As with many of my threads, a post on reddit has inspired me to ask this question.
The OP in that thread wondered if he and his siblings were an assholes for always talking about how horrible their homeschooling experience was in front of their parents, knowingly triggering butthurt reactions out of them. Part of me thinks that they are assholes for doing this. It must be tiring for the parents to have to listen to the same ole whining about old shit from twenty years ago (or however long ago it happened).
But most of me thinks they aren’t assholes. It’s their parents who are really the assholes. They were assholes for inflicting a horrible experience on their kids for stupid, self-serving purposes and not course-correcting when the signs of failure became apparent. And they are also assholes for not apologizing for it. Perhaps if they were to do this, their kids would stop bringing up “old shit” and everyone could move on.
And I totally understand the need to bring up the “old shit” that happened to you. Whenever my siblings and I get together, it is hard for us to not talk about the shittier parts of our childhood. We have enough emotional distance from these incidents that we can talk about them with some humor. Actually a lot of humor! But I think the humor is largely a coping mechanism. There’s nothing really funny about many of our stories. We’ll sometimes try to share the “humorous” trip down memory lane with our parents, knowing they will react defensively:
“You guys are always making up stories! That never happened! And if it did happen, you deserved it! It wasn’t that bad anyway!”
I think that if they want us to stop bringing up these stories (and it’s always the same stories), they should just acknowledge their wrongdoing and apologize.
Mind you, we also talk about the good times, which I can tell fills my parents with warm and fuzzies. For the most part, we have forgiven them for being imperfect. We just haven’t let them off the hook for every single thing.
I’m curious what you think about this. Do you think adult kids should refrain from casually reminding their parents about the harmful decisions they made years ago, or do you think this is fair game–just one more thing a person signs up for when they become a parent?
Tricky. And not all siblings have the same point of view, or even got the same treatment. IMHO history can’t be changed. So you live with it and deal with your parents accordingly. If that means shutting them out then so be it. I don’t see the point of bringing up the past again and again.
In public, Rude. In private, Not Rude. That partly defines the boundaries, but in all situations, it depends in the good-natured spirit within which the conversation is taking place.
If the kids bring it up in the context of trying to address the issues and get some resolution, and have a sincere conversation, then not an asshole. Parents have an obligation to try to give the kids of validation and closure, if possible. If the parents can’t do that, then it’s on them. Generally speaking of course.
If the kids are bringing it up to shake their heads and laugh, but part of the group is the target of the humor and they’re not laughing along, then I think they’re being assholes. Laughing at something and dismissing the others hurt as it just being a joke, is crappy.
Do you know if the OP of that thread and his siblings have kids of their own? In many cases that changes how you feel about your parents’ parenting skills a lot. Doesn’t make you think they were perfect, but you realize that parents can never be perfect.
On the other hand, a good approach might be for the kids to say something like “I’m never going to home school my kids. It didn’t work well for me.” and leave it at that. I doubt apologies would make the kids feel all that much better, but doing it right for their kids would.
I don’t know if the last sentence refers to the kids or the parents.
Imagine a situation where two siblings are talking to each other about how their father once smacked one of them so hard that bodily wastes were expelled on the kitchen floor. After umptity-ump years, they are now able to see the humor in the incident, as fucked up as it is They knowingly hold this conversation within earshot of their father and they do this knowing that he isn’t going to find it funny.
Are you saying that it is crappy for them to laugh about this incident when they know he always reacts defensively whenever they bring it up? Cuz I can see it being crappy only if he has owned up to the fuck-uppedness of what he did and has sincerely apologized for it. If there has been closure, then yeah, don’t keep joking about it. But the way I see it, you get to joke around as much as you want if the person who hurt you refuses to say he’s sorry.
As someone who had a pretty messed up childhood, and has three sisters who we process this stuff together through laughter, we have never done what you described. We laugh together in private or we talk seriously with our parents. What you describe seems passive aggressive. They’re laughing as if it’s a joke, the dad is hurt by the laughter, but he knows they’re really expecting an apology?
