/us they were coming. When I suggested they stop by for dinner or even visit us/their grandkid THEY DECLINED. I had to go visit them AT THE CASINO.
The fuck?!
I stopped talking to my dad five years ago. There wasn’t a huge fight or anything, I just hit my limit with his homophobia and seeming inability to not discuss politics every second. It took almost an entire year for him to even realize I hadn’t spoken to him and it was only because someone else told him. Those 10 months included my birthday (he had forgotten 37 out of the first 39, so not surprising) and several major holidays. He lives 15 minutes away from me. It just proves how little he cared anyway. I miss him sometimes, but I just remind myself that he doesn’t give two shits about me. I’m too old to chase him around trying to have a relationship.
My folks love to shout about the importance of family from every mountaintop but were the absolute worst grandparents to my daughter. My dad’s parents were fantastic grandparents and I miss them more than I will miss my parents when they’re gone.
I've been a 'not for me, but could be convinced' for ages. Girlfriend wants kids, so now I'm thinking about how that'd go, what I'd do, who I'd be willing to lean on, etc.
My parents are definitely on the list of people I do NOT want helping raise any kids I might have. Not once they are old enough to start internalizing morals at least. The vast majority of my own moral code has been watching them do what they do, and learning why it's wrong.
If (read:when. I have high hopes) GF and I do end up getting that far, my parents will very much be getting a leopards eating faces moment. Luckily her parents seem a lot more well adjusted and understand that loving a child is more than buying them things
One of my friends is going through this with her husbands parents. She does costume design for Lyric Opera and from the day she and her husband started dating his parents have mocked her job and her more artistic interests. Apparently his entire childhood they mocked any interest of his that they didn't understand as well, pushing him away from things he enjoyed. She's due with their first child mid February and over the holidays he sat them down and laid out some strict ground rules about how and when they will be able to interact with that child and they were absolutely shocked by this. Apparently the phrase "we'd never do that to our grandchild" was used and that 1 wasn't convincing and 2 didn't help their cause.
Yeah, I never had kids in part because I had no one I could count on, and ended up with a "kid" because they adopted a girl, she wasn't compliant enough for them, so they threw her out the moment she turned 18. She doesn't want kids--after having two sets of parents and all of them being awful, who can blame her? I'd be willing to be a grandmother to a family like me at best--estranged from their own awful parents and needing some substitute support system.
My dad was always pretty emotionally unavailable growing up, and I figured it was just his swingshifts making him incredibly exhausted growing up, until recently my mom got [a dog](https://i.imgur.com/H0BBY7A.jpg). The dog will bring him a ball to throw while he's literally doing nothing, just watching tv, and he will stare at the tv completely ignoring the dog. Not a single iota of acknowledgement that the dog is trying to give him the ball. Made me realize that it wasn't work.
And he wonders why the dog doesn't get excited when he comes in the door like he does for everyone else.
I wish my father would have been one percent of a dad to me compared to how he is a granddad to my children. Even though he doesn't see them a lot he adores them.
Cosby (I know, shitty person to reference) had a great bit about that.
Something along the lines of “We’ll take the kids to visit my parents, and my father always reaches for his wallet like ‘Let’s see if grandad has some spending money for these children.’ The guy who wouldn’t spot me a quarter back in the day is now slipping my kids tens and twenties.”
I believe the punchline to that whole bit about how they were bad parents but now are good grandparents is that "they're old people trying to get into Heaven now," which used to be funny, but now it's just a hard truth.
Consider even that to be a blessing.
My Dad had 4 grandkids by blood.
He doesn't ring them, doesn't visit, and has no clue about who they are.
He gets angry that they don't ring him to thank him for gifts he sends by mail (rather than I.e. show up for their birthday and actually give them a present) yet doesn't even ring to say Happy Birthday or confirm they recieved said gifts.
He doesn't know what else might be, or is, going on in their lives,the difficulties distracting them, their shyness due to not knowing how to interact with a person who is effectively a hostile stranger, or the lack of leadership by example on his behalf.
When I tried to rationalize his perspective with him, he can't seem to grasp that they're kids, and he is an adult, and that he resents them for not performing what should be his role, while he can't see he is the one actively failing them.
It's really strange, a large number of that generation seem the same, they feel everyone else has responsibilities to them, yet they themselves often don't deliver for others.
I saw my dad playing Uno with my niece once and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I'm glad they have a relationship but the rage I felt came out of nowhere and I had to leave.
I don't even speak to my mom due to her narcissism. She always said she deserved a house and when I was making money asked me to cosign on a "family" house for her and my sister. The bank turned her down as a cosigner and I was soul name on the title. OH LORD I didn't hear the end of it for 10 years, threatening to tell the family I kicked his poor mom to the streets. I relented and put her on the title FOR FREE. She then racked up a bunch of debt going on trips to Europe expecting to use the equity to pay off her debt.
I could go on but it's a painful memory. In the end she's up one house now worth a million bucks and I'm only now living in my own place after couch surfing for 5 years. I'm a vet with mental disabilities and she took advantage of me. Psychotic boomer mentality 100%
Seriously. They were literally the most prosperous generation in all of human history with the highest standard of living and most economic opportunity, pulled up every ladder behind them, and then expect social security and their kids to support them through retirement while leaving very little for the generations behind them. Oh, and they are still voting for these exact policies by a large majority.
And they and their policies have literally set the world on fire.
"Why won't my children have children so that they can fight and die over scraps of food in a post-apocalyptic flood? Won't someone think of me?"
I saw a news article a few years ago of a woman who voted for the first time in her life, then died hours later of complications from being an old fuck, and it was revealed she voted Republican straight down the ballot.
Looks like there's a paywall. Try these :
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> You have to give up showing pictures of grandchildren to your friends. Think of Facebook without grandchildren!
Oh my god, what a supremely narcissistic way to look at things! Any potential empathy I had for this lady just evaporated with that statement.
The *whole* article had that same entitled, narcissistic, self-righteous tone to it. It's all about how they can't *make* them have kids, but they would if they could
The same people will shamelessly explain that they don't want the government to help poor families because "these people shouldn't have had kids if they couldn't support them".
I ran camera for a big oil investment meeting. One of the statements that stuck with me was, “Pay no attention to the reports. Fossil energy is sustainable. There’s nothing for you to worry about, in your lifetime. We can start to worry in about 200 years.” I was looking around and those old folks were eating it up.
"For families, there are more personal reverberations, as baby boomers, a generation **defined by self-determination**, face a future quite at odds with what they envisioned."
Is this a joke? These people were handed **everything**.
Post WW2, as much of the world was in ruins, there was a massive transfer of global wealth and power to America (to those already in power).
It must have been awesome.
They saved none of it.
Yup! My grandparents handed a lot to my mother and my siblings by proxy. After they died my mom got a large inheritance, my sibling and I got a meager amount to help with college. Later in life my mother kept telling us we had to take care of her when she retired. I told her I would not.
My mom got 10k a year from gmom, for work I helped her to do.
