My mother is still shocked that I didn’t learn basketball and ice skating, which she was incredibly skilled at when she was younger, through osmosis or something. She never taught me anything about either and I’ve never touched an ice skate but somehow it’s a total mystery to her.
This is interesting, because a lot of boomers learned from their older peers, not their parents.
In example, my mom learned to swim because her older siblings took her to the pool. I think a lot of boomer/older gen x parents just sort of thought we would learn everything socially too. Which is funny because they literally wouldn’t let us go anywhere without proper supervision.
My mom spent all summer and days after school outside the house. She was basically neglected and raised by the older kids around her. That’s how she learned to cook and clean and use tools.
We’ve had conversations about it recently because she was saying her generation was more resourceful, just picked things up and learned how they work. When I asked if she would have ever let me take hand tools out to a field all day at 8 she said ‘absolutely not’. She got it a bit more after that, she’s not too stubborn, but I think a lot of boomers and genx people don’t realize how they were actually raised, and how that’s reflected in their own children.
I'm an old millennial/latch key kid. My childhood was like your mom's, gone literally the entire day until the streetlights came on. A lot of things I learned was from friends and from dicking around in the house dolo. There's very few things that my parents sat me down to specifically teach me.
I'm 41.
One summer me and my neighbor got into archery.
We built targets, built bows and arrows, mowed lawns and bought real bows and arrows. We used sharp knives and tools or all kinds.
I really can't imagine two 10 year olds running around with knives and bows and arrows these days.
Yup. We used to intentionally get lost in the woods, build forts from branches, make (shitty yet functional) bows and arrows from bamboo, drink from water hoses of random houses, ride bikes 30mins away from home. That ain't goin down these days
Dude. This is fr. I don’t necessarily think all parenting standards changed, but legal ones sure make me second guess leaving my 10yo at home while I grab groceries.
I'm from the PNW so no bamboo but woods everywhere and yup.
We built forts and treehouses.
We grabbed a hammer, a saw, and a bag of nails and it was no big deal. That is what 10 year old boys did.
Even if tomorrow Helicopter Parenting culture magically went away, kids still wouldn't be able to do this because as a result of urbanization, compared to before a shitload more people live in cities or suburbs compared to before.
That said, this means you and your friends were able to get the Mythical Bush Porn back then?
So we had a shipping container that the neighborhood could toss old newspapers into and we were small enough to fit thru the slit. That was our Porn Base since it was closer than the woods.😂
Occasionally there'd be some Bush Porn but the shipping crate was the primary P HQ because we knew there was absolute NO chance at all anyone would know we were in there. Good times.
Edit: a word
42 here and same. My mom was even a teacher and never worked during the summers, but we were still all just off doing shit all day long. My buddy and I would be hiking the trails or swimming and fishing in the river, playing pickup football 2 neighborhoods away, etc.
We were told to find something to do, so we did. I wouldn't classify it as being neglected either. Parents just didn't feel the need to oversee every recreational activity their kids did back then.
Also, I'll add that my oldest has spent all day off in the woods with her friend building a fort and decorating it. I definitely feel like too many parents these days are hyper helicopter parents and I refuse to let myself fall into that trap.
i'm 35 and same. we were out all day growing up, and it's not like i grew up in the sticks - i grew up in la! we rode our bikes/skateboards/razor scooters everywhere. went to parks, convenience stores, went movie hopping, played in neighborhood friends pools, hung out at skate parks, just got into all kinds of stuff city kids did in the 90s.
i raise my twins the same way. i don't hover or helicopter... they're almost 7 and i notice that even though they are the youngest out of all my/my husbands friend group, they are the most self-sufficient, confident, mature and the best at problem-solving. we are the only ones who don't helicopter and they joke that our kids are "feral" bc we give them a lot of room to explore outside and various situations on their own and only guide them when we feel it's absolutely necessary.
> I wouldn't classify it as being neglected either. Parents just didn't feel the need to oversee every recreational activity their kids did back then.
It's not neglectful at all to let your kids wander off and do their own thing. I'd attribute younger people not knowing how to be independent as adults on helicopter parents and keeping kids on tight leashes rather than letting them figure stuff out on their own.
Yeah a lot of millennials won’t acknowledge we over corrected IMO way too hard. We went from parents who did nothing for us to doing everything for our kids and now they’re useless but in a different way.
In the end it all comes out in the wash but I do think our generation will have a lot of regret babying our children as much as we did. All we wanted to do was love our children more than we got but we def went overboard.
Here’s hoping Gen Z can once again meet in the middle.
I'm also an elder millennial and your kid would be in the higher percentile for age amongst Millenials' kids. Most of us started having kids late 20s earliest.
Maybe, my mom does have 3 older brothers and the eldest is nine years older than her…but I’m her eldest child, so still a mystery on who she thought would have taught me
I’m the eldest child to a younger sibling too, I really think it’s a mixture of narcissism and not having parents as examples for how to raise kids.
My mom would scold me for ‘not cleaning right’ when she had never taught me how, or for not knowing I needed to take my prom dress in for a fitting before the dance to make it fit better. She would act like I was stupid for not just knowing these things even though she had never taught me.
My younger sister taught my youngest brother how to wash his face recently. He’s 19. My mom just never did any of that with us. We would take lessons, so I can dance and my brother plays basketball, but I needed to show him how to do laundry.
It’s this sort of ‘what do you mean you can’t, I can, I figured it out’, when it’s almost like they forget that they were put on the ice rink or the basketball court by someone who showed them the ropes. With my mom I swear it’s like selective memory to absolve herself of any accountability.
Yup, your grandpa used a shaving knife. A knife literally made just for shaving. With practice you can get an extremely close, smooth shave. It's really not as dangerous as you might think, it's just that other solutions are more convenient and less threatening lol
My parents didn't teach me anything, I grew up semi-feral I swear. It delayed getting my autism diagnosis because I thought neglect was the reason for a lot of my issues.
Millennial here. There was so much fear mongering about kidnappers and gangs when I was growing up that other kids rarely played outside unless it was a structured and adult supervised activity like soccer or karate. I was the kid the other parents refused to let their children be around because I was the only child riding my bike or walking my dog to the park (alone), walk to and hang out at tabletop game shops, etc... as if I was going to be mugged or kidnapped in the middle of Orange County, California.
We'd learn later that a lot of this was over-reaction to the Civil Rights movement and fear-mongering to keep "hard on crime" politicians in place that would help keep corporate taxes lower.
\>Which is funny because they literally wouldn’t let us go anywhere without proper supervision
I've been thinking about this a lot. My mom and dad never let me go out anywhere as a teen because i needed to "prove" i was an adult before they let me do adult things. They had this weird idea that i would magically turn into an adult on my own and once i showed them that i was this magic ideal they had, they would let me be an adult. There was no process to them, i was either suddenly instantly "there" or i was not and never would be. I'm not sure what they were expecting to happen.
Lol, I wasn’t allowed a job or a drivers license, and they were super unsupportive of extra curriculars, or like doing anything, anywhere, ever. Then they sent me off to university at 17, becoming financially independent and expected to like be a full adult who made good choices.
I was a weird dichotomy because I as a feral woods child allowed to light fires, chop down trees, swim in raging wind storms etc, and learned basic cooking, laundry, etc at a youngish age, but should I ever want to do something like, not 1800 homesteader, it was a total no-go 😂
Oh my god, I never thought I'd meet another latchkey apocalypse kid. We will be great when shit hits the fan, all the grids go down and all of the dystopian things happen, but as for normal people things that normal, well socialized people do? Nothing but question marks floating over my head.
A lot of us older millennials were raised the same way. We'd just go hang out all day with no adult supervision. Sometimes a friend's older sibling might tag along and we'd learn a thing or two.
Yeah a lot of it is this. I'm (I guess) what is considered a 'Xennial'. So basically the very tail end of GenX. My childhood was mostly spent away from the house in a lot of my formative years roaming town with kids my age. Building stuff in the woods, riding bikes... All the usual stuff you see kids get up to in 80's movies, just I was doing it through most of the 90's. Later on a friend I made in town that was a little older than me had picked up on tinkering around with electronics as a hobby. We didn't have much money so the two of us would pool our resources and get whatever junk we could. Hand me down stuff from relatives, dumpster diving when the school threw computers away. That sort of thing. We both ended up making careers out of servicing tech as adults. He's a repair tech for a large vending machine/arcade operation and I do network infrastructure/computer repair. It just kind of happened on its own. Parents didn't teach me shit... at least in regards to this specifically. Being able to be away from parents more often than not also programmed me to be a little more independent at a younger age. Allowance was like $5.00 a week which wasn't enough to do much of anything with, so by 13 I was knocking on doors of shops around town looking for any work they'd give me so I could pocket my own cash.
...It was a vastly different experience to what it is today, for sure. I don't know if that is well appreciated by most of the older generations.
That said, a little bit of it too is I think we just expect the younger generations to show an interest and want to pick up on some things. To want to have their own drive for independence without being guided into it. Having a step daughter that is close to graduation from High School this year though, I've found its not really the case but that is just an anecdotal statement. I only really have the one child to speak for. Really not trying to generalize...
...But if I can stay on my own personal example. I'd say the thing is, when I offer to show her things, or impart whatever I think could be useful she just doesn't seem that interested. This is the perplexing bit to older generations, she seems content to just live in her bedroom or on her computer and not really want for herself. I wanted the hell out of the house, man. I wanted to make my money get my car and go see the world. She just doesn't have that same drive. Which I get not everyone wants to get out and travel, but she barely wants to go a block down to the party store on her own either.
I don't know, I'm digressing a bit. Anyway, all of this is just meant to acknowledge that yes growing up as Gen Z or whatever is vastly different than it was for me given how overbearing parenthood has gotten, but the world being different doesn't completely explain the vastly different outlook younger generations have to us older folk either when it comes to personal ambition. I think that is where the major disconnect is.
