I am genuinely curious why "memento mori" never seems to stick. Maybe thats part of it's power.

I'm the oldest of five. This pattern then continued and now my parents and my siblings and their families have that group call with everyone every week.

It's really helped us stay connected. You can't stay close to someone if you never talk to them. And a live interaction is superior to Facebook, etc

I would recommend setting expectations early around weekly calls so they become a habit. Even if you have nothing to talk about you can small talk for a few minutes. I suspect you will have a lot to talk about if your child is starting university.

Or maybe they just...you know...cared.

Damaged kids become damaged adults, and if they realize it, they may decide that they wouldn't be good parents and rightly opt-out of it.

Children that didn't have the right opportunities, whether that's their parent's fault or not may not have enough achievement as an adult to take on the burden of being a parent. One can argue whether it is harder being young today than it was 20-30 years ago, but you can't argue that being a parent requires lots of resources in both time and money, and if you don't have both, it's the right choice to not be a parent.

Another layer is that the parents often want grandkids and will use them as an excuse or as leverage to maintain contact despite lack of respect for boundaries or even outright abuse. So there is an element of spite in denying them grandkids, and an element of self-protection in the same.

We have a good relationship and they re good parents but I cut all attempts at having them take more space in my life than the minimum. It's so common in France we call that killing your dad (I googled and it seems to be a Freudian expression we started using to say growing up) and is part of growing up.

I have a kid now, and I want her to get the fuck out at 19, and start a life of her own with as little need for my involvment.

The funny thing is I moved to Hong Kong eventually and couldnt convince my french gf of 7 years to follow me because she couldnt tolerate being so far from her parents. I then met my current chinese wife, born here, who is in a very fusional relationship with her mom, who talks to her for hours everyday, so much she needs to kill her phone at night to stop it. And they live an hour apart...

It s clear to me there's something in Asia that's different because they all seem just as fusional (I find it unhealthy), but it may be also a girl thing more generally ? I have a sample of 2 so it's hard to know.

In any case, my daughter will be encouraged to "kill her dad" and be on her own. Even if her mom might disagree :D

I have a mentor who told me that he was confused when got married, that his wife didn't come with him when he went to the store, to the bank, or on whatever random errand he was going on. Why? Because his parents (both incredibly highly educated and busy doctors) did everything together. If one was going to the store, the other came along, because they just enjoyed each other's company. I thought it was a beautiful depiction of what a familial relationship could, and perhaps should be like.

I ve been abroad 7 years myself and I could not survive with such a need for contact. Did you follow someone ?

And of course, since she didn't recognize mental illness in herself, she also couldn't see in her children. So we never got care that we needed and are various degrees of fucked up now. We were just force-fed religion instead. We're all atheists now, but those scars never heal, and I'll never forgive my parents for putting us through that.

> I'm going to say something controversial. Not everyone is grateful for their life. I've talked to multiple people who preferred to never be born. And event the best parents I know couldn't offer much more honest reason for having children than "we wanted to" which is basically ultimate selfishness.

> > [...] and being decent at being parents as well.

> That's way more universally good reason for treating your parents well.

I can verify this. I very much wish I wasn't tasked with being alive. Depending on your metaphysical beliefs, I feel like I'm wasting another soul's place in the world. I don't want to be here, maybe if another soul was in this body then it would put it to better use and be happy and fulfilled and desire this life. I have people who want me to be here and for their sake I continue onwards, always wondering why, and always wishing I didn't have to. I used to make the mistake of thinking I could confide in them these feelings I have, but eventually I realized that I cannot. Rather, I should not. My parents wanted to be parents, and they began preparing for me as soon as they found out I was on my way. They kept me from falling off of tall things or licking wall sockets or drinking cleaning fluid as a baby. No matter how you word it, there's no way to explain that you don't want to exist that doesn't tell a parent "everything you defined yourself by for the last few decades is a farce, the thing that you made doesn't want to exist." I am not grateful my parents made me, but I don't hate them so much as to want to hurt them by telling them that.

I really don't think that's at all objectionable or selfish to be honest. Couples that don't have children exist and bless them for deciding to go with their gut and not feel compelled by society into having a child. A child being born has absolutely no say in the matter - it's solely a decision of the parents and it should be one driven by whether the parents want and can care for a child.

The question of being grateful for life - that's a pretty complex philosophical subject. At the end of the day life is all you've got as an organism, you will experience pain from time to time but without life you simply would not exist. To those who go through severe trauma and pain, my heart goes out to you and I thankfully can't relate to that utter helplessness - but for most people existence is all we've got and if you run across someone that genuinely prefers they were never born I'd hope you can direct them to some therapists to work through their issues with, that can't be a healthy place to be.