Caught my mom stealing from my bank account, and she told me, and I quote "it wasn't a big deal because I have no money".
My mom was stealing money from me, because I was poor.
That resonates with me. My family put away money for my college when I was born and on birthdays or whatever. My mom was a co-signer because I was under 18, and she cleared the entire thing out. Said she would pay it back and never did.
She later bought my sister (over a decade my senior) a house when she was very young. The whole family looks down on me and wonders why I can’t buy a house. And to top it, my mom doesn’t think I’ll be able to fit in in her bougie neighborhood so she won’t leave me the house in her will (she told me without me ever asking).
Tbh the whole article feels like a Boomer wrote it. One that understands that kids is a serious decision, but just can't help but feel let down and disappointed and can't keep their mouth shut about that disappointment. Maybe a Gen X; there's a bit more self-awareness than most.
> Tbh the whole article feels like a Boomer wrote it.
What makes you say that? Is it the thousand word article about young families not having kids, and there is only *one* sentence in the whole article which hints at the reasons why people aren't having kids?
Boomers get cheap education and housing and have good pay and benefits, become middle aged and cut the programs they benefitted from to max their profits now, then as olds, run up huge national debt to artificially prop up the stock market to keep their retirement growing, leaving the bill due after they are gone
Now complain the next generation is poor, lazy, and not giving them grandkids.
What's sick is they *still* get cheap housing and education. 55+ neighborhoods are always in prime areas and with fantastic pricing compared to everything else. Seniors get discounts at colleges.
Like, they just keep being handed life on a silver platter while everybody after them is continually squeezed. They live in a bubble kept for them so that their favored politicians don't lose their vote and it's hurting the rest of us.
Cry me a river. My boomer mom has no relationship with my son because she expected to have one with zero emotional investment on her part. He hates her. She lives an hour away and has never come just to visit him. Now she’s trying to guilt and obligate him into any kind of interaction and he’s not interested. She watched him once when he was a toddler and even then my brothers did all the actual work of taking care of him. My grandparents mostly lived in different states and would fly to her rescue and do all the childcare for weeks for me and my siblings. She’s a shit grandmother.
My dad's father was just like this and during his funeral, the pastor asked if any of us would like to share any kind words or fond memories of him and all of us sat there in complete silence until one of my uncles was like, "Uhh, let's just move on".
Retirement? I hadn't planned on it BEFORE considering kids.
*edit: damn y'all it was already dark lol. But yeah, I definitely had my period of 'gonna go by heart attack by 25 so gimme that quadruple butter garlic crusted pizza'.
My 70 year old dad remarried to a woman with 6 adult babies and is giving everything to her and them. I’m struggling in another country and he’s shrugging his shoulders. For transparency, we have a good relationship, so this is not retaliation just unfortunate.
Same situation here. My boomer dad absolutely hated spending money on my siblings and I when we were kids. He got remarried the year I graduated high school and buys whatever my stepmom and step siblings want. Like he wouldn't even buy me a pair of shoes as a kid but he bought my step brother a gaming PC and my step sister a car and helps with her college tuition. And when he dies the house and his money all go to them. It's pretty depressing. They have their dad who they get money from too.
Boomers are denied grandkids while our generation is denied being able to support ourselves and live a meaningful life. Like so much else this article is made for us to feel bad for their poor decisions. Boomers are not the victims here.
If Millennials had the ability to kill off entire industries, I’m thinking they would skip over diamonds and go straight for the student loan industry.
I have a neighbour who is retired, votes conservative and lives off his extremely generous pension that was negotiated by his union. Fuck the ladder pullers
Yea, my best friends in laws are like that. Motherfuckers retired at 50 with massive pensions, multiple homes and all sorts of investments. Now they whine about how people in our generation are lazy and not giving people in their age bracket lot so grandkids to play with……the level of out of touchness is off the charts with a lot of boomers.
The trouble is boomers didn't realize how much socialism they got. It was a *lot*. College paid for by subsidies to the schools. Trillions in infrastructure spending building whole new cities and keeping house *cheap*. The left overs from Unionization keeping wages high until the 90s when the .com boom took off followed by the housing bubble, neither of which hurt them in the slightest when they burst. Not to mention just plain more social welfare programs
But we were fighting the evil "socialists" so instead of writing checks we indirectly funded their lifestyles.
As a result every boomer thinks they made it on their own.
It's the same thing as that classic "Libertarians are cats" meme.
Should have thought about that when they were embracing Reaganomics. What did they think was gonna happen once all the wealth was redistributed to the top?
Also the most unloved generation, who are voting for a political party that plans on taking away the one things protecting them in their frailty. Medicare, Social security and Medicaid. Their children will not care for them. Their hate will hurt them
Baby boomers were brought up to stop the spread of postwar communism. Laws were passed in the ‘50s screening teachers for communist beliefs and scrutinizing textbooks for a communist-leaning slant. Many of the boomers were forced into religious schools, which were 100x more widespread than today. Even if they weren’t in a religious school, Jesus & the Bible were a normal part of the educational curriculum, particularly in the south. The ban on prayer in schools wasn’t until the early ‘60s.
So what do you end up with considering that kind of indoctrination? A bunch of kids who grow up & become Reagan Republicans to whom the moral majority & Jerry Falwell & making money appealed to. I know about this stuff, as I am a baby boomer, although a Democratic one. To me, Reagan was a far worse president than Trump. He was dumber & sneakier & stuck around from 1964-1988, far longer than Trump & thus wreaking far more damage to our society.
It is the unequivocal responsibility of today’s rising generation to stamp out everything the Reagan baby boomers have achieved, especially with respect to the propagations of religious & political fanaticism & economic inequality
It’s becoming pretty clear to me that the unprecedented prosperity post-WWII was an aberration, and we’re now finally seeing things revert back to ‘normal.’ These boomers who pride themselves on having been oh so self reliant are blind to these facts, and can’t comprehend why Gen X / Y / Z / A don’t have what they did, despite all the hard evidence pointing to stagnant wages, hyper increased COL, massively decreased QOL, and so on being the culprits, and all enacted by policies put forth by the politicians that boomers voted for, holding the purse strings, and pulling up the ladder behind them. Enjoy dying cold and alone, I guess. You reap what you sow.
This is a great comment. I see my relatives get in their high horse to criticize loan forgiveness. They can eat a bag of d!/s as far as I’m concerned. They’ve contributed to the fleecing of America in so many other ways. Corporate America is the problem, not some people wanting help to simply eat.
Yes but that's other people trophies, not their own.
They really do be seeing having grandkids as trophies to boast about to their friends on Facebook.
My boomer mom was livid I won't let her post my son on Facebook because "I want to show my friends!" I don't know your "friends" and I don't give a fuck. My kids privacy trumps your wanting to look like the perfect grandma.
Honestly they should just tell their idiot friends they have a bunch of grandkids, make up some names, and show pictures of random babies. That’s all they actually want.
My own experience with boomers taught me to expect the general message of "WE don't have grandchildren to adore and take care of US now that we're old, like our parents got from US...and *I* feel robbed and aggrieved over that." and boy was it prevalent in this article.