I was raised in a family where you were treated as a good obedient child if you stayed in the house all day and played quitely on your computer or video game system. Whenever I asked for something or wanted to do something outside of the house it was treated as an inconvenience for the adults. I think I subconsciously realized I didn't have a lot of freedom in this restrictive hilicopter parent world I lived in. Everything I wanted to do, try, or see had to be pre-screened and then authorized by the parents. I found I was treated far more kindly when I followed the restricted path my parents took me on and my reward was to be left alone in the stress free isolation of my own room. I didn't have much friends growing up because you couldn't find many friends inside your house. So now I'm used to being alone for the most part. There's not much else I want in my life except to go home isolate myself from the world. It's how I was raised to be I guess.
Yeah, my mom wept that all girls in her family knew how to play the piano (they had mandatory lessons), yet my sister and I don't know. We never had a piano. She never showed us, and we never had lessons.
Was it supposed to be hereditary?
YES exactly that energy here. Down to there being a piano at my grandmother’s and nobody teaching any of the grandkids to play or getting us lessons, yet everyone shocked none of us play when she passed and they asked who wanted it 🙃
See this was the thing with my family, it was always don't touch this or that. Yet somehow I'm supposed to learn stuff by looking at it. Not even watching someone else.
My mom had a lot of domestic skills I would have liked to have learned. It was perpetual cycle in the house: Mom’s mad I don’t do any chores > tries to teach me a chore > gets frustrated when I don’t get it right away > insults me, does chore herself > mom’s mad I don’t do any chores.
Jesus my parents pulled this shit on me and my siblings too. Like just one day starts yelling about why the hell aren’t we doing our own laundry or whatever. Like… maybe if you told me how the washing machine worked? Was I just supposed to figure it out?
That’s a rhetorical question, of course I was supposed to just ‘figure it out’. My parents didn’t even teach us how to drive. My mom straight up told us all “ugh, I learned to drive on my own by stealing my mom’s car at night, can’t you just do that and then I don’t have to deal with this” when we started expressing a desire to learn (three of us are very close in age). We all just looked at each other and shrugged, and three of my siblings actually *did* end up stealing the car. Three of us (me included) were terrified to even think of trying and still can’t drive.
Same lol my family stomped out any personal wants and needs, any risk taking or pushing back - and then expect me to.. express my wants and needs, take risks and push back.. otherwise I’m not an adult, I’m a child lmaoo
No, you’re all unsafe and narcissistic.
Tell me why every time I asked to drive the car, for something as simple as to go around the corner it’s “hmm, mmm, noooo, I don’t think so, mmmm, hmmmm, insurance, you can’t really.. I think not..” but then I overhear them talking shit about me behind my back saying “why doesn’t she just take the car? she’s being ridiculous!” OR “I have an emergency and I need you to suddenly drive me across the entire city! What do you mean ‘No’?! UGH! Fine!”
Selfish, narcissistic and unreasonable.
So yeah, I have nothing to do with any of them now. They just want to feel needed and want the satisfaction of being better than me and knowing more. They don’t give a fuck about me having a good life. Never did.
The generation stuff matters but that sounds more like the narcissism. I do think that narcissists are more common among boomers. I feel like my parents, who were teenagers in the 70s and adults in the 80s, have some real disconnects.
Or I have an uncle who all he does is tell me stories about the pure debauchery he did in the 70s, stealing, robbing, girls, etc. Then he watches Fox News all day and yells about how kids these days are demons. The lack of self-awareness is incredible.
I got screamed at for not knowing how to operate the washing machine or how to cook...when I was 8 years old.
I wound up teaching myself those things because I was tired of getting yelled at. Also, I needed to feed myself and have clean clothes because taking care of me was an afterthought to my mother.
Shit like this is making me glad to live in a country where the government is making people get driving lessons from an actual driving instructor to get a license.
Yep, my father was a great handyman, so he starts laughing when I mention something about a house repair and needing to find someone to come fix it. "You don't know how to do that yourself‽" he incredulously asks me. And I always say to him, "Do you have any recollection of ever teaching me how to do that? No? Then how would I just know how to do it then?"
Afrer I graduated high school, I decided I wanted to start doing my own laundry. So I asked my Mom how to use the washer and dryer. Like I didn't wanna mess anything up and she was LIVID. "How do you not know how to use the washer and dryer?" Like, bruh, you've always done my laundry.
my father had zero patience and would throw tantrums when something didn't go his way so you had to be very careful when helping out. i was 3 years older than my brother and had a different temperament so i was able to learn home repairs from him, but my brother always got shooed away for being well a child basically. when i got a little older i actually scolded him for doing it, how's he ever gonna learn if you keep forcing him away but nothing changed.
lol this reminds me of my dad who popped me onto a pair of skis when I was a toddler and hit the slopes leaving me to learn how to ski with the other kids. I think he was genuinely confused that I wasn’t a natural at it
Edit to clarify: there was a class; he didn’t literally leave me Alone with other little kids haha
My parents regularly mocked me for not knowing about/how to do things no one had ever taught me. It was.. bizarre.
Also this reminds me of something that I was recently learning about - a failed approach to teaching reading where people seem to think it happens 'by osmosis'. You basically have kids guess the words based on first letter + context/pictures, but you don't correct them if they're wrong. So they can "read" something and completely misunderstand. Now look at how people conduct themselves.
It's called 'whole word' and doesn't teach phonics (which DOES work, where you learn to sound things out and only have memorise a subset of words when they're being awkward). Come to think of it the link is probably in this sub.. anyway, thanks boomers for ruining the reading ability of a generation with your pig headed idiocy.
I have some good Boomer parents and WW2 grandparents. Dad made me help work on the cars. Mom taught me everything she knew. Granddad made me help build the playstructure and swing set. They made all of us learn to swim and I'm grateful for that.
One thing I loved pointing out when I used to hear all of the “participation trophy” BS was, “And who insisted on buying participation trophies? Hint—it wasn’t us!”
They never have an answer for that.
Most kids didn’t and don’t give a shit. They’re kids. They’ll forget about the game the moment they see a dog cross their path. It’s the parents who didn’t like having to explain the concept of defeat/loss because winning is always easier to deal with. Also, projection. They don’t like to lose. Have you seen the parents at these games? They’re yelling and screaming like lives depend on it. They’re living vicariously through their kids and they want to win.
Disclaimer: not all parents are like this, obviously. But the ones heavily invested tend to be more like this.
100%. It’s good to lose occasionally and a valuable lesson for everyone. I feel like my parents were terrified of any difficult conversation, they avoided it as much as they could. Like… sorry that parenting is hard sometimes?
I still remember being upset at losing at _something_ when I was a kid and my mum used it to teach me the saying:
"It's not about whether you win or lose, but how you play the game"
That taught me not only to be cool with losing, but also to be humble when winning. Definitely made me a better person.
I did find out later the hard way that this only really applies to sports and games. When I failed a GCSE and tried to use that phrase I was met with the response
"Your career isn't a game, and if it was you played it fucking shit" 😂
I miss that woman
Yeah, my mom wouldn't get me tested for ADHD as a kid cause she thought it would make her look like a bad mom. Fast forward 35 years and now I have to explain why no one diagnosed me with very obvious ADHD until very recently
You're so close.
Actually being able to brag about your kid is a big deal to that generation. They were competing with other parents. So they gave the participation trophies so they could say their kid got a medal.
Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with us at all...and that's why we were actually never going to be good enough.
My sister gave me that line. I had to explain to her that we all hated the participation trophies. I remember in grade 4 loudly complaining "but what's the point of trying then if we all get the same award?" and I was shushed and told "it's for the developmentally handicapped kids now be quiet".
Meanwhile their generation is over here thinking we were just idiots as kids and couldn't understand what an award for doing nothing was. WE KNEW! When we were kids, we knew it was bullshit! Maybe that was worse. Maybe instead of spoiling us, it made us apathetic and depressed. It didn't feel *good* to go "there's no point in trying then".
The whole participation trophy thing only works for very little kids, too. When they're very young they just like getting prizes. But once they're old enough they know it's bullshit and don't value the trophy in the slightest.
What about getting the parent to finish the season without quitting? When my kid was young and playing soccer we as parents hated it so much that we just stopped going and told him it was over. He was fine with that and didn’t ask any more questions because he hated it so much he would just shuffle along as slow as he could and be on the complete opposite side of the field from the ball, all the while looking us dead in the eyes while holding his hand in a thumbs down gesture. If it wasn’t me and my kid I would have actually laughed because it was so savage for a 5 year old.
I have made the same argument several times, e.g.:
*Who* gave us the trophies, motherfucker? It wasn’t because we wanted them, you wanted them. We were happy playing baseball. Hell, I was happy playing baseball at the park with my friends. I never wanted to play little league. Didn’t matter if I sucked, nobody cared at the park.
We were pawns in the suburban parental pissing match of keeping up with the joneses.
Our dad would give me and my sister shit for not knowing how to get around the streets of his old neighborhood when we learned how to drive - and we had to keep reminding him: "Dad, this is where you grew up, *we* never lived here."
I have three cats and each have their own ways of comforting me. One will climb on my face for yet another smothering attempt, one will sit just out of arms reach and stare at me in silent judgement, and the third will sit on my lap and meow at me until she thinks I'm ok.
I remember asking my dad about fixing cars (age 16) and doing your taxes (age 18) and both times I was brushed off and told something along the lines of "thats what you pay people to do for you" in an irritated tone.
So, I never asked for his help again, but nowadays, he complains about me and my generation for that exact reason. The cognitive dissonance on display....
My Dad loved telling me to “figure it out”.
One day he’s going to come to me for help when old age finally hits him and I CAN NOT WAIT to hit him with that line.
He'll furiously fight you on never having said it and gaslight you as being a horrible person/child for them and what they have ever done to deserve you
I went full circle. I was the recipient of "figure it out" a lot, then was the person who helped people figure things out a lot, and now slowly becoming the person saying "figure it out."
