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Why do so many people online report having poor relationships with their parents? Is this real? I don't know anyone in real life who talks like this about their

• mensetmanusman 2y ago
  You/we are in a bubble. Nearly half of kids today are growing up with at least one absent parent. Social decay is a real phenomenon.
  • wickedsight 2y ago
    > Social decay is a real phenomenon Calling this decay is an incredibly short sighted view of the actual changes that are happening. Kids used to grow up in toxic households with parents fighting and hating each other. Just look at old TV shows like Married with Children and The Honeymooners. Now they grow up with an absent parent. I'm the latter and I'm really happy my parents chose divorce over keeping up appearances and giving me a shitty life. Domestic abuse in general has also been on a pretty steady decline because of the decrease in societal pressure to stay married.
    • mensetmanusman 2y ago
      That’s great, but data is also real: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10666570/#:~:text=Father%20absence%20during%20early%20childhood,of%20depression%20in%20early%20adulthood.&text=Early%20childhood%20father%20absence%20is,across%20adolescence%20and%20early%20adulthood.&text=Effects%20are%20strongest%20for%20females%20with%20absent%20fathers%20in%20early%20childhood https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10666570/#:~:te.... I.e. on average your life would have been even better if your parents were awesome.
      • wickedsight 2y ago
        Well... Duh. I would've loved to have two parents who loved each other and took me on fun family trips! But that wasn't an option, since they had an awful relationship. So the options were either divorce or doubling down on a shitty relationship. They chose divorce and I'm happy for it. Also, your study doesn't seem to have any comparison to the impact of abusive relationships vs. father absence, which is what I was talking about. If you can find anything about that, I'd love to see it.
      • exe34 2y ago
        > I.e. on average your life would have been even better if your parents were awesome. That's pretty profound! You should write an article!
    • a-french-anon 2y ago
      You're not implying that single parents have simply replaced toxic households, are you? The issues are most probably overlapping in numbers.
      • wickedsight 2y ago
        No, they definitely haven't replaced them. But divorce being more common has certainly opened up doors for plenty of women to escape abusive relationships. That doesn't mean that they can all find that open door or all have an open door. There are still plenty of people in religions where divorced is frowned upon (to put it lightly) and there are also plenty of people who are mentally unable to pull out of a toxic relationship. But the reduction in societal pressure that 'marriage is forever' definitely has an impact.
        • a-french-anon 2y ago
          Divorce laws indeed had some good outcomes like you wrote, but it also allowed people to make carefree choices when choosing a mate - something that should be a well thought out, very long-term deal - and as we all know, we're now in the realm of perverse incentives on the subject. And don't get me started on the vicious interactions between the "soft deprecation" of fault divorce, the abolition of adultery laws and economic aids for single parents. Clearly not the best mixture of choices.
          • wickedsight 2y ago
            > it also allowed people to make carefree choices when choosing a mate Lets flip that coin... Religion/tradition forces people to get married before they actually knew each other well. Then they move in together, have kids and must stay together forever. I feel like 'we need to get married to live together' is way more in the realm of perverse incentives. In the 70's, people on average married around age 22. Right now that's closer to age 29. Which one seems more carefree to you? To me it's the getting married at 22 without having lived together.
            • 2y ago
• Lanolderen 2y ago
  It's definitely not rare. Many people have negative relationships with their parents. Sometimes, however, it's not even a poor relationship but being unable/unwilling to deal with the stress of exposing yourself to their mental and physical degradation.
• viraptor 2y ago
  You may be in a bubble, I know plenty of people with no/minimal relationship with parents. But it may not be a bad thing overall. Historically when people didn't go far away from home they had more "forced" contact with parents; now, not as much. In the same way that it's good that we get more divorces now (people, mostly women, are able to leave bad relationships without the community/church getting in the way), it's also good that people can live independent lives and are not bound to their families. Of course it's better if the relationship is healthy, but both sides need to work on that. There are subreddit of estranged parents too and communities like https://www.rejectedparents.net/forums/ https://www.rejectedparents.net/forums/ but often the stories turn out to be "we're so alone, why are the kids so bad and don't talk to us anymore? (oh yeah, we did try to force them to do X, but that's irrelevant)"
  • _heimdall 2y ago
    Whether this can be a good thing depends heavily on your opinion of the importance of family and shared history in society and culture.
    • viraptor 2y ago
      Or more specifically whether you want to put people first, or some idealised structures with hidden issues.
      • _heimdall 2y ago
        Even that depends on what people you are putting first. Putting the individual first and it will likely make sense to put little value in family structures and community connection. Putting community first, or specifically the people who are in a stage of life that really need help day to day, and valuing family connections makes more sense. Neither are an absolute fix to everything. Like everything else, a mix of both likely makes the most sense.