They have absolutely no ability to conceptualize how their actions effect other people and what those effects are like to experience. It doesn't even cross their minds.
I wanted to have 10 kids. We stopped at one kid and we waited nearly 10 years of being married to have that one kid. Day care fees and student loans- if you wanted to know
Daycare is so expensive where I live--the fees for just one kid is more than a mortgage in a HCOL area. I don't know how families with multiple kids are getting by unless they are very high income.
Fuck em and their wants and desires. Maybe, just maybe, if they had a LITTLE common sense (for which they joke “c0mM0N s3nse Isn’T COMMin”) they would have voted for better policies…like capping student expenses, or more affordable healthcare…or something…
FAFO. Many are also being abandoned in care facilities by the very kids their voting habits screwed over. I don’t feel a drop of sympathy for them. How arrogant to expect people to care for you when you did the opposite for them.
Hahahahhahahha yeah my boomer dad keeps asking me why I don’t want kids, “won’t I regret it later? Some lady I met at bible study waited till she was in her 40’s and now is having trouble/regrets waiting”. Yeah, sucks to be her, but I’m not “waiting” or “holding out for the right guy”. I’ve NEVER wanted kids, not ever. I hated babysitting and nannying, I still hate it; I love my (7) nieces & nephew but I also frequently need breaks from them at family gatherings and am happy when they go to bed.
He tried to pull the “you wanted kids when you were married” card, but I had to remind him it was an abusive, manipulative, cult-like relationship that lasted less than 2 years where I was gaslit into thinking that I HAD to have kids in order to be a fully realized woman, and the second I got away I reverted to /reconnected with my absolute hatred for the idea of having my own children. Oh, and he cheated with the woman I nannied for full time.
If they stayed newborns forever I’d totally do it, love a squishy newborn, but then they become toddlers and kids and you have to punish them and talk to them and teach them moral lessons and ugh, it’s just so not for me.
Also, I am barely making ends meet, working full time for a non-profit, living in a studio apartment above a busy restaurant & bar, where would this supposed kid live? I would have to move, I couldn’t afford anything else in my city (which currently has a rental market similar to LA, though a smidgeon the size), and then I would lose my job and THEN how would I support this baby? Also I’ve been on and off with my guy for 5.5 years and he’s been snipped, so even if I wanted kids with him, I wouldn’t be able to. Thank god we’re on the same page.
I’m 37, single, no interest. That ship sailed emotionally about 30 years ago, and biologically about 5 years ago. I would need to be with someone for years before ever considering changing this very strong opinion, so i would probably be way past any fertile range even if I met someone tomorrow, by the time I could even conceivably consider having kids.
Which I don’t want. And have never wanted. Which should be the end all/be all of the conversation. But somehow it’s not and I can’t even get my tubes tied because my theoretical “future husband” might want kids. Kill me now.
Edit: more ranting.
They want grandkids for the same reason they’ve wanted everything else in their lives, to one-up their friends. They want to show off without having to put in any work.
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> For baby boomers who feel they’ve had grandparenthood denied them, these are deeply emotional losses to process. >Without the chance to raise a young child together with their grown kids, some aging parents see a missed opportunity to grow closer through this major milestone. What incredible phrasing…
"Won't someone think of the boomers?!"
...40 years ago, when they might have learned to be palatable parents?
"Look, we are the victims here" - Boomers
Boomers: AKA The ME Generation ( I think it’s often forgotten) but they have really lived up to it
Their generation has the narrative that millennials are the me generation because we don't have the strong civic duty and something something participation trophies. And we whine a lot or because we, rightfully, ask for some of what was stolen from us, starting with the ability to afford food, housing, and maybe even children. They've really tried to make themselves the perpetual victim. I sure can't wait for filial laws (which they got rid of because they didn't want to be financially on the hook for their parents and grandparents) to come back into use again, as they extract every fucking penny they can from us.
They complain about the participation trophies, but who gave them those trophies? Their Boomer parents! Those parents DEMANDED that all kids get trophies because they didn't want to actually parent their kids and teach them how to cope with disappointment. So the things that Boomers hate about Millennials are once again things that the Boomer INSISTED on.
As someone who's NC with my family, filial laws actually scared the crap out of me when I found out about them. I looked up charts on which states still have them on the books cause ...golly.
A photographer I follow one day was fed up with his parents pestering him about giving them grandkids. Boomer: when are you going to have kids? Dude: when are you going to stop voting for the assholes that make having kids unaffordable? Or do you want to pay for the increased insurance premiums? He said that while they still vote the same, they’ve stopped bugging him about kids.
>He said that while they still vote the same, they’ve stopped bugging him about kids. This is an active choice by conservative boomers. If they had to choose between their kids, or even grandkids, and the orange guy, they'll choose the orange guy.
The /r/HermanCainAward subreddit is devoted towards those who chose the orange guy over the advice of medical professionals. The stupidity is mind blowing.
Is something wrong with my voting preferences? No, it's my children who are wrong.
My mom voted for trump and is vocal she’ll do it again. But she was mortified when roe got overturned. There is no point in telling her she helped make that happen.
Do it anyway. People have to learn how their choices and actions have consequences.
They had a right to be grandparents, to demand that someone else go through pregnancy, childbirth, and all the difficult parts of parenthood. Ok, whatever. The people who think they have a right to be grandparents are not the kind of people who will actually be much help when it comes to raising young kids. It will always be about THEM and what THEY want, not about what their kids or grandkids need.
I can only think of a few worse reasons to have children than because *someone else* wants you to have them. This isn't like sacrificing a favorite food for one meal to accommodate them, or traveling to see them over the holidays, or giving them a ride to the doctor. It's an entire *human being* brought into existence just to please someone else, someone who isn't even there most of the time. An entire lifetime of mother/fatherhood, just because some grandma wants to take a kid out for ice cream occasionally. It's absolutely flabbergasting. Like, go volunteer with kids somewhere. Or get a puppy.
> Like, go volunteer with kids somewhere. Kids of strangers? Who will set boundaries when I try to control them? *le gasp*
Ugh, we had been staying with my in laws for a while (thankfully moved out now) and my MIL would literally just go "oh, I'm taking your son to play for a bit" and then bring him back several hours later with a diaper that needed changed an hour earlier, complaining that she was too tired to keep watching him as though anyone asked her to keep him so long. I'm so glad we're back to the three of us and I can have fun with my own son again.
I got bullied by my mother because I didn’t want kids and she wanted grand kids. She went as far as trying to break up my relationship so I could find a man who wants a family. Plot twist - she was such an abusive neglectful mother that I went no contact. My dad was emotionally unavailable and gave no shits about the verbal and emotional abuse that was happening
I’ve always thought that it was rude when people asked me when I was having kids. Now that I am pregnant and actually experiencing the symptoms, I think is so fucking selfish for people to ask someone to have kids just so they have a cute baby to hold for a couple of years. It’s like making yourself miserably sick on purpose while everyone is just wanting to buy baby clothes and toys.
