Why didnt our parents struggle with parenting challenges?

byisrael

Tue, Jul 30 2019, 3:35 pm

Every generation has it's challenges

Parents in the early 1900- 1920's had to deal with the industrial revalution,Haskalah and communism, rampant anti-semitism and pogroms, and WW1

Parents in the 1930's-1940's had to deal with the depression and the holocaust - and most didn't survive.

Parents in the 1950's and 1960's where survivors - many of them had gone thru the war as teens so had no model of what parenting is , immagrants, trying to build a country in extreme poverty and danger in israel and rebuild a frum infrastructure in the states

Parents in the 70's and 80's where raised by people who had been thru extreme trauma, where second generation to immagrants and to me it seems like HKB"H had rachmanus on them and made life a bit simpler than it was in previous generation taking into account the fact that they where being raised by very broken people.

In the 90's all the awareness on emotional health and the job of a parent started - and honestly life is much easier then it was creating the space to stop focusing on survival and more on other things. WE ARE LUCKY!

Now as we enter 2020 there are huge struggles as frum parents, it is much more difficult to provide for a frum lifestyle finacially then it was in the past, and the world around us has gone completely crazy and it's hard to find the correct balance of engaging with that world while protecting our ruchniyus. BUT - would you like to live in 1920????

Lets stop kvetching so much - we don't have it all that bad!

Mommyg8

Tue, Jul 30 2019, 9:58 pm

amother [ OP ] wrote:

The question is: with all the mental health issues today, therapy, medicine, and parenting instructions, are the children today more emotionally healthy than we are? Is all the effort that we put into parenting our children necessary or should we just let our kids be raised like our parents raised us and then we wont be so stressed with our parenting and the kids will grow up just as unhealthy as us?

I do think that children today are being raised better. There's much more awareness of the emotional needs of children then there was in previous generations. OTOH, the bar is much higher now. In the olden days if you fed and clothed your children, and kept them reasonably clean and warm, and didnt beat them, you were considered a great mother. Nowadays a parent would be considered abusive if she "only" did that. Expectations are higher.

amother

Olive

Tue, Jul 30 2019, 11:30 pm

The simple fact is that they did struggle. They either knew it but didn't have the resources available today, or they thought they were doing fine.

My parents think I didn't give them trouble. Now, don't get me wrong, they were good parents for the most part, but they didn't keep such a close eye on me and to this day, they have absolutely no clue what went on. They thought they were doing well because I got good grades and didn't act out. They had absolutely no idea that I was hanging out with boys, when I ended up getting into an unsafe situation (that unfortunately ended with me getting raped) I never told them anything. They never would have dreamed I could be somewhere I wasn't supposed to be. They didn't know about the drinking or the self harm either, because I managed to keep up the facade. And they think they won the game because I'm a mostly functional adult, happily married, great kids. Again, I don't blame them for much. But they were not as on top of things as they could have been and some very bad things happened as a result. And they never knew, they just thought they had a dream kid.