Further I would argue the antihuman sentiment offer by your argument that giving life is selfish only further contributes to the problem.

You can't really blame them. It's a consequence of evolution. Genes that make brains that want to have children tend to reproduce better than genes that make brains that don't.

This is an interesting one, and in direct contradiction to the adage: "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”

My life experience agrees, tough times mostly produce emotionally damaged people

This sums up how I feel about this topic. I read all these accounts of how people's perceptions of parent-child relationships change after they have kids, or how there's still mutual love between them and their parents despite so-and-so, and I understand.

I am well into adulthood with a stable marriage and career; I've been to therapy, and done all things reasonable to heal from whatever it is I came from. By all accounts I've been pretty successful on that front.

But goddammit, when I think about my parents, I move between seething resentment and gratitude that I decided to cut contact. And this is an improvement.

As you say, people with good enough upbringings can't conceptualize why a child might remain estranged from their family; I'd wager they impose perceptions of their own (good enough) parents when making that judgment.

Alternate take on that human universal: your parents had unprotected sex and fulfilled their obligation to raise the offspring produced to adulthood, this obliges you to nothing.

I'm not saying this means everyone should estrange their parents, but the idea that a child has any obligation to their parents for raising them seems misguided at best and damaging at worst, imo. Any attachment between children and parents should be due to mutual feelings of love and respect, like any other relationship - if those are absent on one side, why should the other suffer a relationship with people who they would otherwise remove from their friend group?

(Note that I have a good relationship with my parents, so this isn't coming from a place of personal pain, but rather a dislike for the idea that two humans procreating and fulfilling their obligation to the offspring that comes of it should impose any obligation whatsoever upon that offspring.)

EDIT: I should clarify that I do believe that parents who went above and beyond that obligation to show their children love and respect and receive nothing in return have a right to be upset - however, what about situations where a parent thought they were doing the right thing (based on how they were raised, religious briefs, parenting advice from a friend or magazine, etc.) but the thing they were doing was actually harmful? There's a lot of nuance in this, but I think that a blanket "honor thy father and thy mother [out of obligation]" is a bad idea.

Not everybody wants to share details, but I've heard enough stories from friends that I'm shocked what people are willing to forgive from their parents. I shared one story in another comment -- that person has a close relationship with their parents despite it not being a very positive one. Another friend of mine, who is queer, grew up with a father who would frequently say things like all gay people should be executed, they should be locked away from decent people, doctors should have let AIDs finish the job, etc. This person did cut off contact with their parents a couple of times but eventually heard sincere apologies and regret from their father and reconciled. That was almost twenty years ago, and now they speak lovingly of their parents and are helping care for them as their health declines.

Really it comes down to two questions: forgiveness and continuing harm. In my observation, adult children are not stingy with forgiveness for their parents. Not everybody can forgive everything, and it can take a while (I wouldn't bother asking until the kids are at least 25, maybe 30) but people forgive their parents for things they would never forgive anybody else for. They also tolerate a lot of continuing harm for the sake of maintaining the relationship. They draw a sharp line when it starts to affect their own children, directly or indirectly, and I think it's good for everyone that they do so.

In ancient Rome as far as the legal system was concerned, your children were your property. You could literally sell them into slavery, no questions asked[1]:

> The pater familias had the power to sell his children into slavery; Roman law provided, however, that if a child had been sold as a slave three times, he was no longer subject to patria potestas.

Also, your children's property was your property:

> Legally, any property acquired by individual family members (sons, daughters or slaves) was acquired for the family estate: the pater familias held sole rights to its disposal and sole responsibility for the consequences, including personal forfeiture of rights and property through debt.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pater_familias#Children

People who abuse or neglect their children are often doing so because of their own mental illness or emotional instability and those issues are unlikely to resolve without outside help.

I'm in exactly the same boat. I'm the most hyperindividualist, detached-from-culture, atomized person I know, but my concept of filial (and familial) duty practically makes me an Old Country traditionalist compared to many of my friends.

> I can think of three acceptable reasons to estrange from parents: sexual abuse, severe physical abuse, and the parents disowning the child

I don't think my view is as concrete as this, as I don't want to confidently dismiss someone who claims that estrangement is necessary for their mental health. But I'm a little disturbed by the degree to which the current culture diminishes or occasionally entirely dismisses the existence of any familial obligation at all.

It is a bizarre to suppose that love is owed instead of earned or earned once instead of the result of ongoing effort. If you stop feeding your cat or watering your plant it dies same with your relationship.

