Our parents promised us we would feel like fools for thinking we were smarter than them as kids. When exactly does that start?
On your teens maybe a couple of times. When you're 20 you'll notice those things and have this passing "oh, I see" moment. On your 30's you'll experience that often. On your 40's you want it to slow the fuck down. You'll probably tell someone to wash their face or brush their teeth a lot.
I figured out my parents were dumb as hell when at age 11 I tried to calmly explain to my screaming father in the midst of an absolute meltdown that leaving the Windows 95 shutdown prompt on "restart" didn't ruin the computer.
He just screamed at me not to touch the prompt anymore and that I didn't know anything about it computers or the Internet. Which is rich coming from the guy who routinely downloaded porn dialers and malware from his fellow closet cases in bisexual chatrooms.
I'm pretty sure he was talking about burning a after image in the screen. My parents were similarly unhinged when the atari 2600 came out. Burn in on old CRT monitors take a really long time. Much longer than it did for TV's in the 60's and 70's.
No, that was was actually a whole other incident onto itself. He didn't know about CRT burn-in until I had to explain to him what the point of a screensaver was when he kept turning it off and leaving the monitor on all day.
He actually ruined our old Apple IIc doing that shit. We had a ">" symbol burned into the upper left corner of the screen. We ended up having to use the flat panel screen which was absolute ass to game on except for text adventures.
My father is just worst kind of stupid: angry.
My narcissistic, selfish, and abusive parents abused things like "because I said so," "you'll understand when you're older," and "you'll understand when you have kids" among other things.
I now understand. They were shitheads that never wanted to actually explain things or be held accountable for their fucking abuse. I understand that it literally took EFFORT for them to be so goddamn angry and verbally/physically abusive to us, and it takes a serious level of hate to sprinkle in the emotional neglect and somehow be okay with treating your child like that.
I can't fathom doing half the shit they did.
Hmmm.... Did we have the same parents?
Apparently why I haven't spoken to them or seen them in over a decade is a mystery. The next time I see them will be when they are in their graves. I'll have my dancing shoes on.
Be like me. I didn't go to the funerals.
Depends on whether your parents are actually dumb or not.
They never said I'd feel like a fool, but mentioned that I'd probably understand later in life, and they were spot on, but it comes gruadually.
As an example: when I started paying my own bills, I stopped taking endless showers and later started being frustrated when my kids do.
I also very recently started understanding why they hated smartphones with small screens as they typed so slowly, as I keep mis-typing more and more myself.
So I'd say it starts when moving out and the realities of life hits you square in the face, and then the rest come dripping slowly over time.
Becomming a parent slaps you with another big load as well.
Ha, I felt the opposite. When I started seeing how cheap water is (where I live) I couldn't believe my parents complained so much about an extra $1.50 a month.
And the endless whining about gas prices. Ok sis, you now have to spend an extra dollar per week. Maybe complain about the book bans and other fascism creeping into everyday life instead.
Becomming a parent slaps you with another big load as well
😏
I was smarter.
That did not prevent me from being foolish like all kids are.
This. This so hard.
Like, it doesn't matter how smart you are, you're working with only a little bit of data on a world filled with lies, which tends to beget bad ideas. And that's not even getting into the non-rational drivers kids can have.
My dad is so, so smart in so many ways. Unfortunately, he’s completely incapable of some forms of introspection (thankfully not all). He believes that he’s even smarter than he is, and rejects anything that doesn’t fit his worldview.
I do understand him a lot more as time goes on, because my siblings and I have learned that our whole family is autistic and our parents were just dealing with that their whole lives. They did a great job with us, specifically in regard to us being autistic.
For example, my dad would warn me before he sharpened our knives, so that I could get at least two blocks away before he started, and they never cared if we wore clothes inside out to avoid tags, as long as they were otherwise neat. They educated us early about nutrition, so we could choose what we wanted to eat ourselves, but it had to be balanced. They most importantly explained that things don’t always make sense, but that sometimes people have an emotional connection to them or for seniority or similar reasons don’t want to hear us say that it doesn’t make sense.
Most effective for me specifically: my dad explained two things to me in exactly the right way for me to act in the way that was most helpful for me. He told me that I might be smarter than any given cop, but I’m not smarter than all of them together if I were to commit a big crime, and that if I kept stealing petty shit, I’d eventually get locked out of jobs where I might have been able to embezzle a lot more money. I stopped stealing and did eventually get a job where I could have embezzled a lot of money, but by that time I was better at thinking through consequences and no longer wanted to. I don’t know if that advice would work for everyone and frankly it seems like irresponsible advice to give a kid, but it absolutely helped me.
Autism aside, they were also both completely correct about how important caring for your teeth is.
I definitely see myself understanding the world more, and that obviously will come with experience. However, with that also comes wisdom, and specifically the wisdom to look back and see that some adults were fucking fucktards.
I was a better person than them then, and am certainly a better person now.
Enjoy hell, Mr. K.
