Are "Baby Busters" worse parents? Why?

In My Humble Opinion
1

To use the terminology of a trillion years ago:

I was born during the “Summer of Love” to two members of “The Silent Generation”, a few short years after the “Baby Boom” had ended. I am part of the cohort that came after them and before the “Babies on Board”, their children, part of a second boom, began to appear toward the mid-1980s. We have gone by and rejected a number of labels, the most lasting of which was “Generation X”.

I grew up with a healthy dose of cynicism, always aware that people my age would be forever out-demographed by the generation that came just before us. I do not think very highly of many of the collective decisions made by that group.

A recent magazine cover story on the fact that the first of the Baby Boomers will turn 60 this year caused me to reflect. If the first of the boomers are 60, the last of the Boomers are just entering their mid-40s. The news is also full of stories dealing with the fact that the “Echo Boomers” are just entering the work force, putting the oldest of them at about age 23.

That leaves my group in the range from the mid-20s to the early 40s, which just so happens to be a group that is very likely to be the parents of young children. Now this is an area in which I had expected my group to excel. Having been the subjects of nearly every education and child-rearing reform, experiment and backlash, I thought we, on the whole, would separate the wheat from the chaff, and go about parenting in as sane a manner as has been done in recent memory.

I have been in the education and childcare field for more than 20 years. I have seen many things the Boomers did in the raising of their children that appalled me. However, now that my group, whether you call them Generation X, Generation 13, or the Baby Busters, are virtually alone in the realm of parenting young kids, I have to say that by whatever measure you can quantify the quality of parenting, the bar, on average, has been lowered.

In every cohort, excellent examples of parenting are to be found, but when it comes to people raising children completely unfit for civil society, I think my generation seems to have far more representatives than their predecessors. In particular is a nonsensical notion that setting any sort of boundaries on the child’s behavior is somehow damaging to them. I have seen a child who was nearly psychotic by age six due to this sort of upbringing by parents who had absorbed this notion so deeply that they were actually afraid of their own offspring.

Nor do I think I am alone in this assessment. There is enough bad parenting on display to keep on the air at least four television shows devoted to broadcasting its results: “Nanny 911”, “Supernanny”, “Wifeswap” and “Trading Spouses”, not to mention the numerous episodes of various afternoon programs devoted to showing this stuff. A Chicago-area cafe owner has made national news for flying in the face of arrogant parents by posting a sign in his window demanding polite behavior from children.

This saddens me greatly. Are we doomed? I am thinking of starting my own family soon, and I am frightened that my judgement may turn out to be as piss-poor as some of my contemporaries. We had all the evidence in front of us as to what works and what doesn’t.

Where did we go wrong?

2

Post-Baby Boomer parent weighing in here to say I think you’re overreacting. I think there has been a backlash against some of the excesses you mention. Certainly I don’t know any parents of out-of-control children on whom no limits have been set. My kids and all the kids I know are reasonably polite – certainly as polite as I was at a similar age. Plus, I wouldn’t want to get hung up on generational labels – Baby Boom, Gen X, etc. These are artificially imposed and have no predictive value in assessing how people will behave as parents.

3

My wife and I (Gen-Xers) are awesome parents and we have a helluva little girl.

You post describes people we don’t even know. :wink:

4

“Your post…”

5

Every generation thinks the one that followed it is going to hell in a handbasket.

I’ve seen writings from the 1700s which closely mirror your post-- the previous generation appalled by the permissive parenting of the next and predicting dire consequences for society.

And, of course, every time this is brought up, people say, “Well, maybe that was true in the past, but this generation really, really has problems. Here is anecdotal example one, two and three.”

We focus on the out-of-control examples because they stick out in our minds. I remember once leaving a resturant and mentally condemning “today’s kids” because of the screaming brat in the booth behind me. But then I remembered that there had been* lots* of kids in that resturant. I just hadn’t paid much attention because they were all behaving.

Likely, this child was born with mental problems that his parents were ill-equipped to handle, meaning that he would have been the same without medical intervention, even if he’d had perfect parents.

Punishment isn’t the only way children are socialized. They pick up cues from appropriate behavior from their peers and from other adults around them. If every kid in the class mocks them because of a certain behavior, a normal child will avoid doing it out of shame.

