What vibe was in your house when growing up?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I mean what was the attitude around the dinner table like? I.e., were you free to pretty much discuss anything under the sun? Or was it more of an angry thing, a place of tension where you had to walk on egg shells?

Also, in your home, were you allowed to make yourself a sandwich if you were hungry? Or did you have to get permission first? Or was it simply out of the question (until dinner)?

In my case, I recall being returned to my “real” family by some people at around 2 or 3 and taking a seat at the dinner table for the first time, and thinking, “Oh boy, dad is going to lead us in wonderful discussions about the world we live in. This is great! Eating some food and learning about everything at the same time!”

But he didn’t. He was a caveman through and through. :mad:

And that was very disappointing; especially because he was somewhat menacing, with his tattooed forearms out there … and using his thumbs to slop-up his chow on his fork while acting all intimidating. The “strong silent type” I guess is how he saw himself. (Though in fairness to him, he lived through the Depression … and was a blue collar guy in a tough, dumpy town.)

Later on, after the state people caught wind of his unique child-rearing ways :eek: and took me and my siblings out of there, and after having been placed in various “facilities,” I was placed in a more permanent foster home. But even though these folks were doing the whole Christian lifestyle thing, there too, there wasn’t any warm fuzzy feeling in the air, especially around the dinner table.

Also, I remember once getting caught by both of these (Christian) parents while stealing a couple of cookies from the cookie jar, and them becoming unglued over it. :mad:

And so the thing is, while I don’t wish to sound too much like a big cry baby by relating all of these personal things; I would very much like to hear how the general home environment is with you folks now and how it was when you were kids, and, if you have children, whether or not you do things differently with them than how you were treated as a child?

As always, Thanks Much(!!) for your time and comments, if any. :slight_smile: I’ll check back later on! :cool:

P.S. I do strongly believe that if you don’t want your child becoming a serial killer or something, then you need to make it a point from the git-go to make them know that talking about things openly with one another is a good thing, lest they turn inward (where bad things go on). Psychologists don’t seem to place enough importance on this matter, IMO.

2

We didn’t talk much around the dinner table when growing up, but talked openly about stuff all the time. Dinner time was TV time! We sat at the kitchen bar and watched TV. We were allowed snacks any time, except for about two hours before dinner.

It was generally the same for my son growing up. Except the snacking - my husband at the time frowned on it because my son was kind of chubby. So he would get in trouble for sneaking food.

The general atmosphere in both was one of openness and the ability to talk about any subject was encouraged.

I’m sorry your upbringing was so stifling - but you can look forward to things being different in your own family!

4

Total and utter fear. You never knew would could set my stepfather off. Our meals were eaten in silence and as quickly as possible.

From the age of 10 on, I ate alone in my room.

5

My parents were well-educated, civilized people at open war with each other. My older sister was a white-hot ball of anger and teenage angst. We had to sit at the dinner table together at dinner. Making yourself a snack ahead of time was absolutely forbidden. Children were not to be in the kitchen at all except at mom’s invitation.

So we had a kind of hellish version of the idealized family dinner. We would talk about the events of our day and what we did at school, and mom and dad would make sly insults at each other and accuse each other of various transgressions that would be minor in normal people’s houses, but were high crimes in our house. To this day I’m still surprised that some people don’t fly into a rage when they find crumbs on the margarine.

The way I remember the vibe in our house was: Mom wanted us to stay out of her way. Dad would yell at us and make us do chores. My older sister was a honeyed trap, who would offer to take you someplace fun and then make you pay for it with your meager allowance, or take you to the beach and then order you under big waves. Once she could drive, she delighted in making us get out of the car and stand in parking spaces until she could get there. (Okay, she never really did it, but she always kidded about it with great verisimilitude). And she was scary.

Mom moved out when I was nine, so I don’t remember a whole lot about her vibe when we lived together. I do remember her snapping “You’re standing in my light” almost any time I approached her. I know that she hugged me at least once, because I have a picture of it.

