“You don’t want to eat what I’m serving you? Millions of starving children aren’t even getting dinner. Be thankful!” Or something.
I have a cousin who has always been quite the smartass. When she was a teenager, one night she sat down at the dinner table and said to her parents, “you know, millions of other kids are sitting down to a much better meal than this one.”
I had a good friend who was from Taiwan. I told her that American parents told their children to eat because “children in China are starving”. She said that Chinese parents told their children to eat because children in Africa were starving.
I always wondered why our parents specified China.
No. My parents were born in the depression and grew up in WWII Scotland.
They told us about rationing and the like, but never pulled guilt trips.
ive noticed the great depression and ww2 spawned 2 types of parents in the 50s
1 the type that thought no one needed or deserved anything but the bare min. to live on
or 2 the type that bought their kids so much stuff xmas didn’t mean much cause they already had everything ……
and neither one helped society
Not in the “guilt-tripping” sense.
There were stories, told simply because something else had brought them to mind. I remember Dad showing me his school Atlas* and explaining why it had borders that were different from those in mine, for example. I knew that my parents had gone to school under a different educational system. In general, stories of “old times” were either anecdotes along the lines of “your then-3yo uncle thought he could accompany his Papa to war so long as he promised he wouldn’t leave the sidewalk 
:D” or told in a way which made it clear that most of the changes since then were a positive thing. That there had been hunger after the war was something important to know, a good reason to avoid wars; it wasn’t given as the reason you should clean your plate young lady!
Daddy told us stories about life on the farm. He hated it so bad he ran away 3 times. The last time he was able to lie enough to get in the Marines. His Mother never really forgave him for doing that. He was the oldest and his 2 younger brothers followed him close behind.
He was always trying to build character into us with his tales about the un-ending work and toil on the farm. But what I gathered they lived pretty well. Plenty to eat and clothes, shoes, occasional treats. I thought it was superb he had his own horse raised from a foal. Broke and trained it himself. I dreamed of such a thing. I think he ran away because of his parents crazy religious leanings. They were Primitive Baptists and they are strict. The only girls in the church were his Sisters and the boys weren’t allowed to date outside the church.
Not guilt, but it used to annoy me when my mom would insist nothing in America tasted as good as the food she got growing up in Germany.
Probably because China was in the headlines more and on the minds of your parents. Growing up the 60’s, my parents would alternate between China and Africa or more often just “There are starving children, don’t waste your food.”
No. My parents told us stories from their childhood, but they grew up as Holocaust survivors, and then under Communist Eastern Europe. They couldn’t expect our lives to compare.
No, but my grandfather sure did.
Just a bit from my mother when I was young ( 8-12 or so ).
She would sometimes go on rants on how we were “spoiled” ( her go-to word when she was mad at us ) “we don’t appreciate” the fact we live in a nice house with a big yard, blah blah blah. I say “blah blah blah” because there wasn’t any spoiled complaining on our part. I didn’t get it. In hindsight, it was just moments she was having a bad day and was wigged out and thought we had it too easy compared to her childhood of 7 people in a small house and parents that beat the crap out of them.
Oh, hell yes.
“When I was your age, I ate my vegetables.” In fairness, Mom grew up during the Depression. Vegetables were a luxury, but Mom’s fresh vegetables in those days (which were the only kind you could get, before frozen foods) were not the flavorless frozen crap she served nightly to my sister and I. Mom was so pleased when she got a fridge with a freezer; she could stock up on such “delicacies” as frozen corn, green beans, peas, and Brussels sprouts.
Of course, having a freezer to hold the above “delicacies,” meant that if I didn’t eat my boiled-the-crap-out-of-originally-frozen-and-thus-flavorless Brussels sprouts, Mom would remind me of the starving children in Biafra, who would just love to be able to eat Brussels sprouts.
Mom didn’t understand that nobody likes boiled-the-crap-out-of-originally-frozen-and-thus-flavorless Brussels sprouts.
The classic bratty response was, “Yeah? Name two!”
My parents are Boomers, and the only time they ever pulled that kind of thing on me was when I was demonstrating against something or other in college, and my Dad said, “You call that a protest? Why, when I was your age we occupied the Dean’s office and held a 7-day sit-in! With drugs! And our music was better, too!”
See, you’re blaming the freezer, but it’s not the freezer’s fault. The vegetables my mother cooked until they became flavorless mush (or worse, fart-smelling mush) were fresh and from the best vegetable-growing land in the world. Other people need to fight those who steal their name for wines: my people pursue those who steal it for vegetables.
Even wood will turn into mush if you boil it long enough.
Wait, what? Have I somehow missed nine world wars?!?
My mother was not a good cook at all in the earlier years of her motherhood…because her mother was even worse.
Vegetables were always overcooked and slathered in butter. Anything green was more gray when they got done with it. Meat was gray. Yes, really. Don’t even get me going on macaroni/pasta. You could mash it into a paste with a spoon and hang up wallpaper with it. Years later she still overboils pasta. She knows how I like it, but ‘Al Dente’ to her means overcook it and call it al dente. When it’s served to her properly she recoils “It’s way too hard…that’s no good for you that way”.
Needless to say, I was kinda’ scrawny till I hit my mid teens and had more autonomy over what I ate. 
Other than nostalgia, the only time I remember my parents saying “when I was your age” had to do with how they didn’t want me to be like them.
Mom: When I was your age, I was a spoiled brat. My mother didn’t make me do chores or anything. I don’t want you to grow up like that.
Dad: I didn’t study hard when I was your age and I have a job I don’t like. Study hard and go to college so you can have the career you want.
He’s right. We did and it was.
My father grew up very poor in the Depression, and it was worse because when he was little his family had a lot of money, which his mother lost after his father died.
Yet he never pulled this on us. We knew money was tight (but not as tight as it was for him) and I think he liked getting us reasonable things, which showed that he could afford it.
As for food, he never had to encourage me to eat, so I didn’t get the kids are starving in Europe bit (which was used after WW II) but I did get “you’re eating like the Russians are in New Jersey.”