Now, if this child has consistently been in an abnormal, or abusive environment (and neglect is a form of abuse) he can fail to develop empathy and a mirror-image-self, meaning that other’s reactions to his behavior would be utterly meaningless.

However, I’d gander to say, based on the clues you offered, that this child reacted to discipline with violent outbursts and had almost manic periods of frantic, uncontrolable behavior. His parents tried the old sit-them-in-a-corner-when-they’re-bad, or even tried spanking him, and it just made the child more angry and uncontrollable. Thus, they gave up on discipline, and just tried to co-exist with him.

Quite possibly, if they got this child to a psychologist and were able to get a diagnosis of what ailment he suffers from, they could use a combination of medication and therapy to modify his behavior. I doubt they will, though, because they don’t seem to understand the severity of the problem.

Medications such as Ritalin have been sorely over-used in this country, with normally energetic children being diagnosed as hyper-active. But that does not mean that there are not some children out there with real mental issues which need medication.

6

I, too, think you’re overreacting. As a parent (age 32) of young kids, I see a lot of parenting, and on the whole I think people my age try really hard to be good parents. We are dealing with some different issues than our ancestors, some of which are so new we’re not sure how to deal with them–but for the most part kids are still kids and families are still families, same as always.

In fact, some parents want so much to do a good job that they worry too much, rather than not enough. How many of us are prone to supermom syndrome, where no matter how much we do it’s not enough?

In a way, I think parenting may be more of an intensive job than it used to be, which makes it very intensive indeed. A lot of parents spend a lot of their time just trying to keep the wider culture out of their homes; many of us feel like we’re fighting all the time to keep our kids away from 90% of the stuff aimed right at them. We’re fighting a $6 billion dollar industry that does its best to get our kids to want terrible junk of every kind, and it (the industry, that is) is very, very good at it. It teaches them exactly how to whine and nag most effectively, too!

It seems to me that children may need more attention, more one-on-one time with parents than was once true–not because they are whiny, needy brats, but because it’s difficult to deal with everything that is thrown at them. At the same time, however, most families are having to work harder to make ends meet, and its harder for one parents to stay home if they want to. Just when many kids need more parent time, we can’t always give it to them. Ouch.

And, we’re also more aware than our ancestors were. We are far more aware of child-abuse issues, for example, and (I think and hope) more able and willing to deal with them. We try so much harder to be open and educate our kids about the dangers of life, and also the stuff they’re going to need to know.

We are far more likely to err on the side of overprotectiveness than neglect, which carries its own problems. We no longer feel free to let our kids roam the neighborhood as we did ourselves; such a thing is unthinkable now, even though the danger is not really any worse. (Or maybe it is, now that neighborhoods are so much more likely to be empty during the day, I don’t know. Either way, it’s no longer acceptable.)

Well, this is a bit disjointed, but on the whole I think parents are trying very hard to do what’s right. Of course there are neglectful, overpermissive, and abusive parents out there; that has always been so and always will be. But I don’t agree that my generation’s parenting skills are so terrible. Most of the parents and kids I know are good people doing their best, and I know some wonderful kids and teenagers. The teenage girls I know are so much more together than I ever was; they’re amazing, really. All is not lost.

7

I think that kids these days don’t NEED more one on one time than older generations. It’s that less is available. In the past the way society was organized they were much more likely to see their parents on a day to day basis. If Mom was at home in the house cooking they were always around her as younger kids, and then later on as they became teenagers, they went out to work the fields with Dad if they were boys, and if they were girls they stayed home and helped keep the house in order. We’ve kind of smashed those roles, and everyone is out working and we are all so busy with everything, that the idea of a holistic life where a lot of those needs are just met naturally, are harder to meet.

I don’t know that many parents of my own generation, but one of my goals before I have kids is to live in a much different situation than I do now, because right now I feel like my time is stretched so damn thin with everything my wife and I do, that I want to be more financially secure and stable and possibly have us both working from home, so that we can all be around each other regularly.

Erek

8

The OP has almost exactly the opposite of my impression. I see a generation that seems to be marrying later in life, more cautiously, and taking greater care to raise well-adjusted, disciplined kids. As times passes, I’ll bet you’ll see a markedly lower divorce rate among busters, compared to boomers.