        • exe34 2y ago
          > the people who are in a stage of life that really need help day to day, They should have thought of that before they fucked up their kids.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• haswell 2y ago
  Very real. My relationship with my parents is extremely complicated at best. Therapy is literally why I have a relationship with them at all. This is fairly common in the particular circle I grew up in (deeply religious and very conservative), and I didn’t see a healthy parent/child relationship until I started dating someone from a very different background. It was eye opening.
• HeckFeck 2y ago
  It's something that seldom comes up in conversation due to politeness and the strong likelihood that it will cause discomfort, but a few friends I know intimately have reported bad relationships and questionable parenting only after long personal conversations when we're alone. A causal factor is the tendency to normalise early experiences, even if they are neglectful or abusive. This means many are unaware or reluctant to realise their upbringing wasn't that good when they are older. Without critical examination the early experiences and the assumptions you had as a child are carried into adulthood. So a lot of people will say their parents are 'loving' even if they were far from it.
• wickedsight 2y ago
  I know a lot of people who have issues with their parents/family/spouses in one way or another. In part because I'm not a very judgemental person, but probably a big part is that I have a lot of unrelated friendships, so people can tell me anything without a chance of that thing ending up as gossip. The internet is like that, you can tell anyone anything from your anonymous account without it ever coming back to you. Honestly, I know only a few people who have near zero issues with their parents and would happily have them move in when they get older.
• throwway_278314 2y ago
  If you are in a bubble, stay there. It is a happier place. Yes, young adults today are more willing to "cancel" their parents. Often enough it is for issues which a generation ago would have been seen as the child not accepting adult responsibility; suddenly the parent is the bad person for doing what their parents considered made them a good person. Parenting is hard.
  • astura 2y ago
    >Often enough it is for issues which a generation ago would have been seen as the child not accepting adult responsibility; suddenly the parent is the bad person for doing what their parents considered made them a good person. Can you give me a specific example of this?
    • pjc50 2y ago
      Before they reply, I would be willing to put money on it being something to do with "coming out".
    • exe34 2y ago
      My sperm provider literally said that his dad treated him like shit, so he gets to treat me like shit, and that as a reward some day I'd get to treat my own son like shit. I fired both of them 8 years ago and haven't missed them even one time. They were always an emotional cost center. Whenever I had one problem, if they found out, I'd have two: the original problem and providing emotional support to them for having upset them. When I first moved to uni, I was utterly confused by everybody saying they were looking forward to going home for Christmas - why on earth would you want to go back to that? I remained baffled for another 12 years until I finally realised what had happened. I drew a poor hand.
• WillAdams 2y ago
  Parenting, like life, is the accumulation of the consequences of decisions/actions. Unless a child has the grace to grant a parent forgiveness for their (forgivable) failures, and unless a parent was able to create a safe and loving environment in which a child could grow up with such a mindset, estrangement is inevitable. Usually, the crux which this revolves around is the realization that each child is a unique person with their own potential, and hopes, and dreams, and that it is not fair to the child if the parent does not make providing the best possible environment for that child a central focus of their life. Many people who are (rightly or not) disappointed by their parents and troubled by aspects of how they were raised will view this as something private and will only open up in therapy, or some other private interaction --- some folks consider the anonymity of online intercourse to have a privacy of/distance from their real life that it is safe to mention things --- I guess in my day it was the "bartender effect". Consider your question as coming from a position of grace/luck and count your blessings.
  • codersfocus 2y ago
    > the realization that ... it is not fair to the child if the parent does not make providing the best possible environment for that child a central focus of their life Unwise of you to state "realization of" to a statement that is not broadly agreed upon. I bet you also believe "you didn't choose to be born"?
    • WillAdams 2y ago
      If you think providing for a child is not appropriate as a central focus of a parent's life, please take that into consideration before doing anything which might involve a child. While politics are something I prefer not to discuss, I hope that every woman who has ever found herself in need of a tampon, and every person with a concern for how laws requiring that society investigate every reported miscarriage as a potential crime shows up to vote in the next election, and that that coalition then puts in place a legal framework which makes giving birth a free and uncoerced choice.
