[I]t still seems increasingly likely that millennials will have the highest rate of childlessness of any generational cohort in American history.There are plenty of plausible explanations for the trend.... I suspect there’s some truth in all of these explanations. But I think there’s another reason, too, one that’s often been overlooked. Over the past few decades, Americans have redefined “harm,” “abuse,” “neglect” and “trauma,” expanding those categories to include emotional and relational struggles that were previously considered unavoidable parts of life. Adult children seem increasingly likely to publicly, even righteously, cut off contact with a parent, sometimes citing emotional, physical or sexual abuse they experienced in childhood and sometimes things like clashing values, parental toxicity or feeling misunderstood or unsupported.This cultural shift has contributed to a new, nearly impossible standard for parenting.... So 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.
Emphasis added.
I remember a few years ago hearing a woman I know describe her work as "healing trauma," knowing that her clients were well-to-do women in the suburbs. She and others like her were training them to think of their lives as traumatic, when in fact they were plausibly among the most comfortable lives anyone was living anywhere on Earth or at any time in history.
That can't be healthy.
6 comments:
We'd all do well to consider life lessons that went awry in our upbringing, so we can improve how we deal with problems. But that's a far cry from explaining every failure of courage, honesty, persistence, imagination, or generosity as the inevitable result of "trauma" that perfectly ordinary people experienced in perfectly ordinary lives.
Every other animal struggles to survive. That is true for most of human existence, think The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. For the first time in human history, for a lot of us there is no famine or pestilence or war. No hungry wolf at the door.
But there is a biological imperative to look for threats. Finding none, we invent them.
We should not criticise our parents until our own children are grown. My assessment of them when I was 60 was different from when I was 20.
BTW, I agree with Robert's assessment. We seem to have an equilibrium of mood and anxiety that we revert to whatever our circumstances, a level of bouyancy that is installed, or perhaps learned quite early in life. If we don't have something big to worry about, we worry about the biggest thing left, One analogy would be those stacks of cafeteria plates that stay at the same level no matter how many we take off.
So is the concept that it doesn't matter, then, if we are looking for threats at Starbucks or in a war zone? We're just hardwired to look for X number of threats, so we'll find them however we can?
That doesn't seem right. One of the really helpful things about motorcycle riding for me has been that it provides real threats, which gives me a rational place for the threat-watching I learned in Iraq (where there were also real threats). I think a lot of PTSD is finding that the threat-response is maladjusted to the safety and comfort of American life; riding horses or motorcycles can go a long way to making the response rational and appropriate, rather than disordered.
No matter how wealthy you are, and Americans by and large are extremely wealthy, life has some pointy bits that you can't buy your way out of: sickness, sin, loss, death. Are those the sorts of things the clients were talking about, or mere disappointments?
It's true that genuine trauma is possible even in America. On the other hand, death especially is awful but as normal as it is possible for life to be. Should we regard even the death of a loved one as a trauma, or should we accept it as an ordinary part of life? Should we teach each other to treat it this way, or is it healthier to treat it the other way?
The Stoics took the hard line on this, and pointed out that you always knew that your father/brother/son/wife/sister was mortal. It's always been true that they would die, and there is nothing you can do about that. Their idea was that the healthy thing was to accept what you cannot change.
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