The problem is one of skills. Busters just don’t have many good role models for parenting. Boomers made terrible mentors in this area, and because we’re waiting until later to have kids, grandparents aren’t necessarily playing much of a role.

In my experience, though, the children of the busters are far better raised, better behaved and happier than my circle of friends when I was a kid. I was the only kid I knew whose parents were still married, but most of the fellow parents in my age range are married to the mother or father of their children.

9

I was going to write something like this. I see the busters trying to regain some order and sensibility out of the messes that the Boomers generally left all over the place. I see the busters like a responsible teenage child that has drug addicted, mentally unstable, and irresponsible parents. The busters quietly sweep up mistakes made by the elders and get down to business. Almost all of the buster parents including myself that I know have their heads screwed on very tightly and seriously. Things were done out of sense of purpose and timing.

10

I’m a buster and we waited until we were able to provide for our child in the manner that we saw fit. We were married seven years, and in our thirties, before we had our daughter.

11

My wife and I are Busters I guess.
We waited to have kids until we were financially well established and somewhat mature. We are by no means great parents. But I think we are Okay. We have some problems with school and we are working to correct this.

I think the largest problem is we are both full time Career people and the kids suffer from latchkey syndrome. They get up, eat breakfast, go to before school program, school and after school program. Home at 5:30pm on average. Dinner. homework and Baths eat up most of the time before Bed at 9pm.

One thing that is really helping with our daughter is a deal, she can stay up past 9pm, but only to read in bed. She has gone from barely reading to going through books fairly quick. Tonight it was a child’s encyclopedia on Mammals.

Our kids are not perfect angels and sometimes act up in public, but thankfully less that other parents. I have notice the worst behaved kids in restaurants are with parents in their young 20’s. I am not sure what this is a product of, just what I have observed. Our kids seem to fall in the middle between Angels and nuisance.

I am fairly strict with them in public and they still get noisy, but they are 8 and 5 and my son is loud if he is talking. No volume control yet.

Jim

12

As a Boomer, I would have to say that I have not really seen any significant differences between the kids I encounter in stores, malls, parks, church, and friends’ carpets than I did ten years ago, twenty years ago, or thirty years ago.
Deb and I did not acquire kids until our mid forties, so I also got to watch a lot of Buster kids in daycare. Again, I did not see any great signs of crisis or incompetence.

I suspect that most of peoples’ perceptions are based on unconscious filters (that can either swing to the good or the bad), seeing the kids that surround them as either better than they expected or worse than they remembered.

Social mores are shifting (so that there is less opprobrium, for example, for yelling “fuck you” in public with more opprobrium for casual racist slurs) and some of those things are reflected among the kids, but I grew up at a time when everyone “knew” that every teen was just dying to become a juvenile delinquent and comic books were destroying the souls of children and none of us ever showed any respect to our betters. Then I got into the workforce and had a boss solemnly tell me that the “kids these days” didn’t have the same work ethic that we had (I was all of eight years older than most of the floor staff), and I have seen the same laments every year, with a shifting boundary for the bad years, throughout my life.

I also see parallel observations regarding adult behavior from generation to generation. Amazingly, nearly every individual I have ever met, regardless of the year of birth, has actually been an individual. Many of their perceptions are shaped by the political and economic situations in which they grew up, but the wholesale condemnations (or accolades) bestowed on “generations” tends to be so much silliness when one looks at people one at a time.

13

And looking back over the posts in this thread, it seems to be leaning heavily toward anecdotal examination rather than a serious sociological or anthropological discussion, so I am going to send it off to IMHO.

[ /Moderator Mode ]

14

There is some statistic evidence that Gen X (people born from 1960-1980 ish) are taking longer to “mature” in the traditional sense of finding a career, getting married, having kids. I don’t think that makes them any better or worse though.

15

Our of curiosity, what are the years/parameters for who is considered to be in the what generation?

I thought that the baby boomers were post-war babies, born from 1945-1960
“Baby busters” were born from 1960-1975 , Generation X, ??
Echo Boomers were 75-90, Generation Y?
What’s after that? Echo Busters? Is there another one?

I’m making up those dates. Does anyone know what they really are? FWIW, I was born in 1972 and was told somewhere along the way that I am too old to be of Generation X. I’ve just been mildly curious about it.

16

I don’t agree with the OP. I think our generation is doing OK.