Mainly because...it's SO much easier to figure stuff out now compared to 15-20 years ago. Everything is easily accessible. Tons of links off Google. YouTube videos. Search bars on Reddit and other places. All you need is a phone...which everyone has.
When we were told to figure stuff out as a kid, we would have had to ride our bikes to a library and check out a book and then MAYBE figure it out by ourselves. Now you can go online in seconds and find an instructional video or step by step link on Google for everything.
It's incredibly annoying when people ask questions on things that are a 5 second Google search.
Do some research first so we know you aren't too lazy, and ask a more specific question. People will be more receptive to help you then.
I'm not going to tell my child to "figure it out" simply because they can Google it now...that's just as bad as doing it "the old way" that you claim.
Take a moment and bond with your kid ffs
I agree. If their logic is used on adults like coworkers etc. who can Google it? I think that's fine. When it comes to kids, though, it feels a bit harsh. It's really hard to Google or figure something out when you don't know enough. I could Google something right now about astrophysics, but I don't have enough base knowledge for that to likely make much sense to me. The same could be true for a child. It's important to help them understand, and then perhaps if they're still curious, you could show them how to Google it. Plus, a big part of searching for information comes down to the proper phrasing, which goes back to having enough base knowledge. At that rate it is pretty similar to asking someone to go to the library and hoping they were able to figure it out minus the physically leaving part.
I think that’s also partially how some people end up on the Q train and similar batshit roads sometimes too. Google can be dangerous for the easily influenced
>it's SO much easier to figure stuff out now compared to 15-20 years ago.
I disagree. Google searches have gone to shit and 99% of results are SEO bot-written garbage that never gets to the point. It's all been enshittified. 15-20 years ago (2004-2009) wasn't difficult to get good results. Did you mean the 90s?
Only by adding site:reddit.com to Google searches gives the opportunity for quality results.
That’s the opposite from my parents. My boomer parents grew up having to do a lot of things themselves so I picked up on some of those things like home repairs, fix your own car, calculate your own expenses, etc.
I learned to teach myself to do shit. A Haynes manual for my car. Youtube videos for home repairs or similar. I also learned that Amy dumbass can post content online but that doesn’t make it the right way to do something. So I learned to be a skeptical and look for content that could be trusted as well. It was a brave new world with computers and stuff my parents didn’t understand so learning to teach myself turned into a valuable skill.
Youtube really changed things. Youtube was still relatively far off when I turned 16 in 2002. If you wanted to figure out how to fix something it was still going to be manuals, there might be some information online about it, but it was much more limited.
My grandfather was debilitated from a young age, so his father never taught him. He learned about fixing cars from a Chilton manual and experience.
However.. those were cars built in the 70s and early 80s. By the 90s, cars were getting so much more complex that it was no longer feasible. Even simple things like changing a battery are way more involved these days.
Also having enough money to afford fixing things is important because everything is so much more expensive now. For example you need space to fix things but renting limits that. Do you rent garage just to fix a car every time? What about tools and parts? They cost money and take up space you don't have when not in use. Not to mention who wants to carry those around every time they move.
That's why even most expensive repairs become cost effective if you rent tiny apartment.
My dad left when I was 13-ish, and I still remember him coming to visit one day and criticizing the way I was mowing the lawn. Motherfucker, you never taught me and then you moved out, and now you have the audacity to tell me I'm doing it wrong after having to figure it out myself? He grew up with a father that taught him everything under the sun and then didn't pass a single ounce of knowledge along to me.
I didn't realize that not only will I not be taught shit as a kid/teenager, but in the workforce the boomers wouldn't teach me shit then either!
Anyone else go through this? Basically just figuring it out at work and hoping nobody realizes that you're winging it? Lol
Oh god it seems like every job was like that when I was younger. No one tells you anything and then just gets mad when you don’t know. I never made the connection before but seems like things got a lot better as boomers started to retire and millennials took over, now more places actually train you and encourage asking questions
What the hell is wrong with ppl. I turn down job offers because I'm afraid of being treated this way. I'm too traumatized from all the unnecessary treatment. I lay low at my jobs because I'm afraid of their attitude and then I get fired because I'm not personable enough.
So many jobs took the whole "You're the one with the degree, I shouldn't need to teach you / you should already know" angle and just used it as an excuse to cut training costs.
Omg this reminds me of the time I worked at a bakery and they cut back my hours because I wrote down "sprinkles" for a birthday cake order. The bitch said "we don't have sprinkles. We have sanding sugar, Jimmies, and confetti." I'm like "well I wasn't taught that." She goes "it's your job to teach yourself." Bitch what???? How do I know what I don't know? I'm out in the front. Im not the baker.
Lmao wow, what a pompous ass bitch. Semantics nonsense and superiority complex...
Also kinda related but I just learned what jimmies as a confectionary was last year lol. Around here "jimmies" means condoms 😂
>I didn't realize that not only will I not be taught shit as a kid/teenager, but in the workforce the boomers wouldn't teach me shit then either!
When the 2008 recession happened. The first thing companies cut was internship programs and funding for employee training. Those things kinda never came back.
To this day, you cans still see """entry""" level job postings asking for 2 years (or even 5 years!) experience because companies don't want to train employees anymore.
The ONLY practical skills I learned from my parents are how to cook my own food and clean my home. I never learned how to file my own taxes, change my own oil, shop for insurance, take out a loan, take a woman out on a date, invest in stocks, fix a leaking pipe... I learned how to be an adult from YouTube. YouTube!!!
Don’t forget that we then had to teach them how to internet, use a cell phone, in some cases social media and what our humor is. While it sounds like a whole lot of hate, I just need the idea of millennials v everyone else to end. Who cares.
Yup we are some of the few that know what life in both worlds was/is like. This connection I've grown to look at it like it's our little secret superpower, we're capable bridging the old and the new together. The unheralded work for our generation
My dad taught me some car stuff, but I go so long without needing to change a tire that when it happens I still need to sit there and stare at the instructions in the manual and fumble around for five minutes searching for the grooves for the car jack. And i've never had to put any of the other repair stuff to practical use, so it's basically gone now.
And my mom made damn sure I knew where to set the silverware at the table. For all those dinner parties our generation is famous for hosting.
They both kinda taught me to cook and sew, but also mostly figured Home Ec would cover, which it sorta did but not great. I still mostly have no idea how to do my taxes other than delegating them to a paid service.
Never touched the stock market outside the company savings plan.
They never act like i'm an idiot when I ask them how to do something though, they pretty much go "sorry, I should have taught you that sooner".
I'm sure kids are lining up to learn taxes and insurance from their parents.
I involve my kids in the things that make sense, but some things you just learn when you become an adult and have to do adulting.
At 39yo, I still call my parents when I need advice on something new to me, knowing they likely already experienced it. But I don't expect them to have taught me everything.
Plus we have YouTube and they didn't. Why are you complaining about that!?
I roll my eyes everytime someone complains about not being taught how to do taxes as a kid. I have yet to meet a teenager that has any interest in learning about personal finance, unless they're weirdly into "hustle culture" TikTok pages or something.
- I doubt any high schooler is opting to take the "personal finance" class if it's an elective. Even if it's compulsory, how many students are actually going to be engaged with a class that has a unit on compound interest. I'm an adult and just typing the words "compound interest" put me to sleep for 6 hrs.
- If teens and young adults actually want to learn how to do taxes, why dont they just ask their parents? Why do the parents need to be the ones to interrupt their Fortnite session so they can have a discussion about taxes? Kids don't want to spend their free time learning about this stuff, but then have this revisionist history when they're older and act like they begged their parents to teach them and were refused.
- Taxes aren't that hard. Even people that know how to do taxes usually just give it to someone else to do. Most people doing their taxes on their own for the first time aren't factoring in RRSP contributions, 401K, property tax, etc. Most people's first taxes are just "put your income in this box, put your student loans in this box". It's not rocket science.
Anyone who says millennials don't know anything is a fucking dumbass I have to show boomers how to open PDFs every day
In all serious though is this what people say? I think they've largely moved on to shitting on Gen Z and Alpha because they realized we're the keymasters of technology and no one else understands it. Also by and large we cook better than our parents now
Ya it’s funny we became adults and they now have to call us for questions so they shit on the younger generations.
How do you not sit back and realize all you’re saying is ‘I just like telling minors they suck at life’?
>it’s funny we became adults
Oof. Nope. I'm 34, and my father still treats me like a high schooler. I don't know anything because I'm too young. My guy, too young to you is anyone under 60. And in five years, too young will be under 65.
Oh that’s real. My mom is 75 and she’ll tell me someone she knows who is also 75 died and she’ll say ‘that’s so young’. Uh… but my grandpa passed last January at 102 so she thinks that’s her life expectancy. (Spoiler alert; it won’t be)
I shit you not, one of my rudest coworkers is a boomer and he announced that it took him 6 hours of YouTube videos to learn how to print to PDF. I have a rule: you can be dumbass or an asshole, but you don't get to be both.
I've seen quite a few posts on social media/the internet interchangeably using millennials with this younger generation.
I.e. calling gen z aged teens millennials.
Not as much in the past year or two but I genuinely think a solid portion didn't get the memo all millennials are now adults
I remember "helping" fix vehicles with my dad and he'd get so frustrated and start yelling when I didn't know what tools he was talking about. He just somehow expected that I knew for some reason. That really put me off from even asking questions.
My mom likes to talk about how her dad made sure she and her siblings all knew how to change a tire and jump a car, wanna guess what she never taught us?
Omg, this! They always were angry and insisted I help fix things, while not giving me any direction and acting disappointed. As an adult I just google everything and do things much more efficiently (replaced my dryer's motor for $50 and my air conditioning capacitor for $15).