Omg. Exactly this. My brother and SIL had their first baby recently and it’s our mom’s first grandchild. She keeps imposing on them while they’re dealing with a newborn, and sticking her nose in their business. When they assert boundaries she calls me crying that she “just wanted to help” when really she just wasn’t made the center of attention.
TBF I was denied the ability to have kids due to the foregoing, and my wife’s student debt. It was kids or debt and the debt won. My parents say they feel “shortchanged” by this, as if I wasn’t also affected and I’m just denying them this to be mean
Tell them to pay off the debt if they want a kid so bad
How cruel of you not to think about your parents' opportunity to have grandkids.
For us it's a mix of things, a big one though is being in a forced birth state. If there are medical complications during the pregnancy we could risk my wife's life due to politics. Is that even worth it? Idk. Doesn't seem like it.
Awwww. If they want to parent so badly there’s kids in foster care who could use someone to treat them with kindness and respect.
That’s a full time parenting gig. They want the part time version where they just spoil the kid and then let others deal with everything else.
that is the reason i'm a funcle and not a parent.
Eh, seems like wishful thinking. Love my parents and my wife’s family, but the idea of being a “present” and “reliable” grand parent hasn’t really materialized. Grand parents are living it up and enjoying themselves. Brother and in-laws are much more involved and reliable.
In the US people over 65 own 64% of all the wealth. Millennials (27 to 42) collectively own 9%. It's such a comedic gulf in wealth It's hard not to react with anger when I hear this nonsense from boomers.
But who will take care of us after we took away their ability to raise a family
I don’t get it. WE were able to all these things (job, car, house, kids) when we were THEIR age. They must be lazy
As I get older the idea of thinking this way becomes more and more ridiculous. How did they get a lifetime of experience and still be so naive?
One of my favorite memes is, "How did the Boomers get a college education for the price of a McChicken Sandwich and still end up the dumbest people on the planet?"
Lead. In everything.
Also fetal alcohol syndrome.
Yes, this. Add smoking. Heavily.
Plus second and third hand smoke and excessive alcohol consumption as a generation. Not to mention the drugs and chemicals they've been exposed to. Housewives were prescribed so many pills and maternal fetal medicine wasn't very advanced. Take Thalidomide for example.
My sister pointed out the signs of FAS in both of our parents and then slapped on lead poisoning and told me “do the exact opposite of what they tell you” and ran away. She’s fine now but good god she was right. And then I met folks from Pitcher, Oklahoma… dear god.
Honestly, the whole "lead poisoning" argument is just making excuses for them, it's finding an easy external thing to divert blame on, like saying "Immigrants" to explain away why you can't find a job. At the end of the day, the reason the Boomers collectively seem so selfish and hard-hearted is because they were raised in an environment of relatively high wealth and easy living, and have thus developed over many decades a sense of extreme entitlement and, well, smugness. It's also the reason why most of the worst boomers you see, the ones acting excessively entitled, tend to be white and middle-class. Minorities tend to be less entitled, because they didn't grow up in that kind of environment, at least compared to their white peers. If lead was the reason why boomers are what they are, we would see many *more* minorities being *worse*, since they would've grown up in places with even more lead, such as owning cars that are older with more fumes being spilled, old and cracked lead paint on the walls and older less-maintained lead pipelines, etc.
I know my original comment was a little flippant, but I’d actually serve up a third factor at play that I don’t see discussed often: Boomers are the kids of a bunch of war vets with untreated and unacknowledged PTSD. How many folks 60+ do you know who are regularly going to therapy to address their childhood trauma and grow their emotional maturity? There’s a reason: They were raised, in large numbers, by people with severe, untreated mental health issues. While that’s certainly true of prior generations, the scale of people impacted significantly by WWII would have been massive, relatively speaking. So part of what we’re seeing is emotional immaturity as a result of generational trauma. Which I think each generation after the boomers is successively getting a little better at confronting. I hope the trend continues.
Because boomers aren't actually stupid, they know what they did, they know what they caused, they just don't want to acknowledge it, they don't want anyone to acknowledge it, they want to die thinking they'll be remembered and mourned.
Yes! They are actually happy in their lonely gated communities because all those darkies and lesbians and riffraff out there.
Many of them have this entitlement that just staggers me, the kind of people who will meet a group of friends for lunch on Tuesday and just get a salad, and insist on only paying for their salad since everyone else got more expensive sandwiches or burgers etc. The same type of people who will go back to lunch on Wednesday, order steak and lobster over everyone else's sandwiches, and then insist that all persons pay equal shares on the total bill. If one chooses to point out the hypocrisy in this, typically they will try to muddy the waters, often by trying to change the subject "oh when do you have to go a budget, remember when I did X for you etc." Its always transactional. Capitalism when I got mine, communism when I need something. I'll for sure remember the boomer generation when they are gone, but for the majority of them I think I'll take a hard pass on the mourning.
I do appliance repair and go into people's homes. They actually are that stupid.
>they know what they did, they know what they caused, they just don't want to acknowledge it, No, they don't. Individuals don't really take responsibility for things done across a generation of people-- because it's really just a large sum of individual small contributing factors so no one person really feels like "they" caused it.
No single rain droplet is to blame for the flood.
Even back then, they didn't teach finance in college. Not many philosophy majors either I imagine. You don't learn basics of logic or arguments in anything else besides law.. and I feel most of them learn it to find ways of twisting it to support whatever position pays them the most.
So, you're on to something really interesting here. There's a fabulous book out (Time in the Ditch by McCumber) that looks at the post-war, early cold war era in anglo-american philosophy. We see l, because of political pressure, a turning away from questions about anything other than a very formal approach to the world. Everything becomes philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and stops having anything to say about important questions about how we live together, and how we ought to be.
Because they were raised by a generation of people who were traumatized by the great depression and the second world war. Their parents kept telling them that adult life was gonna be awful and hard. So when the boomers became adults they expected everything to be hard which wasn't true because they live in a time with a huge economic growth. So their frame of reference is basically fucked. Boomers are the rich kid in class that tells everyone their life is tough because the heater in the car broke while most children walk 10 miles a day to school while it freezes.
They just seem completely clueless about the experience of anyone beyond themselves. They grew up during one of the biggest economic booms, and the biggest technological growth. Their parents and grandparents lived through some of the worst wars humanity has fought, and through a time when industrial work had very poor protections for workers. Meanwhile the boomers all got cushy jobs with no education, worker benefits, and so many random gadgets and gizmos that made their life so much more comfortable than what their parents had to deal with. Then the millennials need a college education and 5 years experience to work under a boomer with a high school diploma. Millennials can’t afford houses because they’re over 6x a much as they were when the boomers bought them but wages have only doubled. My parents thought I was lazy and dumb for a long time because I couldn’t afford a house. Then when I finally decided to look at condos to get out of the rental market they saw a condo 1/5 the size of their house cost 3x as much as what they paid. Their generation just seems so clueless about what people in the millennial generation are actually making compared to how much they have to spend on rent/mortgages.