If theyre laughing as a if it’s funny and one of the group doesn’t find it funny, well, that’s not cool. If they want an apology, have the serious talk. If he’s not capable of giving the apology due to his own limitations, I think jabbing at him when they know it’s received badly is small.
Either it’s a joke and and making someone the butt of the joke is lousy, or it’s serious and they should then ask for the real conversation. This scenario just seems like payback.
I obviously don’t know the details of your current situation or your back story with your parents, so I apologize in advance if I’m over-generalizing or reading things wrong.
Fake humor just seems like passive aggression, and whether or not that’s rude, it doesn’t seem like it’s bringing any comfort for you. What you’re doing isn’t getting you what you want, and you’re just spinning your wheels. It’s not clear whether you’ve tried having a serious conversation with your parents about the parts of the past that are still painful, but perhaps that’s a possibility. They might let their guard down if they don’t feel like they’re just being jabbed.
If you’ve tried, though, and they’re not willing or able to engage with you genuinely, then unfortunately the choices are harder, but you will at least have some clarity. At that point, they’re effectively telling you that they aren’t going to give you what you’re looking for, and then you can decide what to do with that information.
Maybe the lingering hurt is such that you would decide to cut them off, or strictly limit your interactions. In plenty of families, the toxicity is high enough that that’s the right result. Or maybe you can find closure on the past in some other way, possibly through your siblings or through therapy, let go of your aspirations as to how your parents should behave, and build some different sort of relationship with your parents based on your understanding of who they really are now. But the middle ground you describe, where you’re repeatedly taking shots at them and they’re repeatedly dismissing your point of view, sounds awful for you.
It’s rude for the adult children to browbeat their parents. But it is beyond rude to raise your children in sub-optimal conditions if you can do better.
The parents created this rudeness in their family culture. If the adult children are mature adults, they’ll keep their anger to themselves. It seems they’re not mature adults, and their parents are the proximate cause. That the parents reap what they’ve sown is not unexpected.
As previous posters have pointed out, it’s difficult to give an exact answer without knowing the context in which they are reminding their parents of their fails and their motivations for doing this. I agree that it could be rude, or lt’s say, inappropriate, to do it in such a way as to make it a public spectacle, for example, but as some general principles go, I would point out that:
There is nothing wrong with children, either dependent or adult, calling out their parents on perceived wrongs, pointing out what they are (were) not happy about as regards their upbringing, and expecting a reasoned discussion on the matter.
I don’t agree with the traditional value of “filial piety”, I.E. that you are bound to “respect” parents (I put the word respect in quotation marks because parents and children should respect each other; what I disagree with is the “respect” that amounts to treating the parent as a sacred cow, or respectively of expecting a child to give deferential treatment to their parents. Good parents should be appreciated, but parents are no better than their children. The fact that you’re raising them and supporting them, etc. is irrelevant. You owe it to them because you chose to have them and put them in the dependent situation. If you think a person who did not force you to have them should somehow compensate or pay you for having and raising them, you should not have kids.
I have to disagree with this. Whether you have kids of your own is absolutely irrelevant. Parents should be answerable for how they treat their kids. Of course everyone makes mistakes, but that doesn’t mean that you get to make any mistake you want and not answer for it. You shouldn’t have to “walk a mile in someone’s shoes” to be competent to criticize them. Parents get a pass in society in this regard because we are indoctrinated to “respect” (I.E. act deferentially) to them, and nobody else does. Imagine that a man who was being disrespectful or physically or emotionally abusive to his wife, and when she called him out on it, he said, "you can’t know how it feels to be a husband and have to deal with you? Or if a single man called him out on it and he said, “Wait until you have a wife of your own, then come and tell me what I should or should not do”. Or if a politician being criticized by a member of the public said “You try being a politician, see how it is, and then criticize my actions”. It wouldn’t fly. So it shouldn’t fly for parents either. If someone thinks they did the best they could in a given situation, the onus should be on them to explain why they think so and not to assume that, because they are parents, they must have done the best they can and are above responsibility.
So if it’s just a matter of wanting an explanation of their actions and perhaps wanting them to take responsibility for them, no, there is nothing wrong with that per se.
