Why do so many baby boomers blame everything on "alcoholic parents?"

Factual Questions
1

Whenever I hear a baby boomers (usually those toward the older end of the scale) questioned about bad behavior of theirs – be it excessive spending, distaste for lasting marriage, what have you – they almost never fail to cite their “alcoholic parents” as a reason/excuse for their own bad qualities.

Here’s why I’m confused: (a) Statistically, this would mean that something like 90% of the baby boomers’ parents’ generation were alcoholics, which seems unlikely and (b) I fail to see the connection between having had to live with adults that drank a lot and not solving your own personal problems by the time you’re well into middle age.

Now, I realize that not all baby boomers do this, but in my experience it’s been the vast majority of them. Why is this?

2

Can you expand a bit on this? Are you talking about people you know personally? 'Cause I’m not familiar with this phenomenon.

3

friend of mine has alcoholic parents, hasn’t phased him, infact its made him push himself harder to get over his bad habits and work hard on his family.

I hear baby boomers blaming parents for being to conservative a family, thus causing there problems in life. Bunch of hogwash, although some people need people to look up to in order to strive I suppose, and parents are an obvious choice.

4

Flippant answer: because everyone’s a victim these days.

Serious answer: Perhaps the discovery and coinage of the term Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in 1968 may have stuck in the minds of many of that generation, in much the same way as ADD has today. Considering that FAS’s symptoms include growth retardation, learning and behavioral problems, memory and attention deficits, and poor coordination, I think it’s easy to see how people might diagnose themselves and blame their “condition” on their “alcoholic parents”.

I’ve actually never heard of a baby boomer blaming alcoholic parents for their woes, even if they truly did have alcoholic parents. Is it possible that you just know an unusually high percentage of people who say that?

5

Is it possible that you just know an unusually high percentage of people who say that?

Possible, but how would I tell?

6

A more appropriate OP might have read "Why (aside from the obvious statistical shortcomings of my query) do so many of the tiny number of baby boomers I’ve queried blame everything on “alcoholic parents”?

Sorry Colinmarshall, but this is completely foreign to me as well.

7

There is also the Adult Children of Alcoholics movement, which is intended for, well, adult children of alcoholics. It’s a 12-step group like AA.

That said, I don’t have any experience with specific ACA groups, never having been to one. However, I have met lots of people who are members, and unlike Al-Anon, the tendency is to lay blame. “It’s not my fault I’m an asshole; it’s my parents’.” I’ve also met numerous people in that movement whose parents were not alcoholics, but who believed them to be on the basis of their own problems. (If that makes sense.) Sort of a reverse-engineered diagnosis.

This is not to deny that people do have parents who are alcoholics. Lord knows there are enough of us alkies to go around, and Lord knows the mayhem we can cause in our families. However, I’d say the problem isn’t in the absolute number of alcoholic parents as much as it is in the wish for one single thing to explain everything. And I can tell you it’s not just the Baby Boomers who are guilty of this.

Robin

8

Implied question #1: Are the baby boomer’s parents more alcoholic than other generations?

Probably. The boomers parents were the first generation of a massive number of middle class people with the disposable income to buy as much alcohol as they craved and the lack of concern for its effects. Sure, all generations looked down on the gutter-alcoholics, but the ‘functional alcoholics’ bloomed. These were the ones who got wasted at home every night or weekend and terrorized or emotionally blunted their family members and yet seemed to cope at the job or to the eyes of outsiders.
Implied question #2: Does having alcoholic parent(s) effect you now that you’re an adult?

Almost always. Coping skills, interpersonal relationships, dealing with emotions, reacting to authority, internalizing a life ethic… these are all learned skills which are mostly formed by imitating parents. And alcoholic parents will usually screw up passing on these skills. E.g., the alcholic parent manipulates everyone in the family to not talk about the propblems he or she is causing. And so, the child doesn’t learn how to appropriately confront someone who is causing problems.

Yes, a person does and can learn these skills from other sources, but what the parents give or don’t give is the baseline from which a person starts. Those who don’t recognize their shortcomings in these skills don’t go out of their way to make up for their deficits, and so, they are stunted in these skills.