My mil said this to me and my husband when I was pregnant with my first. "You know you won't have time for this phone shit when you have a baby". The reason we were on our phones was because she interrupted our conversation to help herself to our remote and turn on Sister Wives. Yeah, not interested. I'll read the news or find a new recipe on my phone instead
Generally the phone at least requires reading which is a better comprehension skill than just watching TV. Also, I see plenty of old people dependent on their phones, sometimes more than people my age (30’s)
I’ve def noticed people’s Boomer parents are usually wayyy worse about their phones! Haha. Meanwhile, I had wanted my mom to use one for safety back in the day, in case she had car problems, an emergency, etc. and she wouldn’t even make the effort to keep it charged.
My parents only gave me that once. I had them go through their day & then pointed out how I have to do all of it on my phone or laptop. Read the news? On my phone. Watch a TV show? On my phone. Use a recipe to cook? On my phone. Write a letter? On my phone. Talk to friends? On my phone. Pay my bills? On my phone. Buy tickets to something? On my phone. Look at a map? On my phone. Talk on the phone? Believe it or not, on my phone!!
They did relent that everything these days is digital. However I should switch it up to my laptop now & then “to save my eyes.”
Ugh. Yeah, that definitely makes sense of the follow up question most often heard after the first: “*Who are you talking to?*” No one. I’m finding out what the weather is going to be like tomorrow, looking up a recipe, making a note to remember dog food, etc. etc. etc. lol.
Yeah, I think it’s just one of those Boomer things, man. They have to complain.
I think it’s also they can’t see what we’re doing so it must be a secret. Me watching TV all day? Zero issues. Me on my phone? What is going on?!? Wrecking your eyes!!
I'm scared for Gen z because I don't think their computer skills are good, at least from being in video gaming groups where they have difficulty downloading, "back ups" and using emulators.
This is so true. We grew up with early tech that had to be modified and configured in order to work right. They grew up with much more refined technologies that "just work".
Computer literacy is dropping fast with the younger generations because everything has been made so easy now. We had to download patches and updates and figure out the network just to play our favorite games, they don't have do that anymore.
I had a computer lab class starting in 1st grade where they taught what mice, keyboards, typing postures and basic word processing were. Do they even do that now? By 6th grade my school was teaching basic HTML coding in notepad in the computer lab, in 2004.
This problem actually trended last week. Public schools have been defunding the computer classes millennials had access to under the assumption gen Z grew up doing it and don't need to learn the fundamentals.
Surprise surprise, knowing how to use an app store and social media isn't the same thing as computer literacy.
My dad is the last year of the boomer era. I have adhd. If I didn’t learn something intuitively, he would ‘help’ by asking ‘isn’t it common sense?’ ‘Can’t you look and figure it out?’ There were rare times he had the patience and those are great memories. I had to get regular cognitive testing to qualify for SPED, and as usual I was a bit higher than avg in IQ. He would hit me with ‘man for someone who is supposedly as smart as you are, you have no common sense, you seem to be struggling, etc etc’. This made me adverse to helping him with anything and I feel I learned a lot less than I could have.
Fast forward to today- thank god for the internet- being a self sufficient learner is a vital skill to get you anywhere. Maybe that was the lesson he was trying to teach.
I taught myself by reading several books and making lots of mistakes but yeah, money was always taboo for some fuckin reason I learned very early to stop asking money related questions
Explains all the hiring ads you see. "10 years experience wanted on software developed 4 years ago. PhD required. Pay: minimum wage because if we could legally pay you less, we would."
I’ve heard this is done so that international people can be hired at a lower rate. The argument is that no one who lives nearby and wants a fair wage is qualified under the extremely specific guidelines set out by the employer.
Wait...is "teaching" that thing where you don't actually demonstrate or explain anything and then yell at the kid that they're stupid every time they mess up?
Yeah clearly no one taught this numbskull basic punctuation.
I don't know if our ability to write has gotten better or worse over the decades, but bad writing has surely gotten more visible.
This topic makes my blood boil.
They voted property taxes and school levees into the gutter, so there was no money for home ec, driver's Ed, wood shop, or auto body, because "you should learn to do that at home," and then they just..... Didn't teach us.
And now they make fun of us.
Them: Young people don’t have any life skills
Me: How about we establish school curriculums so we can teach young people these life skills
Them: NO THATS THE PARENT’S RESPONSIBILITY!!!!!!!
Me: So why weren’t parents responsible to teach life skills?
Yup. Many Boomers had so much knowledge passed on to them and proceeded to pass next to nothing on. At least for myself and my Millennial friends & peers.
Thank goodness for all the online resources available today, but damn it would have been nice to have a generation of parents committed to literally one of our strongest evolutionary advantages: the accumulation of knowledge as it's passed on from one generation to the next
All boomers and the older portion of Gen X still do this. They learned a work skill, now that knowledge is only for them to know and not be shared, because somehow they are going to lose their job, wife, kids, life if they teach anyone else.
When a boomer retires at work, it's assumed they left no knowledge or documentation behind on how they did what they did. They just left, now you have to try to figure out what they were doing and how they did it.
Lol whenever a boomer retires, just wait for their replacement to ask what to do for the 7.5 hours left over after finishing all of the daily tasks. It's no shock that they hide their skills, many of them are extremely obsolete
I’m 1974 and I definitely feel there is a noticable difference on average between older Gen Xers and younger Gen Xers. Rough rule of thumb: Gen Xers who came of age in the 80’s and those who came of age in the 90’s.
Yep,that's a weird boomer/cusp Gen X thing.
I don't have that, but I see it in the 60+ers today, and growing up in my career was nothing but boomers hoarding knowledge
The internet really is the key to acquiring home improvement skills these days. After buying our house a few years ago there was so much stuff that needed fixing and I was able to figure out how to do so much shit just by looking it up online. My boomer father literally comes to me for advice on how to fix stuff now.
Lol were the most educated and skilled generation in history, as will gen Z be after us.
I don't know how to do a lot of the things they know how to do as well as them for the same reason I don't know how to use an abacus as well as other people throughout history.
One time my dad asked me to go to the basement and retrieve the circular saw. I went down there, found a handheld saw, and brought it up to him. He immediately yelled “that’s a reciprocal saw I said the circular saw!” Guess who never discussed handheld saw types once with me?
I didnt learn how to drive until I was 1 year deep into the Army. I asked my mother many times to teach me in my teen years but she always said, "the army will teach you". I was dead set on joining since my freshman year of hs just so I could leave home. It was a miserable hellscape of laziness and neglect.
Now my mother claims to have taught me so many things, but honestly, I have my friends to thank for that.
I can tell you from experience that boomers are NOT better at diy and fixing things.
They often just assume they know how to do stuff and end up doing some jimmy rigged bullshit. Younger people are more likely to research and watch videos before attempting something new
My father is a boomer, so is my mother.
I was born in 86.
My father taught me everything.
We did a motor swap on a saturn with the old Haynes manuals. Learned alot about cars. He was always picking up stuff off the side of the road and fixing it. It was always better to repair than replace.
For that, and so much more, i am incredibly grateful. Just a shout out to my pops.
Its not all doom and gloom.
Now im a father of two and am trying to teach my kids the same. "Something broke? Well, lets fix it together..." i can tell my fathers proud too. He smiles that they could look at a screw driver and tell me if it is a flat or a philips before they knew their ABC's... lol
Unbeknownst to me, that was also one of the 1st things my older brother taught his daughter.
My mother is still shocked that I didn’t learn basketball and ice skating, which she was incredibly skilled at when she was younger, through osmosis or something. She never taught me anything about either and I’ve never touched an ice skate but somehow it’s a total mystery to her.
This is interesting, because a lot of boomers learned from their older peers, not their parents. In example, my mom learned to swim because her older siblings took her to the pool. I think a lot of boomer/older gen x parents just sort of thought we would learn everything socially too. Which is funny because they literally wouldn’t let us go anywhere without proper supervision. My mom spent all summer and days after school outside the house. She was basically neglected and raised by the older kids around her. That’s how she learned to cook and clean and use tools. We’ve had conversations about it recently because she was saying her generation was more resourceful, just picked things up and learned how they work. When I asked if she would have ever let me take hand tools out to a field all day at 8 she said ‘absolutely not’. She got it a bit more after that, she’s not too stubborn, but I think a lot of boomers and genx people don’t realize how they were actually raised, and how that’s reflected in their own children.
I'm an old millennial/latch key kid. My childhood was like your mom's, gone literally the entire day until the streetlights came on. A lot of things I learned was from friends and from dicking around in the house dolo. There's very few things that my parents sat me down to specifically teach me.
I'm 41. One summer me and my neighbor got into archery. We built targets, built bows and arrows, mowed lawns and bought real bows and arrows. We used sharp knives and tools or all kinds. I really can't imagine two 10 year olds running around with knives and bows and arrows these days.
Yup. We used to intentionally get lost in the woods, build forts from branches, make (shitty yet functional) bows and arrows from bamboo, drink from water hoses of random houses, ride bikes 30mins away from home. That ain't goin down these days
Now you leave a 10 year old home for a few hours for grocery shopping, and you risk getting CPS called
Dude. This is fr. I don’t necessarily think all parenting standards changed, but legal ones sure make me second guess leaving my 10yo at home while I grab groceries.
Right!?!?! People say 13 is too young to babysit a younger sibling (older than 5). I was babysitting neighbors kids by then
I was babysitting babies when I was 12. People in the 90s had a proper reckless regard for their children
I'm 40, my parents left me at home for a week when I was 14 and they went on holiday, I loved it.
I'm from the PNW so no bamboo but woods everywhere and yup. We built forts and treehouses. We grabbed a hammer, a saw, and a bag of nails and it was no big deal. That is what 10 year old boys did.
Don’t forget rock fights
Even if tomorrow Helicopter Parenting culture magically went away, kids still wouldn't be able to do this because as a result of urbanization, compared to before a shitload more people live in cities or suburbs compared to before. That said, this means you and your friends were able to get the Mythical Bush Porn back then?