      • fennecfoxy 2y ago
• astura 2y ago
  You're in a (probably upper middle class) bubble. Think about all the bad/rude/shitty/sick/criminal/awful/miserable people you've interacted with in your life or read about online/on TV. Odds are, those people have kids because most people have kids. Odds also are their public behavior is their best behavior and their private behavior is much worse. Bad people are actually MORE likely to have children and have more children because they don't care about the welfare of their children and having children increases your social standing in life. I am someone who has truly horrible people as parents; they abused me physically and mentally/emotionally, neglected my needs, broke me down, told me they hated me and wished I was never born, and told me I ruined their life for existing. Nothing I ever did or said was "right," I was always criticized. There was also severe mental illness, domestic violence, criminal activity, and substance abuse going on my entire childhood. It's not hyperbole to describe my childhood as 18 years of torture. I've been diagnosed with PTSD due to my childhood experiences. I talk about it openly online with stranges, I talk about it with my various mental health providers over the years. However, most of my friends don't really know the full extent of the terror I experienced and I'll never talk about it with stranges or just acquaintances. It doesn't really come up in conversation very often and it's kinda hard to talk about in person. It's hard enough telling my therapists about it. It's also just really embarrassing and I have to REALLY trust you before talking about it IRL. We have an extremely pronatalist society and nobody really casually wants to hear about the victims that produces. It's not socially acceptable outside an extremely close relationship. I don't feel the same typing about it semi-anonymously online. I also REALLY feel that I need to correct the cultural idea that "all parents are inherently good."
  • jart 2y ago
    You might not realize this on a conscious level, but the reason you're reluctant to tell your friends about your parents is because they'll assume you're a bad person too, due to how you inherited their codebase. If my parents were abusive, I'd want to hide that fact, similar to how I'd want to hide a past felony conviction for abuse. Because I believe people can change and deserve the opportunity to rise above their circumstances and make themselves into something better than where they came from. Having that opportunity is more important than the emotional catharsis of oversharing, wouldn't you agree?
• pjc50 2y ago
  People aren't necessarily that open about it, and it can take a while of getting close to someone to realize that they never mention their family. (I suspect you don't know a lot of queer people?)
• exe34 2y ago
  Of the people that I know that are either in a similar situation (of having gone 100% no-contact) or even those that meet their parents for Christmas and Easter but otherwise keep them on an information diet about their own lives (so about a dozen, let's say), not a single one of them told me their situation first. They only opened up after I casually mentioned that I fired my parents in response to a much smaller parent-related complaint on their part.
• amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  I know several people who have completely cut off communication with one or both parents. Consider yourself lucky.
• aprilthird2021 2y ago
  There was an interesting article about how much more common it is for people to cut off ties with their parents over things like politics or whatever else, things the parents did not understand as a big deal. I do think it's increasing. The ones I know who do it and I'm close enough to know the family, I think it's entirely resolvable and sad
• missedthecue 2y ago
  I've wondered about this too. Seems 90% of people on the internet have abusive narcissistic relationships with their parents, while 90% of the people I know in real life love their parents very much.
  • ProfessorLayton 2y ago
    >...while 90% of the people I know in real life love their parents very much. Wait hold on. Let's not conflate a strained family relationship with not loving them. Both my parents had an extremely abusive relationship with their parents, to the point where they could not be around them (And by extension neither was I), but they always loved them — And so did their parents, they were just extremely flawed. I get along well with mine, but completely understand how complicated family relationships are.
• 8490109481 2y ago
  Yes it's real. And some aspects of those relationships I have found are unsolvable problems, dead ends. For all of the things I feel good about accomplishing and creating, I can't heal that relationship. Some people are just set in their ways, it is a fact of life, and there is no solution to be pursued. It was an important lesson. There are a lot of other problems in the world people bicker about here and elsewhere like urban planning or regulation. Things that seem like solutions can be enacted if only big movements are made, people cooperate. Narcissistic parents are best cut off at first realization. That is a black hole of effort. You were dealt a bad hand and no social safety net would have helped (they were even tricked by the propaganda). No entrepreneur or startup is going to meaningfully address the root of people who are simply born to the wrong parents, only the aftermath. Because the parents are always right and won't be told otherwise, until it's too late. And there is no crucially important meaning behind this happenstance. It just is. Better to spend the effort undoing the years worth of damage on yourself instead.
• kbelder 2y ago
  People with issues from horrible upbringing are often going to be far more vocal than happily raised kids from loving families. Nothing wrong with that; they have valuable opinions and experiences to share. But you mustn't draw statistical conclusions from people talking online, ever. Paraphrasing, "All happy families are the same; all broken families are unhappy in their own unique way."
• tomatotomato37 2y ago
  You see a lot more talk of poor parental relationships online because those people have something concrete to talk and complain about; in contrast anyone who's relationship with their parents is just generically "fine" don't really have anything to comment on. You can see the same phenomenon in the reviews of a lot of things, not just relationships