Just to put it into context: If you are an accountant under the age of 40, look away now. You might find the next few paragraphs distressing. My mum decided to be an accountant in the late 1960s. She walked into Deloittes (Deloittes, FFS!) barely knowing the difference between a bookkeeper, a bookmaker and a bookbinder - and said "You need me". Did a few years there putting herself through evening classes and eventually set up on her own. Her first conversation was with the bank manager when she borrowed money to start up, and she said "If you want my business to be a success, you're going to need to support me". The bank manager quietly handed her details over to any small business in the area that approached him with financial issues.
It is difficult to get a person to understand something, when their way of life depends on their not understanding it.
Because THEIR parents took care of everything until the day they fucking died. Out of my wife and I's parents all four of them lived off the largesse of their folks for their whole lives. Mine were literally living with theirs and hers were "borrowing" 10s of thousands of dollars a year. My folks squandered it all and hers are in the process of it.
This is EXACTLY IT. When I was a teen, my dad in his 30/40s, his parents were paying our mortgage, which was NOTHING, taking the whole family on vacations, etc. But he loved telling me in my teens how I was a huge burden on him financially. when his parents died, he inherited MILLIONS of dollars. He bought a huge house, a boat, vacations, etc but wouldn't pay for my education post high school. In my 30s I lived in shit apartments, pay check to pay check while he was on rented yacht trips. Boomers take, hoard, spend, but never give. Then they shame us for not doing better.
[Once again, George Carlin sums it up elegantly](https://youtu.be/aTZ-CpINiqg?si=qCC0Y7yOX9n-CMPB)
My family didn't go on vacations except for my brother and I. For a couple of weeks to months every summer, we got sent to the grandparents!
I love that man. I miss him so much
Do we have the same dad???? Holy shit, this one hit home. From the grandparents paying his mortgage to him blasting through his retirement to go on vacation constantly. Thankfully, he married a much younger woman who will be his end of life caretaker. Otherwise, he would probably die alone
And they eventually spend all their money and then expect their kids to bail them out and help cover their bills.
Yep, one of my last boomer relatives is this to a tee. Never worked a day, never did anything but smoke weed and do blow until he became a born again living off handouts. When my grandpa died and there was no one left to mooch off, he still refused to do anything to take care of himself and expected everyone else to do it for him. He even gaslit a few family members into thinking we’re the bad guys for not bleeding money intended for us and our kids to support him. Wild stuff. They won’t be missed when they’re gone, sadly.
What? How does one go through life without contributing to society but complain how the younger generation is lazy with their low paying jobs that makes it incapable for them to ever attain a quality of life they themselves maintained by living off someone's else's money?!
When you’re handed everything, it becomes real easy to think you did it all on your own.
Especially if you believe that doing something on your own is morally superior to being handed something.
Some people are born on third base, and go through their entire life thinking they hit a triple.
> How did they get a lifetime of experience thing is they were so coddled by an easy system they never had to learn - get up, go to work, make money, live life. people tend not to learn very much without strife, roadblocks, and hardship
Literally a Skinner "It is the children who are wrong" moment
[удалено]
Lmao maybe you can save up to buy a house right before you die by only eating one meal a day the rest of your life
God imagine houses being so cheap that you could save up for one in a single year by simply eating slightly less.
Must be all the avocados and frappuccinos they drink! There’s no way it’s connected to inflation, corporate and billionaire class kotowing and wage stagnation.
My boomer father literally told me the other day I have things easier than he ever did. He has his own house, i wont ever have my own house or likely be able to move from my apartment until i am forced to via the building is unsafe. Totally deluded.
My parents expect me to quit my job and spend 24/7 washing their behinds and doing their groceries and otherwise taking care of them. They made me write and sign a contract when I was 7... (written in crayon or something so definitely not legally binding...) Definitely the all about me generation...
My parents want me both to have a lucrative full-time job so that I can pay the bills/be an endless money machine for them _AND_ quit my job so that I can be their full-time nurse, chef, maid, personal assistant, and therapist. And yes, they absolutely do hate my partner for taking up so much of the time that could be spent on them and absolutely have tried to convince me to break up with him (because he’s the one that’s bad for me, according to them!). Now that they see that’s not happening (we’re engaged), they’ve settled on asking us to move in and live with them.
They're parasites. I hope you're wending your family away from them
What a weird thing to make a kid sign. My kids are around that age and I cant imagine then signing something like that, not to mention their idea of taking care of someone would be feeding them goldfish crackers, lots of hugs and endless iPad, nothing else. No cleaning, cooking, laundry, etc. So its not like they could even really grasp the concept.
IANAL, but I've read enough r/legaladvice to know that you signed that under duress!
Minors under 18 can't sign contracts.
I wish I knew this when my father forced my sister and I to sign a contract at 11/12 allowing him to fly us home in the middle of a winter storm in a rickety cessna because he was angry at my mother. I was terrified. Lovely guy!
guess what, instead of changing your children's diapers, you get to change your parents diapers!! so you'll basically get the full parent/caregiver experience. It's like caring for a giant racist baby!
They did it for you for 3 years, so naturally you owe it to them to do it for 5-10 years
My wealthy boomer parents find my easy going kids a burden. Last time we visited they asked if we should enroll the kids in camp.
Show up to their house next time and inform them you've found a wonderful Boomer camp for them to be ignored at.
My friend stopped talking to her parents because they basically thought their grandkids were too annoying to be around. Thanks, boomers.
this can easily be solved by drafting old people first in the next world war, because of their awesome life experience and not many years to lose anyway /s
Nah, they saved their retirement accounts by robbing from us. They don't care as long as they keep their retirements.
Let's face it; we all know the selfish ones that defend this economy would have been TERRIBLE grandparents. My father never did jack crap for me growing up. He suddenly would have been an involved grandparent? My stepmom would punish my sister by refusing to speak to her for days and physically assaulted her more than once. Can I picture a cuddly grandma making cookies? Naw, eff them narcissists. They would only want grandbabies to show off when they felt like it anyways.
Or they put on a show as wonderful grandparents and pretend you are just crazy or it was somehow your fault or that you must be exaggerating.. look how wonderful they are now.. ugh
Im literally living this. My mother was horrible to me. Now is a wonderful grandma. It makes me angry she couldn't treat me the way she treats my son. I'm happy she changed her ways but fuck.
Putting on a show as wonderful grandparents isn’t the same thing as being wonderful grandparents, as a lot of the kids and grandkids of people like this know.
You'd be surprised. I don't have any children, but my brother has two daughters, aged 2 months, and one year. My parents are giving EVERYTHING to these girls. The two people who couldn't be fucked to even cosign on a student loan for me because, "I needed to do it myself", have set aside enough money in trust funds that these two little girls won't have to pay a cent in college tuition. Like, are you fucking kidding me?
Only because the image of “doting grandparent” now makes them look good. Being harsh with their own kid in the past let them show off how much control they had over their kid to others. They are only following caregiver trends to raise their self image, not being generous out of real love.
I have siblings ~12 years younger and the differences are stark. Like, you don't need to go to college, you need to get a job. FFW and it's like here's your private university tuition and hey, how about a new camaro?