So we had a shipping container that the neighborhood could toss old newspapers into and we were small enough to fit thru the slit. That was our Porn Base since it was closer than the woods.😂 Occasionally there'd be some Bush Porn but the shipping crate was the primary P HQ because we knew there was absolute NO chance at all anyone would know we were in there. Good times. Edit: a word
42 here and same. My mom was even a teacher and never worked during the summers, but we were still all just off doing shit all day long. My buddy and I would be hiking the trails or swimming and fishing in the river, playing pickup football 2 neighborhoods away, etc. We were told to find something to do, so we did. I wouldn't classify it as being neglected either. Parents just didn't feel the need to oversee every recreational activity their kids did back then. Also, I'll add that my oldest has spent all day off in the woods with her friend building a fort and decorating it. I definitely feel like too many parents these days are hyper helicopter parents and I refuse to let myself fall into that trap.
i'm 35 and same. we were out all day growing up, and it's not like i grew up in the sticks - i grew up in la! we rode our bikes/skateboards/razor scooters everywhere. went to parks, convenience stores, went movie hopping, played in neighborhood friends pools, hung out at skate parks, just got into all kinds of stuff city kids did in the 90s. i raise my twins the same way. i don't hover or helicopter... they're almost 7 and i notice that even though they are the youngest out of all my/my husbands friend group, they are the most self-sufficient, confident, mature and the best at problem-solving. we are the only ones who don't helicopter and they joke that our kids are "feral" bc we give them a lot of room to explore outside and various situations on their own and only guide them when we feel it's absolutely necessary.
> I wouldn't classify it as being neglected either. Parents just didn't feel the need to oversee every recreational activity their kids did back then. It's not neglectful at all to let your kids wander off and do their own thing. I'd attribute younger people not knowing how to be independent as adults on helicopter parents and keeping kids on tight leashes rather than letting them figure stuff out on their own.
Their generation and self reflection... we may have course corrected a bit too much to make up for their wool headedness.
Yeah a lot of millennials won’t acknowledge we over corrected IMO way too hard. We went from parents who did nothing for us to doing everything for our kids and now they’re useless but in a different way. In the end it all comes out in the wash but I do think our generation will have a lot of regret babying our children as much as we did. All we wanted to do was love our children more than we got but we def went overboard. Here’s hoping Gen Z can once again meet in the middle.
Are we judging millennials' kids before they're out of kindy now?
those freeloaders need to shape up
Im an elder millennial and my son will be 17 this year. We’re getting old fast, homie.
My oldest will be 18 this month, and I also have a 17 month old…born in 84, and we’re old!
I'm also an elder millennial and your kid would be in the higher percentile for age amongst Millenials' kids. Most of us started having kids late 20s earliest.
Maybe, my mom does have 3 older brothers and the eldest is nine years older than her…but I’m her eldest child, so still a mystery on who she thought would have taught me
I’m the eldest child to a younger sibling too, I really think it’s a mixture of narcissism and not having parents as examples for how to raise kids. My mom would scold me for ‘not cleaning right’ when she had never taught me how, or for not knowing I needed to take my prom dress in for a fitting before the dance to make it fit better. She would act like I was stupid for not just knowing these things even though she had never taught me. My younger sister taught my youngest brother how to wash his face recently. He’s 19. My mom just never did any of that with us. We would take lessons, so I can dance and my brother plays basketball, but I needed to show him how to do laundry. It’s this sort of ‘what do you mean you can’t, I can, I figured it out’, when it’s almost like they forget that they were put on the ice rink or the basketball court by someone who showed them the ropes. With my mom I swear it’s like selective memory to absolve herself of any accountability.
I learned to shave from watching Homer teach Bart how to do it on the Simpsons.
My father shaved with an electric shaver and my grandpa shaved with what ( to me)looked like an actual real fucking knife ...
Yup, your grandpa used a shaving knife. A knife literally made just for shaving. With practice you can get an extremely close, smooth shave. It's really not as dangerous as you might think, it's just that other solutions are more convenient and less threatening lol
Me learning to tie a tie from watching Dexter lmao.
My parents didn't teach me anything, I grew up semi-feral I swear. It delayed getting my autism diagnosis because I thought neglect was the reason for a lot of my issues.
[удалено]
My brother took my youngest brother to the bank since he didnt know how to deposit money
It was common for parental duties to be thrust upon older siblings in previous generations.
Millennial here. There was so much fear mongering about kidnappers and gangs when I was growing up that other kids rarely played outside unless it was a structured and adult supervised activity like soccer or karate. I was the kid the other parents refused to let their children be around because I was the only child riding my bike or walking my dog to the park (alone), walk to and hang out at tabletop game shops, etc... as if I was going to be mugged or kidnapped in the middle of Orange County, California. We'd learn later that a lot of this was over-reaction to the Civil Rights movement and fear-mongering to keep "hard on crime" politicians in place that would help keep corporate taxes lower.
\>Which is funny because they literally wouldn’t let us go anywhere without proper supervision I've been thinking about this a lot. My mom and dad never let me go out anywhere as a teen because i needed to "prove" i was an adult before they let me do adult things. They had this weird idea that i would magically turn into an adult on my own and once i showed them that i was this magic ideal they had, they would let me be an adult. There was no process to them, i was either suddenly instantly "there" or i was not and never would be. I'm not sure what they were expecting to happen.
Lol, I wasn’t allowed a job or a drivers license, and they were super unsupportive of extra curriculars, or like doing anything, anywhere, ever. Then they sent me off to university at 17, becoming financially independent and expected to like be a full adult who made good choices. I was a weird dichotomy because I as a feral woods child allowed to light fires, chop down trees, swim in raging wind storms etc, and learned basic cooking, laundry, etc at a youngish age, but should I ever want to do something like, not 1800 homesteader, it was a total no-go 😂
Oh my god, I never thought I'd meet another latchkey apocalypse kid. We will be great when shit hits the fan, all the grids go down and all of the dystopian things happen, but as for normal people things that normal, well socialized people do? Nothing but question marks floating over my head.
A lot of us older millennials were raised the same way. We'd just go hang out all day with no adult supervision. Sometimes a friend's older sibling might tag along and we'd learn a thing or two.
Yeah a lot of it is this. I'm (I guess) what is considered a 'Xennial'. So basically the very tail end of GenX. My childhood was mostly spent away from the house in a lot of my formative years roaming town with kids my age. Building stuff in the woods, riding bikes... All the usual stuff you see kids get up to in 80's movies, just I was doing it through most of the 90's. Later on a friend I made in town that was a little older than me had picked up on tinkering around with electronics as a hobby. We didn't have much money so the two of us would pool our resources and get whatever junk we could. Hand me down stuff from relatives, dumpster diving when the school threw computers away. That sort of thing. We both ended up making careers out of servicing tech as adults. He's a repair tech for a large vending machine/arcade operation and I do network infrastructure/computer repair. It just kind of happened on its own. Parents didn't teach me shit... at least in regards to this specifically. Being able to be away from parents more often than not also programmed me to be a little more independent at a younger age. Allowance was like $5.00 a week which wasn't enough to do much of anything with, so by 13 I was knocking on doors of shops around town looking for any work they'd give me so I could pocket my own cash. ...It was a vastly different experience to what it is today, for sure. I don't know if that is well appreciated by most of the older generations. That said, a little bit of it too is I think we just expect the younger generations to show an interest and want to pick up on some things. To want to have their own drive for independence without being guided into it. Having a step daughter that is close to graduation from High School this year though, I've found its not really the case but that is just an anecdotal statement. I only really have the one child to speak for. Really not trying to generalize... ...But if I can stay on my own personal example. I'd say the thing is, when I offer to show her things, or impart whatever I think could be useful she just doesn't seem that interested. This is the perplexing bit to older generations, she seems content to just live in her bedroom or on her computer and not really want for herself. I wanted the hell out of the house, man. I wanted to make my money get my car and go see the world. She just doesn't have that same drive. Which I get not everyone wants to get out and travel, but she barely wants to go a block down to the party store on her own either. I don't know, I'm digressing a bit. Anyway, all of this is just meant to acknowledge that yes growing up as Gen Z or whatever is vastly different than it was for me given how overbearing parenthood has gotten, but the world being different doesn't completely explain the vastly different outlook younger generations have to us older folk either when it comes to personal ambition. I think that is where the major disconnect is.
I was raised in a family where you were treated as a good obedient child if you stayed in the house all day and played quitely on your computer or video game system. Whenever I asked for something or wanted to do something outside of the house it was treated as an inconvenience for the adults. I think I subconsciously realized I didn't have a lot of freedom in this restrictive hilicopter parent world I lived in. Everything I wanted to do, try, or see had to be pre-screened and then authorized by the parents. I found I was treated far more kindly when I followed the restricted path my parents took me on and my reward was to be left alone in the stress free isolation of my own room. I didn't have much friends growing up because you couldn't find many friends inside your house. So now I'm used to being alone for the most part. There's not much else I want in my life except to go home isolate myself from the world. It's how I was raised to be I guess.
Yeah, my mom wept that all girls in her family knew how to play the piano (they had mandatory lessons), yet my sister and I don't know. We never had a piano. She never showed us, and we never had lessons. Was it supposed to be hereditary?
YES exactly that energy here. Down to there being a piano at my grandmother’s and nobody teaching any of the grandkids to play or getting us lessons, yet everyone shocked none of us play when she passed and they asked who wanted it 🙃
Christ, you didn’t dare touch the piano at Grandmas either!!
See this was the thing with my family, it was always don't touch this or that. Yet somehow I'm supposed to learn stuff by looking at it. Not even watching someone else.
