The term latchkey kid became commonplace in the 1970s and 1980s to describe members of Generation X who, according to a 2004 marketing study, "went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history." Latchkey kids were prevalent during this time, a result of increased divorce rates and increased maternal participation in the workforce at a time before childcare options outside the home were widely available.[6][7][8][9] These latchkey children, referred to as "day orphans" in the 1984 documentary, To Save Our Children to Save Our Schools, mainly came from middle or upper-class homes. The higher the educational attainment of the parents, the higher the odds the children of this time would be latchkey kids.[10][11]
Nowadays, if my mother was a black woman giving me the responsibilities she did, they would've arrested her ass.
You kids will one day be like this. You'll slowly find it creeping up on you in your older age, and eventually you wake up one day not understanding the young generation and you'll be thinking to yourself "Gosh, those darn kids and their perfidious pranks they play on us. But at least its a nice day to go outside and grill "
Sweet Child O' Mine slowly plays in the distance, fading away until nothing but the soft wind rustling the golden waves of seed-bearing grass stalks across the desolate fields
DO NOT FUCK WITH ME I WAS NEGLECTED BY MY PARENTS
I WAS BEATEN AS A CHILD AND I TURNED OUT FINE
is everyone in the west raised in an abusive home or what? at least millenials got participation trophies. that's probably the thing that saved them. until they discovered toast..
is everyone in the west raised in an abusive home or what?
I don't know how universal it is, but where I'm from people brag about having a rough upbringing like it's a badge of honor. It leads to a really silly culture where people feel a social pressure to exaggerate and mythologize their childhoods as a series of legendary conquests. You'll notice in OPs image that the event that they endured was spending a day playing with a sprinkler and then eating a sandwich at the neighbor's house.
Seems that way. A lot of immigrant groups tend to be of a "lower class" as well that unfortunately involve a more abusive upbringing. I was shocked at the amount of US latinos that talk about the "chancla" and being hit by their parents as a regular thing. I never saw that from anyone in my family or my friends, but the kids that had that happen to them were usually raised in the poorer parts of the cities.
Perfect example of this mentality: the Adam Sandler movie Pixels, it's a fucking Gen X pride film about how boomers suck because they grew up before video game and we millenials suck too because our video games are bullshit but Gen X are the baddest dudes who ever lived because they played Pac-Man and Donkey Kong
Pac man? Damn imagine bragging about how devoid your games were. Let me guess, “we were happier with simpler things”?
As a zoomer I feel like millennials objectively had the best childhood for video games. Yall experienced such massive changes and improvements, like I’m kinda jealous of the level of nostalgia a lot of millennials seem to have for super mario 64
The vast majority of Gen X men I've met have been borderline dysfunctional. I've never seen a gen X dude make a decent meal from scratch without fucking up.
Gen Xers have had the absolute strangest brainworms about gender, prescribing strict gender codes for other men, while being completely unable to live up to their own standards.
Most Gen X men are useless in the kitchen, helpless in raising their own children and too self absorbed to notice the absolute state of themselves.
I hope they know everyone under 35 lumps gen x and boomers as almost the same people
They’re genuinely the most forgettable gen (after silents). No one but gen xers think of gen xers as tough. Emotionally unavailable people that need therapy, maybe, but that doesn’t make you tough
Born late enough to avoid a brain full of lead and know how to use a computer
Born early enough to avoid a brain full of plastic and know how to use a computer
For a bunch of people that commend the rough 'n tough lifestyle, why prevent walkable cities that teach independence at such an early age AND reduce reliance on technology?
Because walking is communism. The actual solution is to give driver's licenses to children as young as 6 years old so they can experience true freedom.
Personally, I find the whole being a flag bearer for an age cohort thing to be very hokey and needlessly distracting from the actual class warfare that we are constantly losing to the capitalist class.
I do not endorse generational warfare as a concept. But this is actually just a boomer Facebook meme. The title is a literal description of what it is.
Piety has nothing to do with it. I'm not trying to act holier-than-thou. Obviously the person in the OP screenshot is a total fucking loser, but this doesn't generalize gen x or baby boomers. This is just some individual pretending real adversity in life is a scenario he totally imagined, probably based only in repeated fictions that he eventually came to believe in.
Also, there is no disagreement about baby boomers living much more privileged and easier lives in general than we do today. But nobody chooses the environment in which they're born into, the propaganda of the era they are subjected to, or the general information publicly available to them during their lives. Much as you said, we all receive a propaganda made to keep us compliant to the economic system we live under, and that message shifts over time. But that's the thing that needs to be combated today, not the bygone fact that someone lived a better life in the past.
The only thing that I'm impressed with myself over the youth is that for a brief time we somehow found the people we were going to meet at an event without sending signals into space to send messages to transponders to find each other, everything else about being gen x sucks and we lost that ability.
Probably started when they began sticking warning labels like "do not drink out of this hose" on the packaging for hoses due to them being lined with lead.
This is not a feature of boomers here in the UK so my assumption is that this never became a thing here for one reason or another. Maybe lead was never used in UK hoses or there was never a lead-in-hoses scare from the way they approached resolving it or something? I don't know. It seems to be a feature of Americans in particular.
It's not enough to be good at some things and bad at others, they must be super good at everything because Self Reliant!
Which is how you get middle managers in graphic design departments trained for 3 weeks on COBOL trying to write a website from scratch instead of using a template or hiring a company or, indeed, getting literally anyone else in the company to do it.