I would venture to guess that the majority of estranged parents don't know this or in denial about having let the relationship die.

The article says that the majority of parental estrangement is due to divorce especially the non custodial father then successfully segues to some nonsense about identity politics.

I don't see it as a realignment of values so much as a more boring story about parents breaking up and becoming estranged spiced up with a minority becoming estranged because the values they hold are correctly deemed odious and hateful.

If you hate gay people and your kid is either gay or feels strongly about the issue they aren't going to want to be around you.

If you talk about shooting dirty liberals and your kid is a dirty liberal likewise.

If your own kid hates you the first thing you should do is ask yourself why and if you blame it on a lack of family values you are almost certainly the problem.

We both have good relationships with our kids I think you misunderstand why others don't.

It wasn't much later when I had my own child, they finally broke me. Not only they set high expectations for how I will help them have relationship with their grandchild, and criticizing our parenting, but also started criticizing 2 year old. For their part as grandparents, they did bare minimum, that is attend a birthday, ask for pictures because relatives are asking for photos. Never made an effort to come visit us. That is when they broke something in my brain.

Now I resent them more than ever, I wish I had never let them criticize me as an adult. I lost faith in God since they are so religious. I am trying to be complete opposite of them. I have mostly stopped feeling joy. I live mostly to fulfill my duty as a father. I really want to pack everything and move to the other side of the world but wife doesn't agree with that.

And as a father, I realize that there is no sacrifice in parenting. You choose to be a father. That was your choice. My kids are the only things that bring me joy right now. Yes sometimes they push my limits and I am tired, but it was my choice to have them. Thinking that my kids are making me sacrifice will probably make me resentful towards them. When I am playing video games while tired because I am so close to finishing a level, I don't say I made a sacrifice.

EDIT: I want to add that I have lost joy in everything related to my parents like my culture, songs that I grew up with, religious festivals, food, stories, career, etc. I hate it.

On the one hand I agree children and young adults can be overly entitled or have too high expectations for their human parents on the other I think that framing raising children as a sacrifice is wrong. It is kind of the core point of biological life. In past times children were seen as a blessing now some times in the west they are seen as a burden. This inversion is part of the larger narcissism epidemic distorting modern society IMHO.

It matters a lot! First of all, it matters legally. An entirely different set of laws and procedures will be invoked depending on which it was. But, second, it matters because it tells me something about what to expect from you in the future. It tells me something about how you feel towards me. It tells me something about your character, about your capacity for violence.

It’s more subtle than that. “Toxic” is used as a synonym for “irredeemably harmful”, and that very distinction makes all the difference. If a person is labeled a “jerk”, they are potentially redeemable and able to be reformed, but if someone is labeled as “toxic”, the label itself declares that there is no helping them. The label itself prescribes ostracism.

What's the point in having children and raising them as best as you can if the talking heads in society will treat them to focus on your unintentional harms and resent you?

I myself am one of four children and I'm the only one that had a healthy relationship with both our parents because I ignored society's pressure to focus on people's failures and instead consider parents as flawed people doing their best given their upbringing, values, effort and the knowledge/information they had available to them at the time. My three siblings all have have issues with one or both parents and they aren't doing as well I me emotionally and I feel bad for them but also know it isn't entirely their fault since society has fed them toxicity.

That's right: society teaching people to focus on how others are toxic to you can be as toxic as those people are and often is far more toxic than any toxicity you experienced from the people you're been taught to consider toxic. Yet, we never discuss how all these discussions about "toxic people" are more toxic that the people we're discussing.

I have come to the conclusion that my parents, who of course had their flaws, were damn nigh perfect.

"Personally, I think putting that reckoning front and center is a good thing" I really disagree. If you parent was a monster, then absolutely. Otherwise, if they met the 3 points above then what good does calling them out and telling them that what they did was in your mind, harmful? They cant change anything and all it will do is make them react in hurt; they are still just people and you are invalidating their core life achievement. My parents were far from perfect, but they loved me and did their best, what would calling them out on any perceived failures do? I feel like people have lost the ability to just take things in stride these days. I can only speak from the personal experience of me and my siblings of course. My brother and I are very different in almost every way especially politics (He is pro Trump, I am not) but we just assume the other is coming from an honest place and doing what they think is best in their mind for their family and have good conversations and our families hang out often. My sister is unable to take anything in stride and assumes anyone that has different opinions than her is coming from a vindictive place. She has elected to completely remove herself from the family based on us not being far enough left for her (and I am pretty left). I find if one just assumes positive intent on another's actions as long as reality and not being a sucker allows then things are good. I always just assumed positive intent on my parents past actions or simple human flaw and all is good.