Dad was always good for fun, though, too. He spent a lot of time with us and took us all kinds of interesting places. The vibe in the house improved a lot after Mom moved out. Then a few years later, when my big sister moved out, it actually became pleasant at home.

6

Pretty open and friendly. My mom always insisted that we have family dinners in the kitchen, though (unless there was a ballgame or The Simpsons on, in which case we could sometimes convince her to let us eat in the living room watching TV), and my sister and I used to get in lots of fights about who was kicking whom under the table.

Until I was in high school or so, I had to ask a parental unit (preferably dad) for permission to have a soda or cookies or something sweet. Making myself a sandwich when I was hungry was encouraged. Mom and I used to have conversations like this:

Mom: Are you hungry?
Me: Well, kinda, yeah.
Mom: We have tortillas and cheese in the fridge. Make yourself a quesadilla.

>Five minutes later<

Mom: Oh, I see. You’re only hungry if I’m going to make something for you.

My mom is sneaky.

7

I think it was a Hitachi Wand, and one of those cheapo plastic torpedo-shaped ones with a light in it. Why there was a light in it, I don’t know. Both were my sisters tho.

What?

oooohhh… misunderstood the thread title…
:eek:

8

We ate at the dinner table. We didn’t discuss anything. Dinner is for eating. Finish it and get on with what you were doing before the meal. Also in our family if you didn’t eat, the food was gone. The talkative would find all the serving dishes empty.

9

We always had family dinners at the table (my mom would have considered TV at dinner a high crime; she wouldn’t let us answer the phone either). There are 5 kids in our family, so it was a bit loud. We were relaxed and kind of silly. Lots of talking.

We could have snacks, but I think we were supposed to ask; otherwise every cookie would have been gone in 6 seconds. And we couldn’t have snacks too close to dinner. I remember raiding the freezer for ice chips a lot; I had a thing for ice chips then. We made cookies a lot (I was stunned when I got married and discovered that my husband couldn’t make cookies. What did he eat growing up then? My brothers made cookies about twice a week, I’m pretty sure). My mom used to make a ton of bean and cheese burritos that would live in the fridge for us to eat. With ketchup. :slight_smile:

Soda was strictly rationed in our house; for a treat, we were allowed to share a can with a sibling. This lasted until my brothers discovered 7-11 and Big Gulps.
I guess we’re pretty similar now; we talk a lot around the table. I let the kids have healthy snacks when they’re hungry until around 5, with one exception. My oldest daughter will frequently leave half of her breakfast behind; when she does, I tell her that she’s not getting any snacks or extra food until lunch. She understands the rule.

10

It was pretty okay until I refused to complete a frustrating homework assignment or go on a school trip. Then I became the subject of a full-scale psychological breakdown campaign.

11

Well mostly the vibes in our house came from German bombs.

Mealtimes?? lemme think…ah yes I remember we had one of those, 1944 I think it was.

We had dripping butties or should I say butty, what a grand time was had by all.

I recall mumsy saying that one day we’d have a dripping butty EACH and that in the not to distant future we’d also have knives, forks and spoons which we sprogs had allus thought were jewels.

Aaaah the good old days…my arse

12

We all ate at the table and had calm discussions about our day. The only time there was a problem, was when one of the kids didn’t want to eat what was made. We had to ask for snacks, but the answer was always yes, unless you were asking for sweets, you’d just wasted food, or it was too close to meal time.

Once we got older, we stopped eating at the table, and people could get snacks without asking.

13

My parents are basically nice people but, for them as for me, making conversation is exhausting. We were mostly silent around the dinner table, and occasionally someone stumbled upon a topic that, we were all surprised to find, we could talk about for a few minutes without too much effort.