I can tell you my sister always blamed my parents for mostly going on vacation to Poland, where they had a summer house and family (uncles, aunts, grandparents) instead - like the rich children from her class in Germany - to Spain or Italy.
Now she is asking if she could use that summer house to be able to go anywhere abroad because turns out it's quite difficult to earn a lot of money to be able to take your child on expensive vacations. And she has only one instead of three children like our parents.
While I can't tell you if she feels like you describe, but I think in this case she should :p
Spain or Italy sound like tourist traps these days, I wouldn't mind Poland.
Depends where in Italy or Spain. Italy is very nice because it's almost always sunny and the food is always good and cheap. And there are so many kilometres of coastline... you can still find what you want too: small not completely tourist overrun coastal villages. Unfortunately it's getting too warm now in summer because climate change.
Apulia.
I'm guessing the average Lemming was a weird little nerd. I was.
If anything, my own parents had trouble recognising I actually still was a kid.
My parents didn't talk down to me like that.
What I have been told, however, is that I wont stay lean like this all my life and will start gaining weight as I get older. That I'm still waiting for to happen.
They told me i'd gain 10lbs a decade and they've been right so far but I'm not unhealthy or massively overweight so eh.
Ha, same. I'm 37 and had my reckoning a bit. I was a bean pole kid, though I worked at it, swaam competitively, played sports my whole life, did the military thing. Got my own kids now, and COVID was peak lazy for me, and took me some time to get out of. Getting back on the exercise thing was tough, and the pounds did come on in the interim. Nothing crazy, but definitely noticeable for me.
Same! What they didn't count on is an autoimmune disease that makes it difficult for me to gain weight.
At the same time we stop believing everything we read on the internet. As told to us by the people who now happily believe every oh so absurd made up bullshit on the internet or TV.
When you have kids.
I am smarter than my dad in a lot of things. But not programming. Or math.
At the same time, though, a huge portion of what I learned in school was wrong. I got As for being able to remember information that has since been changed, debunked, or otherwise made inaccurate due to new discoveries. So kids today probably are smarter than me, but will likely end up in the same boat at my age when everything they were taught is discovered to be wrong.
The only real constant is math. Math never changes.
At age 46 I’m more smarter than them now than I ever used to be. They do literally 93% of things incorrectly, yet are convinced of the opposite, and that they are always the smartest people in the room.
My grandma does this. Meanwhile she does the worst decisions and no one trusts her. She never asks for help because she is the smartest ever and none of us "know the value of a dollar". Pride is one hell of a drug.
You mean the dad who had me rewire the telephone lines in our house when I was 14 because he couldn't figure out four wires? That one?
Do you have kids, yet ?
I do not, so I expect it is related to that moment in your life.
Kids? In this economy?! What am I? My parents?
Yes, that's a pretty famous moment for your parent's lines to start coming out of your mouth. TBF the reaction to that seems to be "I can't become my parents" more often than "they were right".
They might have meant to say wiser. When I was a teenager, I remember being sharper than my parents with academic subjects, but there is much more to life than that.
I suppose I can't fault them too much. I did have the benefit of learning from their mistakes (and being one of them.)
Thankfully, my parents never tried to undermine my self-esteem like that.
Yeah, this thread and many others shines a light on a lot of folks who are (and maybe with good reason) very bitter. My folks weren't perfect, but I understand life is a difficult thing and there is no manual. My mom at times will apologize to my brother and I for not doing well at times, but from my point of view she's got two good sons who are well positioned in life, and that's about all you can ask for.
And as many others have said in this thread, becoming a parent shines the light on you. And not that one has no right to judge as the child in the relationship, I think having the perspective of the parent can be difficult. I constantly try to remind myself how I felt at my child's age, and sometimes it leads to a battle within to do what's right, because "what's right" isn't always this crystal clear thing.
Kids are difficult. Life is difficult. We're all just trying to plod our way through. Nobody here is a billionaire, many of us need to balance working and our family, and the lack of sanity both bring. I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but also guide in such a way that I'm not doing them a disservice later.
Ignorance and hubris are consequences of youth. The fact is that your parents do probably know quite a few things that you don't, if for no other reason than they have more lived experience. That shouldn't necessarily make you feel foolish. Part of growing older is realizing that you possess a microscopic fraction of all the knowledge in the universe. Meaning that most people know things that you don't and you could learn something from them. That's wisdom. Some adults never embrace that, seeing their ignorance as an asset and turning their hubris into blind arrogance. Those people should feel foolish because they are fools. But they probably don't.
I don't agree with every decision my parents made. But in my mid thirties, I do now understand why they are the people they are and why they made some of the decisions they made. They were far from perfect parents. But they did ok, especially in light of the incredibly shitty examples they both had for parents.
I'm 29. My opinion on my parents has not changed much since I was a kid. My dad has a lot of practical knowledge, but his worldview is pants-on-head stupid. My mom is a far better person than my dad, but her technical knowledge is limited.
It doesn’t happen until you have your own kid who thinks they are smarter than you
It sounds kind of like hubris or face-saving when you put it like that.
When you grow up, which you clearly yet haven't.