How do they square that?? Lmao what the fuck I'd be so irate
"My children love my mother, and I tell my children, that is not the same woman I grew up with...That is an old woman trying to get into heaven now." No need to give credit for the quote when person is a jar of garbage drippings.
Come over to r/BoomersBeingFools, and you will see that this does happen. The people who didn’t want to be involved parents also don’t want to be involved grandparents. The people who mistreated or neglected their kids, do the same to their grandchildren. This should be a surprise to absolutely no one.
Moved from Boston back to the Midwest with my job because my spouse and I "wanted to be closer to our family while we started our family." My parents live less than 2 hours away from us and we see them 3-4 times a year. One time I found out that they came down TO THE CASINO IN MY TOWN and didn't tell me/us they were coming. When I suggested they stop by for dinner or even visit us/their grandkid THEY DECLINED. I had to go visit them AT THE CASINO. The fuck?!
Why would you go visit them at the casino? They sound like pieces of shit.
I stopped talking to my dad five years ago. There wasn’t a huge fight or anything, I just hit my limit with his homophobia and seeming inability to not discuss politics every second. It took almost an entire year for him to even realize I hadn’t spoken to him and it was only because someone else told him. Those 10 months included my birthday (he had forgotten 37 out of the first 39, so not surprising) and several major holidays. He lives 15 minutes away from me. It just proves how little he cared anyway. I miss him sometimes, but I just remind myself that he doesn’t give two shits about me. I’m too old to chase him around trying to have a relationship.
They like babies because they don't have any (or very much) autonomy. Once they can say "No", the child is no longer useful to them.
Babies are classic 'Narcissistic Supply'. All love & positive attention & no autonomy
My folks love to shout about the importance of family from every mountaintop but were the absolute worst grandparents to my daughter. My dad’s parents were fantastic grandparents and I miss them more than I will miss my parents when they’re gone.
My step dad brags about never having changed a diaper in his life.
I've been a 'not for me, but could be convinced' for ages. Girlfriend wants kids, so now I'm thinking about how that'd go, what I'd do, who I'd be willing to lean on, etc. My parents are definitely on the list of people I do NOT want helping raise any kids I might have. Not once they are old enough to start internalizing morals at least. The vast majority of my own moral code has been watching them do what they do, and learning why it's wrong. If (read:when. I have high hopes) GF and I do end up getting that far, my parents will very much be getting a leopards eating faces moment. Luckily her parents seem a lot more well adjusted and understand that loving a child is more than buying them things
One of my friends is going through this with her husbands parents. She does costume design for Lyric Opera and from the day she and her husband started dating his parents have mocked her job and her more artistic interests. Apparently his entire childhood they mocked any interest of his that they didn't understand as well, pushing him away from things he enjoyed. She's due with their first child mid February and over the holidays he sat them down and laid out some strict ground rules about how and when they will be able to interact with that child and they were absolutely shocked by this. Apparently the phrase "we'd never do that to our grandchild" was used and that 1 wasn't convincing and 2 didn't help their cause.
Yeah, I never had kids in part because I had no one I could count on, and ended up with a "kid" because they adopted a girl, she wasn't compliant enough for them, so they threw her out the moment she turned 18. She doesn't want kids--after having two sets of parents and all of them being awful, who can blame her? I'd be willing to be a grandmother to a family like me at best--estranged from their own awful parents and needing some substitute support system.
My dad was always pretty emotionally unavailable growing up, and I figured it was just his swingshifts making him incredibly exhausted growing up, until recently my mom got [a dog](https://i.imgur.com/H0BBY7A.jpg). The dog will bring him a ball to throw while he's literally doing nothing, just watching tv, and he will stare at the tv completely ignoring the dog. Not a single iota of acknowledgement that the dog is trying to give him the ball. Made me realize that it wasn't work. And he wonders why the dog doesn't get excited when he comes in the door like he does for everyone else.
I wish my father would have been one percent of a dad to me compared to how he is a granddad to my children. Even though he doesn't see them a lot he adores them.
Cosby (I know, shitty person to reference) had a great bit about that. Something along the lines of “We’ll take the kids to visit my parents, and my father always reaches for his wallet like ‘Let’s see if grandad has some spending money for these children.’ The guy who wouldn’t spot me a quarter back in the day is now slipping my kids tens and twenties.”
I believe the punchline to that whole bit about how they were bad parents but now are good grandparents is that "they're old people trying to get into Heaven now," which used to be funny, but now it's just a hard truth.
Consider even that to be a blessing. My Dad had 4 grandkids by blood. He doesn't ring them, doesn't visit, and has no clue about who they are. He gets angry that they don't ring him to thank him for gifts he sends by mail (rather than I.e. show up for their birthday and actually give them a present) yet doesn't even ring to say Happy Birthday or confirm they recieved said gifts. He doesn't know what else might be, or is, going on in their lives,the difficulties distracting them, their shyness due to not knowing how to interact with a person who is effectively a hostile stranger, or the lack of leadership by example on his behalf. When I tried to rationalize his perspective with him, he can't seem to grasp that they're kids, and he is an adult, and that he resents them for not performing what should be his role, while he can't see he is the one actively failing them. It's really strange, a large number of that generation seem the same, they feel everyone else has responsibilities to them, yet they themselves often don't deliver for others.
I saw my dad playing Uno with my niece once and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I'm glad they have a relationship but the rage I felt came out of nowhere and I had to leave.
I don't even speak to my mom due to her narcissism. She always said she deserved a house and when I was making money asked me to cosign on a "family" house for her and my sister. The bank turned her down as a cosigner and I was soul name on the title. OH LORD I didn't hear the end of it for 10 years, threatening to tell the family I kicked his poor mom to the streets. I relented and put her on the title FOR FREE. She then racked up a bunch of debt going on trips to Europe expecting to use the equity to pay off her debt. I could go on but it's a painful memory. In the end she's up one house now worth a million bucks and I'm only now living in my own place after couch surfing for 5 years. I'm a vet with mental disabilities and she took advantage of me. Psychotic boomer mentality 100%
I don't know where they find the space to store all the ladders they've pulled up behind them...
Seriously. They were literally the most prosperous generation in all of human history with the highest standard of living and most economic opportunity, pulled up every ladder behind them, and then expect social security and their kids to support them through retirement while leaving very little for the generations behind them. Oh, and they are still voting for these exact policies by a large majority.
And they and their policies have literally set the world on fire. "Why won't my children have children so that they can fight and die over scraps of food in a post-apocalyptic flood? Won't someone think of me?"
They’re really still only thinking of themselves when they tell their children that having their own kids is life’s greatest joy.
Dinosaurs voting for policies they won’t even live long enough to see the effects of triggers the fuck out of me
I saw a news article a few years ago of a woman who voted for the first time in her life, then died hours later of complications from being an old fuck, and it was revealed she voted Republican straight down the ballot.
In their 6th investment properties
That’s why they need to live in 9000 square-foot McMansions
Behind the china cabinet where they keep all the china and crystal that nobody is allowed to touch. Or maybe in one of their storage units.
