Opinion Today: Why my generation dreads having babies
"I want to suggest that there's another reason my generation dreads parenthood: We've held our own parents to unreachable standards, standards that deep down, maybe, we know we ourselves would struggle to meet."
I came of age with the internet — with Tumblr, Snapchat, blogs and YouTube. It was on the internet, and in therapy, that I and a whole generation learned to tell a certain kind of story. This kind of story begins with a problem. It could be depression. An eating disorder. Low self-esteem. Maybe the problem manifested at work or at school. But to tell the story, you need to trace the thread back, search for its deepest roots. So you look for the source in your family, your childhood, your parents. Was there a trauma you missed? Was there a family relationship that could be the source? Sometimes that search reveals physical, sexual or emotional abuse. But often and increasingly, it seems to yield vaguer results: Familial toxicity. Feeling ignored or misunderstood. Believing a sibling was always favored. One of the results of this narrative is that adult children have become harder on our parents, as I argue in a guest essay this week. We have higher expectations, and we expect more from parents than ever before, often while offering less in return. (Certainly the days of "Honor thy father and thy mother," at least, are gone.) And when they don't meet our expectations, we have recourse: We can go no contact. The belief that our adult struggles have roots in the events of our childhoods is an old standby of psychological theory. In the 20th century, autism and schizophrenia were often blamed on bad mothers. But the internet is an amplifier, and it turned up the volume on this story a hundredfold. I learned the story — and how to interpret my life through its lens — in part via Tumblr. Now it's all over Instagram and TikTok, where, as one content creator suggests, childhood trauma "isn't just being in an abusive household, being in a car accident or having a parent pass" but can also be caused by things like "feeling unseen, unheard." In my essay, I draw a connection between the high expectations my generation has of our parents and our reluctance to have children. Is it possible, I ask, that when childhood trauma seems ubiquitous, parenting seems unbearable? Could it be that my generation's fear of failing our children is outweighing our desire to have them?
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