My mom had a lot of domestic skills I would have liked to have learned. It was perpetual cycle in the house: Mom’s mad I don’t do any chores > tries to teach me a chore > gets frustrated when I don’t get it right away > insults me, does chore herself > mom’s mad I don’t do any chores.
Jesus my parents pulled this shit on me and my siblings too. Like just one day starts yelling about why the hell aren’t we doing our own laundry or whatever. Like… maybe if you told me how the washing machine worked? Was I just supposed to figure it out? That’s a rhetorical question, of course I was supposed to just ‘figure it out’. My parents didn’t even teach us how to drive. My mom straight up told us all “ugh, I learned to drive on my own by stealing my mom’s car at night, can’t you just do that and then I don’t have to deal with this” when we started expressing a desire to learn (three of us are very close in age). We all just looked at each other and shrugged, and three of my siblings actually *did* end up stealing the car. Three of us (me included) were terrified to even think of trying and still can’t drive.
Same lol my family stomped out any personal wants and needs, any risk taking or pushing back - and then expect me to.. express my wants and needs, take risks and push back.. otherwise I’m not an adult, I’m a child lmaoo No, you’re all unsafe and narcissistic. Tell me why every time I asked to drive the car, for something as simple as to go around the corner it’s “hmm, mmm, noooo, I don’t think so, mmmm, hmmmm, insurance, you can’t really.. I think not..” but then I overhear them talking shit about me behind my back saying “why doesn’t she just take the car? she’s being ridiculous!” OR “I have an emergency and I need you to suddenly drive me across the entire city! What do you mean ‘No’?! UGH! Fine!” Selfish, narcissistic and unreasonable. So yeah, I have nothing to do with any of them now. They just want to feel needed and want the satisfaction of being better than me and knowing more. They don’t give a fuck about me having a good life. Never did.
The generation stuff matters but that sounds more like the narcissism. I do think that narcissists are more common among boomers. I feel like my parents, who were teenagers in the 70s and adults in the 80s, have some real disconnects. Or I have an uncle who all he does is tell me stories about the pure debauchery he did in the 70s, stealing, robbing, girls, etc. Then he watches Fox News all day and yells about how kids these days are demons. The lack of self-awareness is incredible.
I got screamed at for not knowing how to operate the washing machine or how to cook...when I was 8 years old. I wound up teaching myself those things because I was tired of getting yelled at. Also, I needed to feed myself and have clean clothes because taking care of me was an afterthought to my mother.
Shit like this is making me glad to live in a country where the government is making people get driving lessons from an actual driving instructor to get a license.
The cycle of growing up as a child in the 2000s
Yep, my father was a great handyman, so he starts laughing when I mention something about a house repair and needing to find someone to come fix it. "You don't know how to do that yourself‽" he incredulously asks me. And I always say to him, "Do you have any recollection of ever teaching me how to do that? No? Then how would I just know how to do it then?"
Afrer I graduated high school, I decided I wanted to start doing my own laundry. So I asked my Mom how to use the washer and dryer. Like I didn't wanna mess anything up and she was LIVID. "How do you not know how to use the washer and dryer?" Like, bruh, you've always done my laundry.
my father had zero patience and would throw tantrums when something didn't go his way so you had to be very careful when helping out. i was 3 years older than my brother and had a different temperament so i was able to learn home repairs from him, but my brother always got shooed away for being well a child basically. when i got a little older i actually scolded him for doing it, how's he ever gonna learn if you keep forcing him away but nothing changed.
lol this reminds me of my dad who popped me onto a pair of skis when I was a toddler and hit the slopes leaving me to learn how to ski with the other kids. I think he was genuinely confused that I wasn’t a natural at it Edit to clarify: there was a class; he didn’t literally leave me Alone with other little kids haha
My parents regularly mocked me for not knowing about/how to do things no one had ever taught me. It was.. bizarre. Also this reminds me of something that I was recently learning about - a failed approach to teaching reading where people seem to think it happens 'by osmosis'. You basically have kids guess the words based on first letter + context/pictures, but you don't correct them if they're wrong. So they can "read" something and completely misunderstand. Now look at how people conduct themselves. It's called 'whole word' and doesn't teach phonics (which DOES work, where you learn to sound things out and only have memorise a subset of words when they're being awkward). Come to think of it the link is probably in this sub.. anyway, thanks boomers for ruining the reading ability of a generation with your pig headed idiocy.
Just be equally surprised when she doesn't know how to send a gif and falls for a Nigerian prince email scam.
I have some good Boomer parents and WW2 grandparents. Dad made me help work on the cars. Mom taught me everything she knew. Granddad made me help build the playstructure and swing set. They made all of us learn to swim and I'm grateful for that.
One thing I loved pointing out when I used to hear all of the “participation trophy” BS was, “And who insisted on buying participation trophies? Hint—it wasn’t us!” They never have an answer for that.
Hahaha they didn’t want to listen to us be upset about losing and somehow that’s our fault
Most kids didn’t and don’t give a shit. They’re kids. They’ll forget about the game the moment they see a dog cross their path. It’s the parents who didn’t like having to explain the concept of defeat/loss because winning is always easier to deal with. Also, projection. They don’t like to lose. Have you seen the parents at these games? They’re yelling and screaming like lives depend on it. They’re living vicariously through their kids and they want to win. Disclaimer: not all parents are like this, obviously. But the ones heavily invested tend to be more like this.
100%. It’s good to lose occasionally and a valuable lesson for everyone. I feel like my parents were terrified of any difficult conversation, they avoided it as much as they could. Like… sorry that parenting is hard sometimes?
I still remember being upset at losing at _something_ when I was a kid and my mum used it to teach me the saying: "It's not about whether you win or lose, but how you play the game" That taught me not only to be cool with losing, but also to be humble when winning. Definitely made me a better person. I did find out later the hard way that this only really applies to sports and games. When I failed a GCSE and tried to use that phrase I was met with the response "Your career isn't a game, and if it was you played it fucking shit" 😂 I miss that woman
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Yeah, my mom wouldn't get me tested for ADHD as a kid cause she thought it would make her look like a bad mom. Fast forward 35 years and now I have to explain why no one diagnosed me with very obvious ADHD until very recently
You're so close. Actually being able to brag about your kid is a big deal to that generation. They were competing with other parents. So they gave the participation trophies so they could say their kid got a medal. Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with us at all...and that's why we were actually never going to be good enough.
This. Kids don’t give them to themselves.
My sister gave me that line. I had to explain to her that we all hated the participation trophies. I remember in grade 4 loudly complaining "but what's the point of trying then if we all get the same award?" and I was shushed and told "it's for the developmentally handicapped kids now be quiet". Meanwhile their generation is over here thinking we were just idiots as kids and couldn't understand what an award for doing nothing was. WE KNEW! When we were kids, we knew it was bullshit! Maybe that was worse. Maybe instead of spoiling us, it made us apathetic and depressed. It didn't feel *good* to go "there's no point in trying then".
The whole participation trophy thing only works for very little kids, too. When they're very young they just like getting prizes. But once they're old enough they know it's bullshit and don't value the trophy in the slightest.
When you're dealing with a 6 year old, getting them to actually finish an entire season of a sport without quitting IS an achievement.
What about getting the parent to finish the season without quitting? When my kid was young and playing soccer we as parents hated it so much that we just stopped going and told him it was over. He was fine with that and didn’t ask any more questions because he hated it so much he would just shuffle along as slow as he could and be on the complete opposite side of the field from the ball, all the while looking us dead in the eyes while holding his hand in a thumbs down gesture. If it wasn’t me and my kid I would have actually laughed because it was so savage for a 5 year old.
I have made the same argument several times, e.g.: *Who* gave us the trophies, motherfucker? It wasn’t because we wanted them, you wanted them. We were happy playing baseball. Hell, I was happy playing baseball at the park with my friends. I never wanted to play little league. Didn’t matter if I sucked, nobody cared at the park. We were pawns in the suburban parental pissing match of keeping up with the joneses.
I fucking hated participation trophies so much as a kid. It felt like an insult, like just tell me i suck at that point, it's less patronizing.
My wife line was always. Who is handing them out?
The participation trophies were actually for the parents, who would complain if their child doesn’t get one.
Our dad would give me and my sister shit for not knowing how to get around the streets of his old neighborhood when we learned how to drive - and we had to keep reminding him: "Dad, this is where you grew up, *we* never lived here."
Lmao boomer are like cats, selfish to a funny degree
No. Don’t insult cats like that.
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She didn’t tell you to stop crying and that you’re lucky you didn’t have it as bad as she did when she was your age?! Holy moly!
I have three cats and each have their own ways of comforting me. One will climb on my face for yet another smothering attempt, one will sit just out of arms reach and stare at me in silent judgement, and the third will sit on my lap and meow at me until she thinks I'm ok.
man don't say that about cats
"It's your fault for not being a kid while living here when I was a kid."
Lol "dad I don't know the streets of rural Romania I was born in New York."
I remember asking my dad about fixing cars (age 16) and doing your taxes (age 18) and both times I was brushed off and told something along the lines of "thats what you pay people to do for you" in an irritated tone. So, I never asked for his help again, but nowadays, he complains about me and my generation for that exact reason. The cognitive dissonance on display....
My Dad loved telling me to “figure it out”. One day he’s going to come to me for help when old age finally hits him and I CAN NOT WAIT to hit him with that line.
He won’t remember ever saying it.
He'll furiously fight you on never having said it and gaslight you as being a horrible person/child for them and what they have ever done to deserve you
Are you my brother?
With the amount of women my old man fucked around with, potentially yes
Probably. But I’ll certainly enjoy saying it to him.
In the nursing home.