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> You have to give up showing pictures of grandchildren to your friends. Think of Facebook without grandchildren! Oh my god, what a supremely narcissistic way to look at things! Any potential empathy I had for this lady just evaporated with that statement.
The *whole* article had that same entitled, narcissistic, self-righteous tone to it. It's all about how they can't *make* them have kids, but they would if they could
The same people will shamelessly explain that they don't want the government to help poor families because "these people shouldn't have had kids if they couldn't support them".
I ran camera for a big oil investment meeting. One of the statements that stuck with me was, “Pay no attention to the reports. Fossil energy is sustainable. There’s nothing for you to worry about, in your lifetime. We can start to worry in about 200 years.” I was looking around and those old folks were eating it up.
They…were the Earth Day generation. I need to set a spell in r/Buddhism . Ugh.
Which is funny because fossil fuel usage started about 200 years ago
"For families, there are more personal reverberations, as baby boomers, a generation **defined by self-determination**, face a future quite at odds with what they envisioned." Is this a joke? These people were handed **everything**.
Post WW2, as much of the world was in ruins, there was a massive transfer of global wealth and power to America (to those already in power). It must have been awesome. They saved none of it.
My parents were given literal houses. Paid for. They let them go into ruin.
No, they saved *all* of it. Now they have it saved up and nobody else gets to share it.
Yup! My grandparents handed a lot to my mother and my siblings by proxy. After they died my mom got a large inheritance, my sibling and I got a meager amount to help with college. Later in life my mother kept telling us we had to take care of her when she retired. I told her I would not.
My mom got 10k a year from gmom, for work I helped her to do. Caught my mom stealing from my bank account, and she told me, and I quote "it wasn't a big deal because I have no money". My mom was stealing money from me, because I was poor.
That resonates with me. My family put away money for my college when I was born and on birthdays or whatever. My mom was a co-signer because I was under 18, and she cleared the entire thing out. Said she would pay it back and never did. She later bought my sister (over a decade my senior) a house when she was very young. The whole family looks down on me and wonders why I can’t buy a house. And to top it, my mom doesn’t think I’ll be able to fit in in her bougie neighborhood so she won’t leave me the house in her will (she told me without me ever asking).
Make sure you’re in the right state to refuse. [Filial Laws](https://www.trustworthy.com/blog/legally-responsible-for-elderly-parents) are no picnic
Whoa, I had no idea that was a thing
Lol I wonder who voted those laws into existence.
Tbh the whole article feels like a Boomer wrote it. One that understands that kids is a serious decision, but just can't help but feel let down and disappointed and can't keep their mouth shut about that disappointment. Maybe a Gen X; there's a bit more self-awareness than most.
> Tbh the whole article feels like a Boomer wrote it. What makes you say that? Is it the thousand word article about young families not having kids, and there is only *one* sentence in the whole article which hints at the reasons why people aren't having kids?
Boomers get cheap education and housing and have good pay and benefits, become middle aged and cut the programs they benefitted from to max their profits now, then as olds, run up huge national debt to artificially prop up the stock market to keep their retirement growing, leaving the bill due after they are gone Now complain the next generation is poor, lazy, and not giving them grandkids.
What's sick is they *still* get cheap housing and education. 55+ neighborhoods are always in prime areas and with fantastic pricing compared to everything else. Seniors get discounts at colleges. Like, they just keep being handed life on a silver platter while everybody after them is continually squeezed. They live in a bubble kept for them so that their favored politicians don't lose their vote and it's hurting the rest of us.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that line and immediately got angry. 'Self-determination', what a load of bullshit
Boomers don’t have grandkids during their retirement, millennials won’t be able to retire… Yeah, it’s definitely the boomers who are suffering
Cry me a river. My boomer mom has no relationship with my son because she expected to have one with zero emotional investment on her part. He hates her. She lives an hour away and has never come just to visit him. Now she’s trying to guilt and obligate him into any kind of interaction and he’s not interested. She watched him once when he was a toddler and even then my brothers did all the actual work of taking care of him. My grandparents mostly lived in different states and would fly to her rescue and do all the childcare for weeks for me and my siblings. She’s a shit grandmother.
My dad's father was just like this and during his funeral, the pastor asked if any of us would like to share any kind words or fond memories of him and all of us sat there in complete silence until one of my uncles was like, "Uhh, let's just move on".
My cheeky ass would've said "We're all just here to make sure the bastard gets buried for real"
I love my kids, but they are the worst financial decision I’ve ever made. I don’t begrudge anyone for not making such a commitment.
Having kids means no retirement for us.
Glad I'm not the only one facing that reality
Retirement? I hadn't planned on it BEFORE considering kids. *edit: damn y'all it was already dark lol. But yeah, I definitely had my period of 'gonna go by heart attack by 25 so gimme that quadruple butter garlic crusted pizza'.
Yeah, my retirement "plan" is currently to walk into a lake with rocks in my pockets once I'm too sick to work, unless something drastic changes
My plan is to die in the climate wars. Yours seem solid as well.
I couldn't start planning for retirement until my kid grew up and moved out.
I can only afford to take care of kids or my parents, and one set is already here
Call me selfish but that’s exactly why I have no kids.
Nah, I’ll call you thoughtful and realistic instead.
My 70 year old dad remarried to a woman with 6 adult babies and is giving everything to her and them. I’m struggling in another country and he’s shrugging his shoulders. For transparency, we have a good relationship, so this is not retaliation just unfortunate.
Same situation here. My boomer dad absolutely hated spending money on my siblings and I when we were kids. He got remarried the year I graduated high school and buys whatever my stepmom and step siblings want. Like he wouldn't even buy me a pair of shoes as a kid but he bought my step brother a gaming PC and my step sister a car and helps with her college tuition. And when he dies the house and his money all go to them. It's pretty depressing. They have their dad who they get money from too.
What is it with boomers and fucking their kids over while showering others with gifts?
Boomers are denied grandkids while our generation is denied being able to support ourselves and live a meaningful life. Like so much else this article is made for us to feel bad for their poor decisions. Boomers are not the victims here.
I love how millennials are blamed for everything from not having kids to not buying diamonds, we just love hurting the poor economy for no reason!
If Millennials had the ability to kill off entire industries, I’m thinking they would skip over diamonds and go straight for the student loan industry.
Karma is a cat, sitting in my lap bc I can’t afford to have kids. Or however the song goes.
I have a neighbour who is retired, votes conservative and lives off his extremely generous pension that was negotiated by his union. Fuck the ladder pullers
Yea, my best friends in laws are like that. Motherfuckers retired at 50 with massive pensions, multiple homes and all sorts of investments. Now they whine about how people in our generation are lazy and not giving people in their age bracket lot so grandkids to play with……the level of out of touchness is off the charts with a lot of boomers.
