Rearing Children Who Will Like You

My wife and I get along with our adult kids. I got along with my parents, she got along with hers. But I gather, mostly from things our kids say about their friends, that a lot of young adults don't get along with theirs.

That raises three questions:

1. What determines whether adult children get along with their parents, in particular are there child-rearing approaches that make it more likely?

2. Is the pattern of children not liking their parents more common than in the past, if so why?

3. The possibility of having children who don't like you strikes me as one of the scariest things about having children. If it is becoming more common, could that be part of the reason for declining birth rates? Other consequences?

There are two views of children — that they are small people who do not yet know very much or that they are pets who can talk. I prefer the former. One implication is that children and parents are, in a fundamental sense, peers. Obviously they are not equal in what they know or what they can do or how strong they are. But they are not different sorts of people in a way that goes beyond that. Children should usually believe their parents about things the parents know much more about but parents should believe children when that asymmetry is reversed, as it sometimes is. The mere fact that one is parent and the other child does not determine which is right and which wrong when they disagree; that is determined, as between adults, by which has better arguments, more evidence.

One implication of treating children as people not pets is that you have to keep promises to them, as to other people. Another is that if you assert something to them you have the same obligation you would have if you said it to an adult to defend it or, if you find you cannot, admit that you can’t.

I once heard an elderly man tell a child who disagreed with him on something that he should never contradict his elders. The statement struck me as not merely wrong but blasphemous. The elder was probably correct on what they disagreed about but the appropriate response is to demonstrate that, at worst decline to argue it, not to imply either that truth is determined by seniority or that it is discourteous to point out errors to a status superior. I am reasonably sure that neither of my parents ever told me to believe something just because they said so or refused to entertain arguments against their views. The son of my first marriage, who spent summers with me and my wife when he was growing up, told a friend that his project for that summer was to get my wife to say “because I told you so.” I doubt that he succeeded.

Treating your children as your peers is easier if you sometimes interact with them in contexts where they demonstrably are at least your equal. I was the first member of our family to play World of Warcraft, so when my wife and our children, then eleven and fourteen, joined the game I was more skilled, had a higher level character, more in-game resources. They improved over time and there was a long period, during which we sometimes played separately, sometimes as a family team, were all on about the same level. By the time I eventually quit the game some years later we all had top level characters and all three of them had become more skilled at the game than I was.

Going back to my childhood, the nearest equivalent that occurs to me is ping-pong. We had a table in the basement on which my father and I played. We equalized the contest with a sliding handicap, a number of points I started each game with. Every time he won the handicap went up, every time I won it went down. Over a period of years, as I got better, the handicap went down, eventually to zero, I think occasionally below zero. The family also played bridge together, there being conveniently four of us.

I spent a lot of time arguing with my father on a wide range of subjects. Someone who met us skiing on Colorado when I was in high school told a friend of mine that we spent all our time arguing and I won half the arguments. I don’t think the latter was true, but if my father won a majority of the arguments he won them fair.

Discussing these things online, I got pointed to Taking Children Seriously, a movement along roughly the lines I advocate. With a quick look at their website, the only thing I found to disagree with was the claim that what they were advocating was, as of 1980, a new idea; it was consistent with how my sister and I were brought up, and I was born in 1945.

So much from my own experience. When I put my question to people online, I got several answers from the other side, not how to get along with your child but why some people don’t.

One that had not occurred to me but should have was cultural conflict. The obvious case is an immigrant family where the parents conform to the culture of the society they came from, the children to that of the society they now live in; the same problem could occur with cultural change over time or clashes between different cultures within a single society.

That is part of the theme of one of my favorite Kipling poems, The Mary Gloster.

Another explanation of parent/child conflict was genetic, for example:

I've noticed that there's a personality trait of "enjoying control/ social dominance" … that (a) seems highly heritable, and (b) when present in both a parent and a child, regularly leads to intergenerational strife. (poster online)

Other people suggested that problems could arise as a result of a messy divorce or if either parent or child, but presumably not both, were adherents of some odd religious or ideological group. An extreme version would be the sort of cult that demands that members cut ties with their family.

One more possibility is that if parents don’t treat their young children as people, entitled to have their views and desires taken seriously, they may never make the transition to treating their adult children as peers.

I have not yet found any source of data that would let me know if the problem of adult children not getting along with, not liking, their parents is becoming increasingly common, over decades or centuries, so all I have is speculation, reasons why the problem might be increasing.

Cultural conflict: Arguably society is changing faster than in the past, increasing the cultural difference between one generation and the next. Easier communications, first the telephone and then the internet, make it easier for children to interact with others their age outside of the home rather than chiefly with parents and siblings. Public schooling, an earlier and more powerful causal agent for the development of an independent youth culture, could be an explanation for changes over centuries — but not over decades.

A possible explanation of more recent change is the increasing frequency of formal education beyond high school, a context where young adults socialize almost exclusively with their age peers. It would be interesting to know whether college graduates are more or less likely than others to get along with their parents.

Decline of the family enterprise: Another possible explanation for long-term change is the shift away from a pattern of production organized by the family, most often in farming but in other enterprises as well, with children participating, expecting to eventually take over. While that could be a cause of conflict it is also a context where adults and their children cooperate on common tasks.

Increasing wealth: One reason in the past for children to want to get along with their parents and parents with their children was that they needed each other, young adults needing support from their parents, old adults from their children. That is less true in a society with Social Security, pensions, a welfare system, a flexible labor market where most people can find a job sufficient to sustain themselves, even if it is only waiting tables.

Marital instability: Increasing divorce rates mean fewer children growing up within a stable family structure that they would want to remain a part of.

Assuming that conflict between parents and their adult children is increasing, what are the likely consequences?

One is declining birth rates. One reason to have children is so that there will be people in the world you can trust to have your interests at heart, especially important as you get older. That doesn’t work if they don’t like you. The loss of that benefit, combined with the increased emotional cost of bringing up children who don’t get along with you, makes having children a less attractive prospect.

Another consequence might be an increasing role for institutions that substitute for the role of family, most obviously the state, social security replacing support from children, but also churches or cults that function as family replacements, hobbies that provide a network of people who have something in common with you, can be expected to care about you.

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