I can’t help but notice so many young people around the forum and some who mention their parents - mainly the dad - in a good way. I was wondering how many of you actually get on well with your parents.
My parents have always been embarrassing and I rarely like being around them. I’m not sure if it’s because of a strict upbringing where I haven’t bonded well enough or that I just don’t like them.
Quick descriptions: My dad’s like Homer Simpson without the compassion he shows for his family. My mum is interfering and generally makes a nuisance of herself. They never get along and have been borderline divorced for many years but probably won’t split up because of their religion.
Another thing I’d like to know is do you like the way you have been or are being raised? Do you prefer a strict upbringing as it perhaps enhances your moral character or a freer upbringing so you feel more confident?
I think I’d prefer a freer upbringing because I see families like the Osbournes on TV and despite the fact they generally seem a bit odd, their family looks really close-knit.
I love both my parents yet I hate them so much at the same time, my dad because of the way he treats me (as if I was 5 years old) and how he’s paranoid about me. My mom because of her bloody snoopyness she’s always in my buisness makes me mad as hell.
Well I can’t really answer that poll because I always get on with my dad and always fight with my mom. I guess it has to do with the fact that my dad has been “there” and my mom, well, was a total goody-girl and a good student and such in that age
I get along very well with my parents. I guess I’m not doing anything they wouldn’t want me to do. My dad is an electronics engineer and botany major, so we have a lot in common (including similar appearance!!) and I get along with my mom fine, though I absolutely cannot have a civil discussion with her about genetic engineering. (I can see both sides, but I am strongly in favor of genetic research. She’s against all the way.) Of course, she always calls me when she needs help with her email. (She checks her email about three times a day.)
i get a long with my mom still, but i feel as though she is an instigator, where as i say something out of tone, she will yell at me and then stomp away.
my dad doesnt care much…i just need to treat him nicely and all things will go smoothly.
my mom thinks i was a bad kid sometimes, where i would love to let here take care of one of the many goth type trouble makers getting suspended all the time. then we’ll see who was the better kid.
I know what you mean. I don’t like saying stuff about them either. You know, how you’re supposed to respect them as they’re family but they piss me off and I don’t understand why they do it. Surely if they wanted respect they would behave in a more sensible way.
They both hate you - everybody does Kansas ;). No, I understand what you mean. It could be that in lasting relationships, a lot of the time it’s with 2 differing personalities so I guess you tend to bond more with one parent.
I see that from a lot of the posts. I find it curious that it’s more with the dad than the mum though, like with Carnivore, PlantPerson and R2Blend. I figured it would be more common for guys to bond with their mum and girls with their dad.
Did she give you a spankin’? I bet she was none too pleased at some of things you said. Is she wondering who theeth’s mum is?
I don’t think that’s true. I think that some parents do their job better than others and that job shouldn’t include being nosey or annoying. Ok, parents should be concerned but there is a boundary beyond which their behaviour becomes invasive. Sometimes it seems they subcosciously believe that their children are not independent human beings but their possessions who they can treat however they please.
I know that if any of us ever become parents, we might turn out the same but I’m sure that we will realise that our actions and the way we treat our kids will have a lasting effect on their personality. My parents often forget that, they especially did when I was younger.
I think I relate most to your situation. My dad has a short fuse and any little thing that upsets him and he stomps about like a child so I just try to be nice but mostly I stay out of his way.
My mum’s a bit more open-minded about stuff but her trouble is that she interferes and sometimes puts me down about stuff. I totally think the same - they criticise me for stuff and I just think they should feel so lucky they don’t have a kid who is on drugs or in prison or whatever. They don’t reward me for anything I achieve but they’re quick to reprimand me when I do something wrong.
The three stages of life: - “My daddy’s bigger than your daddy!” - “Aww, Dad, you are so twentieth-century! You don’t know shit!” - “My father used to say …”
“Oh, don’t worry, Albert. He won’t do anything you didn’t do as a kid.”
“Oh… :o shit…”
It is quite remarkable how you see your parents after you become a parent yourself. Giving so much sweat, tears, love, money to such a little human to raise him and then getting shit and disrespect when he gets older must be kind of hard in the end.