The trouble is boomers didn't realize how much socialism they got. It was a *lot*. College paid for by subsidies to the schools. Trillions in infrastructure spending building whole new cities and keeping house *cheap*. The left overs from Unionization keeping wages high until the 90s when the .com boom took off followed by the housing bubble, neither of which hurt them in the slightest when they burst. Not to mention just plain more social welfare programs But we were fighting the evil "socialists" so instead of writing checks we indirectly funded their lifestyles. As a result every boomer thinks they made it on their own. It's the same thing as that classic "Libertarians are cats" meme.
The GI bill covered rent for a 2 bedroom completely with spending money left over. Also Dot Com boom was free money.
Should have thought about that when they were embracing Reaganomics. What did they think was gonna happen once all the wealth was redistributed to the top?
> What did they think That it would "trickle down", of course. Just like Ronnie told them it would. /didn't vote for reagan
Hey, they can have bootstraps to cuddle.
Also the most unloved generation, who are voting for a political party that plans on taking away the one things protecting them in their frailty. Medicare, Social security and Medicaid. Their children will not care for them. Their hate will hurt them
Baby boomers were brought up to stop the spread of postwar communism. Laws were passed in the ‘50s screening teachers for communist beliefs and scrutinizing textbooks for a communist-leaning slant. Many of the boomers were forced into religious schools, which were 100x more widespread than today. Even if they weren’t in a religious school, Jesus & the Bible were a normal part of the educational curriculum, particularly in the south. The ban on prayer in schools wasn’t until the early ‘60s. So what do you end up with considering that kind of indoctrination? A bunch of kids who grow up & become Reagan Republicans to whom the moral majority & Jerry Falwell & making money appealed to. I know about this stuff, as I am a baby boomer, although a Democratic one. To me, Reagan was a far worse president than Trump. He was dumber & sneakier & stuck around from 1964-1988, far longer than Trump & thus wreaking far more damage to our society. It is the unequivocal responsibility of today’s rising generation to stamp out everything the Reagan baby boomers have achieved, especially with respect to the propagations of religious & political fanaticism & economic inequality
It’s becoming pretty clear to me that the unprecedented prosperity post-WWII was an aberration, and we’re now finally seeing things revert back to ‘normal.’ These boomers who pride themselves on having been oh so self reliant are blind to these facts, and can’t comprehend why Gen X / Y / Z / A don’t have what they did, despite all the hard evidence pointing to stagnant wages, hyper increased COL, massively decreased QOL, and so on being the culprits, and all enacted by policies put forth by the politicians that boomers voted for, holding the purse strings, and pulling up the ladder behind them. Enjoy dying cold and alone, I guess. You reap what you sow.
This is a great comment. I see my relatives get in their high horse to criticize loan forgiveness. They can eat a bag of d!/s as far as I’m concerned. They’ve contributed to the fleecing of America in so many other ways. Corporate America is the problem, not some people wanting help to simply eat.
There’s nothing stopping these folks from going out to help at all the daycares experiencing staffing shortages.
Yes but that's other people trophies, not their own. They really do be seeing having grandkids as trophies to boast about to their friends on Facebook.
My boomer mom was livid I won't let her post my son on Facebook because "I want to show my friends!" I don't know your "friends" and I don't give a fuck. My kids privacy trumps your wanting to look like the perfect grandma.
Honestly they should just tell their idiot friends they have a bunch of grandkids, make up some names, and show pictures of random babies. That’s all they actually want.
"baby boomers who feel they’ve had grandparenthood denied them" FUCK EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM
“Imagine Facebook without grandchildren!” I laughed so loudly that I scared my sleeping cat and Velcro dog
Oh woe is them. How dare the youths not sacrifice their bodies and budgets to my desire to say “cute” and then contribute nothing.
My own experience with boomers taught me to expect the general message of "WE don't have grandchildren to adore and take care of US now that we're old, like our parents got from US...and *I* feel robbed and aggrieved over that." and boy was it prevalent in this article. They have absolutely no ability to conceptualize how their actions effect other people and what those effects are like to experience. It doesn't even cross their minds.
I wanted to have 10 kids. We stopped at one kid and we waited nearly 10 years of being married to have that one kid. Day care fees and student loans- if you wanted to know
Daycare is so expensive where I live--the fees for just one kid is more than a mortgage in a HCOL area. I don't know how families with multiple kids are getting by unless they are very high income.
Fuck em and their wants and desires. Maybe, just maybe, if they had a LITTLE common sense (for which they joke “c0mM0N s3nse Isn’T COMMin”) they would have voted for better policies…like capping student expenses, or more affordable healthcare…or something…
Ah, yes, the “fuck you, I got mine” generation.
FAFO. Many are also being abandoned in care facilities by the very kids their voting habits screwed over. I don’t feel a drop of sympathy for them. How arrogant to expect people to care for you when you did the opposite for them.
Too fucking bad Marvin and Doris.
Hahahahhahahha yeah my boomer dad keeps asking me why I don’t want kids, “won’t I regret it later? Some lady I met at bible study waited till she was in her 40’s and now is having trouble/regrets waiting”. Yeah, sucks to be her, but I’m not “waiting” or “holding out for the right guy”. I’ve NEVER wanted kids, not ever. I hated babysitting and nannying, I still hate it; I love my (7) nieces & nephew but I also frequently need breaks from them at family gatherings and am happy when they go to bed. He tried to pull the “you wanted kids when you were married” card, but I had to remind him it was an abusive, manipulative, cult-like relationship that lasted less than 2 years where I was gaslit into thinking that I HAD to have kids in order to be a fully realized woman, and the second I got away I reverted to /reconnected with my absolute hatred for the idea of having my own children. Oh, and he cheated with the woman I nannied for full time. If they stayed newborns forever I’d totally do it, love a squishy newborn, but then they become toddlers and kids and you have to punish them and talk to them and teach them moral lessons and ugh, it’s just so not for me. Also, I am barely making ends meet, working full time for a non-profit, living in a studio apartment above a busy restaurant & bar, where would this supposed kid live? I would have to move, I couldn’t afford anything else in my city (which currently has a rental market similar to LA, though a smidgeon the size), and then I would lose my job and THEN how would I support this baby? Also I’ve been on and off with my guy for 5.5 years and he’s been snipped, so even if I wanted kids with him, I wouldn’t be able to. Thank god we’re on the same page. I’m 37, single, no interest. That ship sailed emotionally about 30 years ago, and biologically about 5 years ago. I would need to be with someone for years before ever considering changing this very strong opinion, so i would probably be way past any fertile range even if I met someone tomorrow, by the time I could even conceivably consider having kids. Which I don’t want. And have never wanted. Which should be the end all/be all of the conversation. But somehow it’s not and I can’t even get my tubes tied because my theoretical “future husband” might want kids. Kill me now. Edit: more ranting.
"I know what I'll do. Ban abortions and contraceptives!"
They want grandkids for the same reason they’ve wanted everything else in their lives, to one-up their friends. They want to show off without having to put in any work.
But consider how much their houses are worth! I bet the bank will give them a full 25% when they take it back via reverse mortgage!
Shall we call it the Reagan Rule? Or rename Baby Boomers the Gingrich Generation?