Away from the dinner table, I always found the vibe sort of tense. One never knew at what second one parent or the other would explode and start lecturing me about how lazy and messy I was and how I’d better “get rid of that junk” right away–or drop whatever I had been doing so I could do what THEY thought I should do. Junk ran the gamut from piles of drawings to books to crochet projects and expensive dolls. I was pretty damn jumpy whenever my parents were home (fortunately, I was always a latchkey kid, so I had some peace) and still to this day grit my teeth when my mother refers to personal possessions as “junk.” There was never any possibility of talking back or explaining; they were the parents and I was the child, and I had to do what they said. My dad, especially when I was in high school, was just spoiling to be the parent of a rebellious teenager, and even eventually resorted to making things up (mistaking a curled up dried leaf in my car for cigarette ash, for example).

It’s not the same as always being tense because your stepfather might go psycho and start beating you, but it was tense all the same.

Everything relaxed when I got my first college degree. Since I finished the Ph.D., they’re positively fond of me.

14

Mealtime was a bad time at our house, growing up.
If you didn’t finish all of whatever it was you put on your plate, Step-dad would begin the beatings.
If someone didn’t eat all of what was on their plate, EVERYONE was beaten.
Along with the one that didn’t eat who got the first beating, mom, sisters and brothers also got it.
He didn’t play favorites.
You had to take at least a little of everything that was offered, or you would get into trouble for that, too.

Step-dad was a no-good, worthless drunk, who was a contractor and a farmer.
The kids, seven of us, did all the farm work, though.
He was just the ‘supervisor’ when there was any farm work to be done and he happened to be home.
If dinner was at 6pm, you had to be cleaned up and at the table right then.
Not a few minutes before, not a few minutes after.
RIGHT THEN.
No matter how hard you worked in the fields that day, no matter how hard you worked in the barn, or the pump house, or in the pasture, you had to be ON TIME.
If not, the beatings would commence BEFORE dinner, and then that meal was thrown out to the pigs, and no one ate.
Except the pigs.
No one was allowed to eat anything until the next meal.

There were no snacks at our house.
With 7 kids, snacks were just something that were NOT available.
Too expensive.
Apparently, the cost of said snacks would have cut into his money for booze.
Og, I’m SO glad he’s now dead!

After I got married and we had our daughter, I made sure to NEVER repeat the things step-dad did to us.
Mealtime at our house is wonderful!
You can talk about anything, no matter what it is.
If you don’t like something that is served, that’s cool. You are NOT required to eat it OR taste it.
If you don’t finish what is on your plate, that’s cool, too. No problem!

See? History, at least in THIS case, does NOT repeat itself!

15

Was your stepdad a veteran? Punishing the group for the actions of one person is a time-honored technique used in boot camp to maintain unit cohesion. Although clearly your stepdad couldn’t have cared less about unit cohesion; he just wanted an excuse to beat you all. :mad:

I don’t mean to slam those who have served (especially not on this Memorial Day weekend), but quite a few men of former generations, especially from nonfunctional families, got their only lessons about discipline from military training, and it had to lead to a lot of over-the-top abuse.

16

No, he was not, Beware of Doug. Although one of my brothers did go to West Point and had a wonderful career in the Army, and another brother ended up as an Army Ranger in Vietnam.

We didn’t turn out bad at all.
Considering.

17

They might have found Army life to be a haven of rational behavior compared to home.

18

My mom and sisters and I rarely actually sat down to a meal. My mom had been raised by a very physically and mentally abusive woman. My grandmother was a wonderful cook but she used food as a form of torture. Thanks to her, my mom never learned to cook and she has some major issues with food and mealtimes. When my mom did make us a meal, it was usually a casserole (something even my mom can’t screw up). Mealtimes were fun and we would talk about whatever came up. Sometimes my sisters and I would misbehave and my mom would punish us at the table. One time, she made the three of us sit side by side. She then braided our hair together and made us finish the meal without pulling each other’s hair. Of course that didn’t work as we immediately started laughing, which caused some hair tugs. Another time, my middle sister didn’t want to finish her eggs ( I think my older sister cooked that meal) so my mom pushed (gently) my sister’s face in her plate. When she came up, my sister had scrambeled eggs sticking out of her mouth, nose, hair, and stuck to her glasses. My mom didn’t make her finish her food after that.