No, they are laughing because laughter is how they’ve been taught to deal with shit. Their parents were the ones who taught them to do this.
The siblings take strolls down memory lane regardless who is within earshot (within reason, of course). They just don’t hold back to spare their parents’ feelings because their parents never held back to spare their feelings when their were raising them. It is the family way.
I would not say their laughter is passive-aggressive because the siblings are not laughing to elicit an apology. They aren’t expecting an apology. But they would stop laughing about it if their parents were to say something like, “Hey, I just want to let you know that I’m sorry I did that. I really am. And I’d appreciate if you would stop bringing it up around me because it reminds me how much of an ass I was back then.”
But instead of saying this, the parents just add absurdity to the already absurd situation by denying it ever happened. Of course that just makes these twisted siblings laugh even more. Laughing feels a whole lot better than crying.
So no, I don’t agree that the siblings are the crappy ones in this equation. They shouldn’t even have to ask for a fucking apology. They would only be crappy if they received that apology but still kept bringing it up to their parents.
Of course it’s rude. It’s more than rude, it’s cruel.
You’re right and completely wrong.
Of course the parents were assholes. You know what? EVERY PARENT FUCKS UP. We’re all assholes. Just because they’re assholes doesn’t mean the kid can’t be an asshole too. Someone else being an asshole does not excuse you being an asshole.
Sorry, but the notion that you have some sort of “Right” tocriticize your parents for things they did twenty years ago misses the point. In 99.9% of cases what you have a right to do is pointless and cruel. Just because you have a right to do something doesn’t mean you should do it.
What the hell is the point of this? Are you going to change the past? Is there a time machine handy for the parents to go back and alter how they did things? No? Then this verbal assault is basically just to make the parents feel bad, when they already feel bad. That’s the classic asshole move.
I don’t know if it’s rude, but it doesn’t sound healthy. Sounds like dysfunction on top of existing dysfunction. If someone brutalized you as a child and hasn’t sincerely apologized for it, then ISTM that the healthy thing to do is cut them out of your life, parent or not. Keeping them in your life, but routinely laughing about the brutalization in front of them, sounds like a very unhealthy habit for the one doing the laughing.
Children: say what hurt you when you were a child.
Parents: listen, repeat back what you heard.
Children: say what you were needing then that you didn’t get.
Parents: listen, repeat back what you heard.
Parents: say what you feel hearing all this.
Children: listen repeat back what you heard.
and so on.
If neither set of people have the skills to speak honestly and directly about pain (you can bet the parents have some pain too), nothing different is going to happen. Cruel, rude? That’s irrelevant.
Quoting for truth, but the rest of the post seems spot-on as well.
As a parent…you only get one pass at life, usually only one pass at the parenthood phase of life. There’s tons of conflicting advice books & videos that you can shift the blame to if you’re resourceful, but in the end your instincts as a parent are going to dictate your style. Parents have a lot more going on that just making sure the kid doesn’t die. They’ve got bills to pay, a roof to keep, a pantry to stock, a career to develop so all the rest remains possible, a spouse to pay attention to…and a dozen other things that have escaped attention and will blow up at random points in the 20 or so years of this process. You make decisions in the moment based on the information in front of you. Sometimes you read that information to mean your kids must be homeschooled (having sentenced my own kids to public school I can’t say homeschooling is a foolish choice), sometimes It means something else. But every parenting choice is a door to a hallway that leads to more doors, and you often can’t go back so you just pick, often blindly, from the choices presented to you. When things slow down you can look back and see ‘how you did’ at guessing blindly and swinging at the endless series of curve balls life threw at you. But you’re a fool to think you did a good or bad job overall (extreme instances on both ends notwithstanding).
As a son, I eventually found it impossible to be nice to mom and her keeper, so I just stopped coming around. This is not so much to do with anything that happened when I was a kid, rather, their behavior toward me and mine after I reached adulthood. Now that I’ve done their job and can sort of see the world as they did when I was a child, I have mercy on them. But that’s all in the distant past now, and people grow, learn, and change–even people who have earned their parent badge. But they don’t care for who I’ve become, I don’t care for who they’ve become, and although we both feel the loss it is nothing compared to the suffering we’d all go through if we hung out.