Respect your parents. Do you even know how much they did for you?
my dad was paying $1,000 dollars in child support each month for 2 kids, and yet i had to pay my school fees, buy my own meals, and yes, get my own shoes!
oh well…im not dead yet, so they havent done a bad job.
If you think that’s bad, Maddox’s mom found his website. He was on IRC at the time, and there’s a quote at bash.org.
Pretty much the same situation for me - but sometimes you have to realize that a single mother can’t afford to help you out even with that kind of money coming in. That wasn’t really the case with me, but it may be with your mom if you think about it.
Oftentimes I wonder what delusion causes people to think that they deserve automatic and instant respect while everyone else has to earn theirs.
That’s a good point but the amount of work they put into being parents they get back from the joy that their kids are adorable and they have fun times with them. That doesn’t mean they have the right to behave like a-holes and still deserve respect. Respect is not an entitlement of parenthood, it has to be earned by everyone, constantly.
Ok, I agree that some kids disrespect their parents but a lot of the time it’s because parents get all condescending or embarassing, which there’s no need for. Obviously, we can’t judge all parents alike and if you’re a good parent nico, that’s great. I just know my parents well enough to dislike them.
I respected my parents until one of them gave me a reason not to. I think maybe some people have great parents and have no idea what it’s like to have a bad one, or maybe they were bad kids and think that that’s the only way you can see your parents as bad. My mother was selfish, immature, and hardly thought about the consequences of the things she would say and do to me. It’s been over a year since I left, and in hindsight I still think I was more mature than her when I was 14.
I really think she expected to raise children that would always adore her no matter what she did or how imperfect she was. She wanted children who listened to every word she said and obey whether she was wrong or right. Never should anything be held against her, bad things should be forgotten. People like that need to get dogs, not children. That is an idealized fantasy. Once someone reaches the age of 13 or so they start to seperate logic from illogic and make decisions based on that. If you as a parent can’t answer questions to your logic and instead just demand obedience, you should expect nothing but disobediance. If you are hypocritical in your ways, you will be seen as hypocritical and your opinion will matter less and less.
I really don’t want to go into details of specific events and etc… but just try to see that there are more bad parents out there than you think. People who get divorced hold an especially high responsibility to be mature and not to expel all of their anger and resentment on their children. No child should have to feel bad for loving both of their parents, but so often you have an immature man or woman try to make them do just that because of their own mistake.
IMO, anyone can raise a baby. Raising a baby doesn’t make you a good parent. You feed it, change its diapers, respond to its cries. It’s all very simple even up to age 10-12, although taxing. The real trial comes when you must raise a conscious thinking and reasoning Human being. That requires more than going through the motions of providing food and shelter.
My parents were like that. Some have trouble making friends or have unfulfilled goals and they either burden the children with their unrealized ambition or like you point out, they treat them as if they should always look up to them irrespective of how they behave. Because my family are heavily religious, anything written in the Bible went as law, however ambiguous - “Honor thy father and thy mother”. As you say they need to get dogs or maybe even robots - my dad was well cruel to our dog. My dog got sick sometimes and my dad would beat the living crap out of him for making a mess on the rug as he couldn’t afford a vet. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a dog cry before but it’s not nice to watch, especially as a kid.
The hypocrisy is the thing I hated most when I was growing up. Neither of my parents are very bright and just like you say, I was more mature than them when I was still only 14 or so. But you can’t argue with someone who smacks you until you either burst out crying or concede. My dad gave me the belt once for not being asleep. That’s right, for not being asleep, not for wandering about the house - just because I was and am still a bit of an insomniac. I mean, how the hell do you make someone sleep?
What I think is also a problem is there are parents who think they are good parents but don’t ask their children to find out. Bad parents who know and admit they’re bad aren’t quite so bad.
Not so. They are just different kinds of challenges. For example, at a very young age a baby begins to bond with the mother, and if the mother rejects the baby for some reason (post-partum depression can play a big role in this) the child can grow up feeling insecure because that basic mother-child bond didn’t develop properly.
Just because children aren’t able to purely reason before they’re a certain age doesn’t mean they aren’t sensitive to how their parents feel about them/others. Or aren’t internalizing the way they experience their parents interacting with the world.
I bet she was none too pleased at some of things you said. Is she wondering who theeth’s mum is?