So anyway, I think my mom’s issues with food made our rare mealtimes more enjoyable because she didn’t want us to be afraid of food - as she was. Too bad we only had one or two non-holiday meals a year.

We were allowed to eat whenever we wanted, whatever we wanted - with a few exceptions. Soda and yogurt were my mom’s only. My sister’s and I didn’t really care though. We mostly only drank milk - the three of us would generally finish off a gallon a day.
My mom actually preferred that we make our own meals, not only because it made it so she didn’t have to do it, but also because it allowed us to find that we actually liked cooking. When she was in the kitchen, she was tense and it made us tense. So we all learned to cook at a very young age and we all still like to cook. My mother still is petrified of the kitchen.

When I was 12, I went to my first of 9 foster homes. All my foster parents provided actual sit down meals. Only two allowed us to snack at all and only one of those allowed us to take one without asking (but we were still only allowed one per day). Three of my foster homes actually had pleasant meals. We were allowed to talk about whatever we wanted and we would take as long to eat as we wanted, as long as the meal was cleaned up before we went to bed. The other six foster homes didn’t allow talking about anything at all.

One of my foster homes was very unpleasant - except for meal time. My foster parents ate at the kitchen table and all the kids ate in the dining room. They didn’t care what we did as long as we cleaned up our messes.

My last foster home had three rules:
No answering the phone during dinner
The TV will only be on if the News was on
No singing at the table
Dinner at this house would have been great if my foster mother hadn’t been a worse cook than my mom.

19

Beware of Doug…Yes. You are exactly right.
They left as soon as they were able to leave, age-wise.
They have said many times that the military was a breeze, compared to living at home!
Neither one EVER regretted leaving and going into the military.

20

I am the youngest of five children. From the age of about eight, it was just my mother and me at home. We got along well, and the vibe in the house was wonderful. there wasn’t much money, but we got by OK.

An example: One evening we caught a bus downtown. We ate Chinese food and went to a first run movie. After the movie we caught a bus back to our neighborhood and went for ice cream. That was the fist time I ate pistachio. I remember this night like it was last week. It was forty five years ago. The movie was “the Music Man” with Robert Preston. I was nine years old.

Mom passeed away seven years ago. I still miss her every day.

21

Mealtimes with my family were great. We almost always gathered at the dining table -except Sunday night, we had a bath, got into our PJs and watched Disney movies (Or Countdown, an unbearably loud to my ears rock music show) while having a sort of nursery supper, eggs either boiled or poached and toast soldiers with vegemite. I loved Sundays! Anyway, regardless of the Sunday digression, dinners were usually lovely. Mum and Dad were both good cooks, one of the kids set the table - that was mostly my job - and we always had vibrant discussion about what books we were reading, or culture and current events. Mum worked hard to give us good table manners.

The thing about the vibe in my house was that both my parents had absolutely nightmarish childhoods. Both my grandfathers were abusive in different but entirely evil ways, and my grandmothers were passive and/or abusive themselves. Mum and I had a few issues because I’d trigger bad reactions in her and she’d end up screaming at me. But she recognised this, and that it was seriously damaging my trust, so she took us off to family therapy, and it was pretty good after that.

My parents worked very, very hard not to repeat history. They, however, also had a lot to work through and did tend to have loud fights fairly often. They did explain pretty early to us that this didn’t mean they didn’t love each other, and that they didn’t hide them from us because that would be dishonest. We could have used a little more dishonesty, though, as I knew far too much about how horrible our finances were, far too young, and have a lot of anxiety.

I give them a B- for performance and an A+ for effort.