Implied question #3: Does an adult child of an alcholic have the right to pass the blame for their deficits onto their parents?

Only to a point. If I only recently realized that my parents’ problems with alcoholism was the cause of my anger outbursts, then I can say, “Sorry for that outburst, my alcoholic parents never dealt with anger well, and so, neither do I. I’m going to try to do better.”

However, if I’ve known for years that my parents’ alcoholism was the root of my poor coping skills, and I never did anything about it, then yes, I do become responsible for not learning the appropriate skills (read a book, anger management workshops, counseling, 12 step groups, etc…).

Peace.

9

Maybe it’s because; blaming the parents, is the easiest way out?

My parents were great. Not alcoholics. Since my therapist can’t find anything else to blame my depession on, she suggested my parents must have been bad.

Bullshit. My troubles are my own fault. No-one else’s. People should start looking within themselves.

10

How did you go from the subset of older end baby boomers to the smaller subset of those who happened to have problems to the even smaller subset of those who actually talk about those problems to the yet smaller subset of those who attribute those problems to their parents’ alcoholism to “90%” of baby boomers?

Even allowing for a bit of exasperated hyperbole, this is GQ and your numbers seem way off.

Why do some people of any generation blame their parents for their troubles? Sometimes because one’s parents truly scar one’s life and sometimes because it is easier to shift blame than to accept responsibility.

Why is alcoholism the agent of choice for incurring that blame? Because alcoholism* is a known (if not always understood) agent that causes harm to individuals and families and it, by being an outside agent, allows one to simultaneously “blame” one’s parents without accusing them of malice (since they are, themselves, “victims” of the condition).

Why do so many people of your acquaintance who have problems make this accusation? I have no idea. The overwhelming majority of my acquaintances are boomers (several of whom are known to have had alcoholic parents) and I have never heard any of them blame any of their current problems on their parents’ alcoholism. (A few mention rough childhoods that they got over and a few have current problems that they do not blame on their parents. YMMV, obviously. Perhaps your experience is tied to the particular region and social status of your acquaintances.)

*Drunkenness has been known and condemned for ages and it was, actually, the prevalence of drunkenness (and the disproportionate amount of family income spent on alcohol up until the 1920s) that led to the passage of Prohibition in the U.S. Alcoholism has been regarded as a disease (rather than a character flaw) for a fairly brief period in history and only became widely recognized as an illness in the late 1970s.

11

Well I think it’s fair to say that compared to previous generations, baby boomers are more inclined to blame problems like divorce or compulsive spending on their parents but part of that is just that previous generations didn’t have as much opportunity to get divorced or compulsively spend.

The Baby Boom is the generation that spawned self help as an industry and made councelling and therapy so huge and the “me” decade and so on. Before the baby boom, white North America was very different and people were not inclined to criticize their parents as much and even if they did, they did not have a huge media culture in which to do it. Part of the self help movement was to point out that repressing family traumas can be very destructive. So it was an intrinsic part of the self-help idea that you should not be ashamed to talk about things like alcoholic parents and that if you were reluctant to talk about your problems it was because you were in denial about them and therefore dysfuntional. With the help of popular media, I think that idea really trickled down to people feeling that if they didn’t have any skeletons to talk about they were just not looking hard enough. I think it all really came to a peak sometime in the late 80s when the tv schedule was packed with confessional talk shows and tons of celebrities were coming out as incest survivors. Around the time Roseann was on the cover of People magazine with the headline about her being an incest survivor, I think the trend started to swing back the other way so that now there are a lot of people who think even mentioning that your parents were alcoholics or that your family was dysfunctional is a copout and that it simply can’t be valid because “everyone comes from a dysfunctional home.” Now it is the style for people like Dr. Phil to tell everyone to “get real” and to celebrate “the Greatest Generation” and there are plenty of baby boomers and other people who are happy to eat that up because it’s such a relief after the years of Geraldo and Oprah making everyone admit their parents were awful.

In other words, it was a trend, and like most trends there were a lot of people who blindly wanted to fit in with the trend and who still hang on to it. On the other hand, the new trend is to accuse people of learned helplessness and a victim mentality and there are a lot of people who follow that one blindly too. Almost anything looks stupid once it’s out of style.