So my point? You can’t always control not wanting to be civil and kind, but you can control where you are and who you’re with.
“Remember when Mom taught us that the ancient Egyptians and dinosaurs coexisted? And we made the mistake of sharing this knowledge with the neighbor kids and they stopped playing with us for awhile?”
I don’t see how it is rude to say something like this in front of Mom. If Mom wishes her kids would stop bringing it up, she can use her words and ask them to stop…which might then open up a constructive dialogue where all parties discuss their feelings and get closure. But ss long as she denies them that closure by denying it ever happened, then they have every right to keep bringing it up.
Did you turn a blind-eye to your kids’ illiteracy to keep them away from the evil influences of public school?
Did you smack your kids so hard that they shat themselves at the dinner table?
These are the kind of parenting fails I am talking about. I refuse to believe that every parent does shit like this. Yes, every parent makes mistakes. But I don’t consider run-of-the-mill mistakes “fails”. Something like locking a kid out of the house for several hours in the dead of winter as punishment isn’t a run-of-the mill mistake that every parent makes. It is a major fail. If a parent who makes such a fail doesn’t want to be reminded of this fail, then it is on them to be the mature one and apologize. It is not on the kid to be the mature one, IMHO.
I think there are gradations of assholery. Abusing children is the very worst kind of asshole move . Laughing at a child abuser in front of the child abuser is nowhere near as bad, but I guess I will concede this kind of behavior is somewhere on the asshole spectrum. That only makes sense in a world where everyone is an asshole. (I don’t think we inhabit such a world, but obviously you do.)
I welcome anyone who I have harmed to laugh at me and laugh hard. If I don’t want to hear that laughter, all I have to do is stop being an asshole and apologize.
I think the people who do this kind of stuff are just whiners. It’s one thing if it happened a year ago and you’re still a kid. Once you are old enough to drink you need to get over stuff that happened to you. You’re not doing it to he funny you’re doing it as a way to bitch about your parents and your crappy childhood in a passive aggressive way. My sister tries to do this shit occasionally and I just pretend I don’t remember and my mom buys into it and tries to get absolution from me where I also pretend I don’t remember. The past is in the past move on.
If one of my kids wants to ask about something, such as “Dad, why did you do such and such. . .”, then I’m fine with that. It would be very risky for one of them to flat out accuse me of some sort of malfeasance in their upbringing: “You were always gone.” Yes, that was called earning a living.
Similarly, snipped quote of post I agree with 100%.
Another thing seems likely to me the particular theme in the original example, home schooling, is presumably a pre-existing burr under the saddle of many people on a left leaning forum. They say their homeschooling was horrible and parents knew at a point it was a mistake but didn’t change course, well that’s gotta be 100% literally true as per the complaint, amiright?. Perhaps in theory we’re assuming it’s some entirely valid complaint. Later on an alternative hypothetical was given, ‘literally slapped the shit out of them’ which even if exaggerated by the kids in memory is still clear 100% parent fault. But in a lot of cases the room for opinion what was wrong in parents’ behavior is significant and the audience’s pre-dispositions are going to matter. How about kids complaining that ‘the loopy far left views our parents indoctrinated us in we later realized made us miss opportunities and have trouble competing in the real world’ ? Maybe the premise that the parents were entirely at fault would be questioned more in that case, on this forum at least.
Also competing for most ridiculous concept I’ve heard lately on the internet, which is really saying something, the implication in an earlier post that you don’t gain useful perspective on your complaints about your own parents by raising kids yourself.
Bottom line it’s fine to sit down at some point with your parents and air your serious grievances, if you have them. Their response might satisfy you or not. But you’re definitely just an asshole to criticize or tease them in a hurtful way about it from there on indefinitely if they won’t give you the response you’re looking for.
Family relationships are funny in that often people will just harp on the same past grievances over and over rather than just separate themselves from people they feel have done them wrongs which demand certain amends the wrongdoers, in their view, refuse to make.