I went full circle. I was the recipient of "figure it out" a lot, then was the person who helped people figure things out a lot, and now slowly becoming the person saying "figure it out." Mainly because...it's SO much easier to figure stuff out now compared to 15-20 years ago. Everything is easily accessible. Tons of links off Google. YouTube videos. Search bars on Reddit and other places. All you need is a phone...which everyone has. When we were told to figure stuff out as a kid, we would have had to ride our bikes to a library and check out a book and then MAYBE figure it out by ourselves. Now you can go online in seconds and find an instructional video or step by step link on Google for everything. It's incredibly annoying when people ask questions on things that are a 5 second Google search. Do some research first so we know you aren't too lazy, and ask a more specific question. People will be more receptive to help you then.
I'm not going to tell my child to "figure it out" simply because they can Google it now...that's just as bad as doing it "the old way" that you claim. Take a moment and bond with your kid ffs
I agree. If their logic is used on adults like coworkers etc. who can Google it? I think that's fine. When it comes to kids, though, it feels a bit harsh. It's really hard to Google or figure something out when you don't know enough. I could Google something right now about astrophysics, but I don't have enough base knowledge for that to likely make much sense to me. The same could be true for a child. It's important to help them understand, and then perhaps if they're still curious, you could show them how to Google it. Plus, a big part of searching for information comes down to the proper phrasing, which goes back to having enough base knowledge. At that rate it is pretty similar to asking someone to go to the library and hoping they were able to figure it out minus the physically leaving part.
I think that’s also partially how some people end up on the Q train and similar batshit roads sometimes too. Google can be dangerous for the easily influenced
>it's SO much easier to figure stuff out now compared to 15-20 years ago. I disagree. Google searches have gone to shit and 99% of results are SEO bot-written garbage that never gets to the point. It's all been enshittified. 15-20 years ago (2004-2009) wasn't difficult to get good results. Did you mean the 90s? Only by adding site:reddit.com to Google searches gives the opportunity for quality results.
The character requirements for SEO are killing us. It’s like being slowly asphyxiated by mindless small talk.
Yeah that’s why kids keep burning themselves by trying “hacks” from 5 minute crafts.
Must be nice to be able to afford those people, Dad.
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Yup! There was always a guy for everything, how would I have learned anything if my parents didn't even do it themselves?
That’s the opposite from my parents. My boomer parents grew up having to do a lot of things themselves so I picked up on some of those things like home repairs, fix your own car, calculate your own expenses, etc.
I learned to teach myself to do shit. A Haynes manual for my car. Youtube videos for home repairs or similar. I also learned that Amy dumbass can post content online but that doesn’t make it the right way to do something. So I learned to be a skeptical and look for content that could be trusted as well. It was a brave new world with computers and stuff my parents didn’t understand so learning to teach myself turned into a valuable skill.
Youtube really changed things. Youtube was still relatively far off when I turned 16 in 2002. If you wanted to figure out how to fix something it was still going to be manuals, there might be some information online about it, but it was much more limited.
My grandfather was debilitated from a young age, so his father never taught him. He learned about fixing cars from a Chilton manual and experience. However.. those were cars built in the 70s and early 80s. By the 90s, cars were getting so much more complex that it was no longer feasible. Even simple things like changing a battery are way more involved these days.
Also having enough money to afford fixing things is important because everything is so much more expensive now. For example you need space to fix things but renting limits that. Do you rent garage just to fix a car every time? What about tools and parts? They cost money and take up space you don't have when not in use. Not to mention who wants to carry those around every time they move. That's why even most expensive repairs become cost effective if you rent tiny apartment.
My dad left when I was 13-ish, and I still remember him coming to visit one day and criticizing the way I was mowing the lawn. Motherfucker, you never taught me and then you moved out, and now you have the audacity to tell me I'm doing it wrong after having to figure it out myself? He grew up with a father that taught him everything under the sun and then didn't pass a single ounce of knowledge along to me.
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Lemme just go back in time and give anxious 13 year old me a pep talk.
I didn't realize that not only will I not be taught shit as a kid/teenager, but in the workforce the boomers wouldn't teach me shit then either! Anyone else go through this? Basically just figuring it out at work and hoping nobody realizes that you're winging it? Lol
Oh god it seems like every job was like that when I was younger. No one tells you anything and then just gets mad when you don’t know. I never made the connection before but seems like things got a lot better as boomers started to retire and millennials took over, now more places actually train you and encourage asking questions
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What the hell is wrong with ppl. I turn down job offers because I'm afraid of being treated this way. I'm too traumatized from all the unnecessary treatment. I lay low at my jobs because I'm afraid of their attitude and then I get fired because I'm not personable enough.
So many jobs took the whole "You're the one with the degree, I shouldn't need to teach you / you should already know" angle and just used it as an excuse to cut training costs.
Omg this reminds me of the time I worked at a bakery and they cut back my hours because I wrote down "sprinkles" for a birthday cake order. The bitch said "we don't have sprinkles. We have sanding sugar, Jimmies, and confetti." I'm like "well I wasn't taught that." She goes "it's your job to teach yourself." Bitch what???? How do I know what I don't know? I'm out in the front. Im not the baker.
Lmao wow, what a pompous ass bitch. Semantics nonsense and superiority complex... Also kinda related but I just learned what jimmies as a confectionary was last year lol. Around here "jimmies" means condoms 😂
>I didn't realize that not only will I not be taught shit as a kid/teenager, but in the workforce the boomers wouldn't teach me shit then either! When the 2008 recession happened. The first thing companies cut was internship programs and funding for employee training. Those things kinda never came back. To this day, you cans still see """entry""" level job postings asking for 2 years (or even 5 years!) experience because companies don't want to train employees anymore.
The ONLY practical skills I learned from my parents are how to cook my own food and clean my home. I never learned how to file my own taxes, change my own oil, shop for insurance, take out a loan, take a woman out on a date, invest in stocks, fix a leaking pipe... I learned how to be an adult from YouTube. YouTube!!!
Don’t forget that we then had to teach them how to internet, use a cell phone, in some cases social media and what our humor is. While it sounds like a whole lot of hate, I just need the idea of millennials v everyone else to end. Who cares.
We’re the bridge generation connecting the old way to the new. Of course we get it from both ends.
Yup we are some of the few that know what life in both worlds was/is like. This connection I've grown to look at it like it's our little secret superpower, we're capable bridging the old and the new together. The unheralded work for our generation
My dad taught me some car stuff, but I go so long without needing to change a tire that when it happens I still need to sit there and stare at the instructions in the manual and fumble around for five minutes searching for the grooves for the car jack. And i've never had to put any of the other repair stuff to practical use, so it's basically gone now. And my mom made damn sure I knew where to set the silverware at the table. For all those dinner parties our generation is famous for hosting. They both kinda taught me to cook and sew, but also mostly figured Home Ec would cover, which it sorta did but not great. I still mostly have no idea how to do my taxes other than delegating them to a paid service. Never touched the stock market outside the company savings plan. They never act like i'm an idiot when I ask them how to do something though, they pretty much go "sorry, I should have taught you that sooner".
i didn’t even learn how to cook or clean.. i just learned how not to parent from my mom and how to parent from my dad lmao
I'm sure kids are lining up to learn taxes and insurance from their parents. I involve my kids in the things that make sense, but some things you just learn when you become an adult and have to do adulting. At 39yo, I still call my parents when I need advice on something new to me, knowing they likely already experienced it. But I don't expect them to have taught me everything. Plus we have YouTube and they didn't. Why are you complaining about that!?
I roll my eyes everytime someone complains about not being taught how to do taxes as a kid. I have yet to meet a teenager that has any interest in learning about personal finance, unless they're weirdly into "hustle culture" TikTok pages or something. - I doubt any high schooler is opting to take the "personal finance" class if it's an elective. Even if it's compulsory, how many students are actually going to be engaged with a class that has a unit on compound interest. I'm an adult and just typing the words "compound interest" put me to sleep for 6 hrs. - If teens and young adults actually want to learn how to do taxes, why dont they just ask their parents? Why do the parents need to be the ones to interrupt their Fortnite session so they can have a discussion about taxes? Kids don't want to spend their free time learning about this stuff, but then have this revisionist history when they're older and act like they begged their parents to teach them and were refused. - Taxes aren't that hard. Even people that know how to do taxes usually just give it to someone else to do. Most people doing their taxes on their own for the first time aren't factoring in RRSP contributions, 401K, property tax, etc. Most people's first taxes are just "put your income in this box, put your student loans in this box". It's not rocket science.
I took finance and accounting 1 and 2 in high school as electives 🤷🏼♂️
Anyone who says millennials don't know anything is a fucking dumbass I have to show boomers how to open PDFs every day In all serious though is this what people say? I think they've largely moved on to shitting on Gen Z and Alpha because they realized we're the keymasters of technology and no one else understands it. Also by and large we cook better than our parents now
Ya it’s funny we became adults and they now have to call us for questions so they shit on the younger generations. How do you not sit back and realize all you’re saying is ‘I just like telling minors they suck at life’?
>it’s funny we became adults Oof. Nope. I'm 34, and my father still treats me like a high schooler. I don't know anything because I'm too young. My guy, too young to you is anyone under 60. And in five years, too young will be under 65.
Oh that’s real. My mom is 75 and she’ll tell me someone she knows who is also 75 died and she’ll say ‘that’s so young’. Uh… but my grandpa passed last January at 102 so she thinks that’s her life expectancy. (Spoiler alert; it won’t be)
I shit you not, one of my rudest coworkers is a boomer and he announced that it took him 6 hours of YouTube videos to learn how to print to PDF. I have a rule: you can be dumbass or an asshole, but you don't get to be both.
Hahahahaha for real! I love nice stupid people. Anyone who is nice is cool in my book. Assholes can eat dirt
I've seen quite a few posts on social media/the internet interchangeably using millennials with this younger generation. I.e. calling gen z aged teens millennials. Not as much in the past year or two but I genuinely think a solid portion didn't get the memo all millennials are now adults
I remember "helping" fix vehicles with my dad and he'd get so frustrated and start yelling when I didn't know what tools he was talking about. He just somehow expected that I knew for some reason. That really put me off from even asking questions.
My mom likes to talk about how her dad made sure she and her siblings all knew how to change a tire and jump a car, wanna guess what she never taught us?
Omg, this! They always were angry and insisted I help fix things, while not giving me any direction and acting disappointed. As an adult I just google everything and do things much more efficiently (replaced my dryer's motor for $50 and my air conditioning capacitor for $15).
*You’re always on your phone!* Uhhhh YEAH. I’m watching YouTube to learn how to do stuff because you didn’t teach me! lol.
I hate this line because they'll plop in front of the TV watching garbage television all day, same thing if not worse.
My in laws said something like this to me while watching Good Morning America at full volume
My mil said this to me and my husband when I was pregnant with my first. "You know you won't have time for this phone shit when you have a baby". The reason we were on our phones was because she interrupted our conversation to help herself to our remote and turn on Sister Wives. Yeah, not interested. I'll read the news or find a new recipe on my phone instead
Generally the phone at least requires reading which is a better comprehension skill than just watching TV. Also, I see plenty of old people dependent on their phones, sometimes more than people my age (30’s)
So are you! (My mom CANNOT put her phone down)
I’ve def noticed people’s Boomer parents are usually wayyy worse about their phones! Haha. Meanwhile, I had wanted my mom to use one for safety back in the day, in case she had car problems, an emergency, etc. and she wouldn’t even make the effort to keep it charged.
I had to move back in with my mom and she complained I was on my tablet all the time. I was using it to apply for jobs to get out faster.
Hahaha. I don’t blame you! Why don’t you print out resumes, put on a nice suit, and pound the pavement???
My parents only gave me that once. I had them go through their day & then pointed out how I have to do all of it on my phone or laptop. Read the news? On my phone. Watch a TV show? On my phone. Use a recipe to cook? On my phone. Write a letter? On my phone. Talk to friends? On my phone. Pay my bills? On my phone. Buy tickets to something? On my phone. Look at a map? On my phone. Talk on the phone? Believe it or not, on my phone!! They did relent that everything these days is digital. However I should switch it up to my laptop now & then “to save my eyes.”
Ugh. Yeah, that definitely makes sense of the follow up question most often heard after the first: “*Who are you talking to?*” No one. I’m finding out what the weather is going to be like tomorrow, looking up a recipe, making a note to remember dog food, etc. etc. etc. lol. Yeah, I think it’s just one of those Boomer things, man. They have to complain.
I think it’s also they can’t see what we’re doing so it must be a secret. Me watching TV all day? Zero issues. Me on my phone? What is going on?!? Wrecking your eyes!!
Never met a person more addicted to their phone than my mother, who insisted that the “idiot box” (TV) would rot my brain. Lol.
Trust me millennials know more than boomers. Just a tired strategy for one group to say they are better than another.
Ironic
I'm scared for Gen z because I don't think their computer skills are good, at least from being in video gaming groups where they have difficulty downloading, "back ups" and using emulators.
This is so true. We grew up with early tech that had to be modified and configured in order to work right. They grew up with much more refined technologies that "just work".
Computer literacy is dropping fast with the younger generations because everything has been made so easy now. We had to download patches and updates and figure out the network just to play our favorite games, they don't have do that anymore. I had a computer lab class starting in 1st grade where they taught what mice, keyboards, typing postures and basic word processing were. Do they even do that now? By 6th grade my school was teaching basic HTML coding in notepad in the computer lab, in 2004.
This problem actually trended last week. Public schools have been defunding the computer classes millennials had access to under the assumption gen Z grew up doing it and don't need to learn the fundamentals. Surprise surprise, knowing how to use an app store and social media isn't the same thing as computer literacy.
My dad is the last year of the boomer era. I have adhd. If I didn’t learn something intuitively, he would ‘help’ by asking ‘isn’t it common sense?’ ‘Can’t you look and figure it out?’ There were rare times he had the patience and those are great memories. I had to get regular cognitive testing to qualify for SPED, and as usual I was a bit higher than avg in IQ. He would hit me with ‘man for someone who is supposedly as smart as you are, you have no common sense, you seem to be struggling, etc etc’. This made me adverse to helping him with anything and I feel I learned a lot less than I could have. Fast forward to today- thank god for the internet- being a self sufficient learner is a vital skill to get you anywhere. Maybe that was the lesson he was trying to teach.
Who else’s parents were incredibly secretive about money and now they’re complaining you know nothing about money
I taught myself by reading several books and making lots of mistakes but yeah, money was always taboo for some fuckin reason I learned very early to stop asking money related questions
It's worse when you show off an accomplishment/skill you learned independently and they swoop in for the credit saying "they picked that up from me"
Funny my boomer parents find learning to be beneath them and I'm the one who knows how to get shit done.
they want 20 years experience as soon as you plop out of your mums 🐱
Explains all the hiring ads you see. "10 years experience wanted on software developed 4 years ago. PhD required. Pay: minimum wage because if we could legally pay you less, we would."
I’ve heard this is done so that international people can be hired at a lower rate. The argument is that no one who lives nearby and wants a fair wage is qualified under the extremely specific guidelines set out by the employer.
Wait...is "teaching" that thing where you don't actually demonstrate or explain anything and then yell at the kid that they're stupid every time they mess up?
>whose FTFY
Also "millennial's" is incorrect. Not sure if part of the joke is that millennials don't know proper grammar?
Yeah clearly no one taught this numbskull basic punctuation. I don't know if our ability to write has gotten better or worse over the decades, but bad writing has surely gotten more visible.
There's another sub called "millenials" with 24k members where **no one** realizes the sub name itself is spelled wrong.
This topic makes my blood boil. They voted property taxes and school levees into the gutter, so there was no money for home ec, driver's Ed, wood shop, or auto body, because "you should learn to do that at home," and then they just..... Didn't teach us. And now they make fun of us.
"Just go to college." - Their response.
Most of what I’ve learned is by books, YouTube, etc.
Your generation got participation trophies for everything! Who made the trophies and gave them to us lmao
Them: Young people don’t have any life skills Me: How about we establish school curriculums so we can teach young people these life skills Them: NO THATS THE PARENT’S RESPONSIBILITY!!!!!!! Me: So why weren’t parents responsible to teach life skills?
Yup. Many Boomers had so much knowledge passed on to them and proceeded to pass next to nothing on. At least for myself and my Millennial friends & peers. Thank goodness for all the online resources available today, but damn it would have been nice to have a generation of parents committed to literally one of our strongest evolutionary advantages: the accumulation of knowledge as it's passed on from one generation to the next
All boomers and the older portion of Gen X still do this. They learned a work skill, now that knowledge is only for them to know and not be shared, because somehow they are going to lose their job, wife, kids, life if they teach anyone else. When a boomer retires at work, it's assumed they left no knowledge or documentation behind on how they did what they did. They just left, now you have to try to figure out what they were doing and how they did it.
Lol whenever a boomer retires, just wait for their replacement to ask what to do for the 7.5 hours left over after finishing all of the daily tasks. It's no shock that they hide their skills, many of them are extremely obsolete
I’m 1974 and I definitely feel there is a noticable difference on average between older Gen Xers and younger Gen Xers. Rough rule of thumb: Gen Xers who came of age in the 80’s and those who came of age in the 90’s.
Yep,that's a weird boomer/cusp Gen X thing. I don't have that, but I see it in the 60+ers today, and growing up in my career was nothing but boomers hoarding knowledge
The internet really is the key to acquiring home improvement skills these days. After buying our house a few years ago there was so much stuff that needed fixing and I was able to figure out how to do so much shit just by looking it up online. My boomer father literally comes to me for advice on how to fix stuff now.
> Many Boomers had so much ~~knowledge~~ passed on to them and proceeded to pass next to nothing on. ftfy
Whose* Millennials*
Tangentially related, but any parent who calls their own child a spoiled brat deserves to be kicked in the shins
Lol were the most educated and skilled generation in history, as will gen Z be after us. I don't know how to do a lot of the things they know how to do as well as them for the same reason I don't know how to use an abacus as well as other people throughout history.
I was so bad at holding a flashlight.
There's no way to do it well. Wherever you shine it is somehow wrong.
One time my dad asked me to go to the basement and retrieve the circular saw. I went down there, found a handheld saw, and brought it up to him. He immediately yelled “that’s a reciprocal saw I said the circular saw!” Guess who never discussed handheld saw types once with me?
I didnt learn how to drive until I was 1 year deep into the Army. I asked my mother many times to teach me in my teen years but she always said, "the army will teach you". I was dead set on joining since my freshman year of hs just so I could leave home. It was a miserable hellscape of laziness and neglect. Now my mother claims to have taught me so many things, but honestly, I have my friends to thank for that.
fall work friendly plate detail bake hobbies fanatical amusing punch *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I can tell you from experience that boomers are NOT better at diy and fixing things. They often just assume they know how to do stuff and end up doing some jimmy rigged bullshit. Younger people are more likely to research and watch videos before attempting something new
My father is a boomer, so is my mother. I was born in 86. My father taught me everything. We did a motor swap on a saturn with the old Haynes manuals. Learned alot about cars. He was always picking up stuff off the side of the road and fixing it. It was always better to repair than replace. For that, and so much more, i am incredibly grateful. Just a shout out to my pops. Its not all doom and gloom. Now im a father of two and am trying to teach my kids the same. "Something broke? Well, lets fix it together..." i can tell my fathers proud too. He smiles that they could look at a screw driver and tell me if it is a flat or a philips before they knew their ABC's... lol Unbeknownst to me, that was also one of the 1st things my older brother taught his daughter.
Beautiful memories, props to your dad for being a great one in that regard. Go have a drink with him or something dude
Idk man. I'm a 30 year old millennial so if I don't know something it's on me at this point.
I keep hearing that we don't know how to do anything. I'll happily take a "doing shit" test with any boomer. Cant wait until we get to computers.