> I've also saw more than one person disown their parents after being sucked in to the anticircumcision movement - men who had until that moment seemingly normal lives but were then convinced their sex lives would never reach their potential because of a decision their parents had made....

That's a really good point. Before the internet, and especially social media, people had weird and arguable toxic ideas, but it was almost always impossible to form a geographically-based community around them, so they'd almost always peter out and their effect was limited. The internet broke geographical limits, allowing intense purely ideological communities to form around almost every idea and validate them, no matter how wrong and misguided. In our very online times that can have serious social consequences, sometimes for good but often for ill.

This is one of those things that is specific to the Jewish religion, in which it serves as an irreversible symbol of membership and has done for about three thousand years ... and also a subset of Americans, who do it for reasons which they suddenly find difficult to explain to their adult children.

If it's important for adult life, but not actually urgent, leave it until the child is old enough to be asked for their meaningful consent.

Did it take a lot of sucking into considering that they've been subjected to genital mutilation?

It's fine to disagree with decisions someone (shouldn't have) made on your behalf, but learning to judge people by intent, not result, is part of adulthood.

Punishing someone who loves you for doing the best they knew to do is one of the most cruel things I can imagine.

In other words, disliking someone for something they did to you does not automatically mean they deserve punishment and you should hurt them return. Especially since causing harm to a loved one also already hurts oneself.

If someone tells you that everybody around them is always lying they are usually the liar. The same way some people who can't seem to work anywhere without having constant drama are the source of the conflict.

You are not doing your sons any favors if you circumcise them when it's not necessary.

The apple never falls far from the tree.

What would you want to debate against someone who says something makes them feel like shit? There's not a lot to say beyond: "I don't care how you feel", "That sucks you feel that way, what would make you feel better", and "It's unreasonable to ask me to change in ways that make you feel better, so suck it up".

Now imagine one person telling another their behavior is toxic, which means they are telling them that they make them feel like shit. Well the response will dictate what happens to the relationship. If the response is anything but "That sucks you feel that way, what would make you feel better", well the logical move for the person feeling like shit is to find a way to never have to interact with the toxic person again or force them to change their behavior.

What else would you want to discuss?

Perhaps a lot of the "toxic things" are subjective based on someones experience, so there is not much to refute.

If someone says the way they were treated by another was toxic, who are you to refute its toxicity? People tend to be able to understand how some thing affects them and if it is good for them.

1. Coming out. I suspect that gay people always existed, but just didn’t come out.

2. Interracial relationships. Far less common in the past. And society doesn’t view them as negatively now, which changes the power balance.

3. Parental affairs. I suspect this is the one that always happened, but people just lived with it more.

From my anecdotal list the problems are actually new. And except for the third, likely to get better.

First fold: Christendom and its 2,000-year-old siblings/cousins Islam (also Confucianism? Buddhism?) have been around long enough to form a sort of base social reality.

Second fold: These 2,000-year-old cultural regimes are crumbling and we are moving into new cultural regimes.

Third fold: The crumbling is actually, as you said, a reversion to the mean.

Fourth fold part A: This so-called reversion to the mean is itself impossible because cultures from 2,000 years ago were themselves much different from the cultures that came before them, and so on in both time and space dimensions.

Fourth fold part B: This so-called reversion to the mean is impossible also because we don't have enough context about ancient cultures to say that we are reinstantiating them, and things have changed so much (technology, residual effects of the most recent cultural regimes) that, even if we had enough information about the ancient cultures, there's no way we're really doing what they were doing.

I recently received a torrent of abuse via WhatsApp from him after a relatively minor disagreement on a news story I wasn't interested in (Harry and Meghan). It happened just as I started a week on-call as the most senior clinician, and I found I couldn't concentrate because of the things that he said echoing in my mind. Stuff that referred to things when I was less than half my current age, and hugely hurtful.

Why should I allow this in my life? An I risking the things I'm responsible for by doing this? My wife has pointed out I'm in a foul mood if I've been arguing with him about something. Is that fair on my wife and children?

However, she's very cyclical and can act normal ~30% of the time. She's told everyone that we're all drug addicts, or child abusers. Lots of people believe her, and think we all abandoned her. I've had family members call me and reduce me to tears with insults, because of the things she's told them.

From what I've seen anecdotally in every single family where the child has cut contact: there's ALWAYS a (good) reason. It almost always boils down to a failure in respecting their children, and treating them with kindness and understanding.

Younger generations are growing up with better mental health care and social awareness (due to the pervasive nature of it these days with social networks) than previous generations. We grew up in an era of public PSAs and school videos on bullying and acceptable behaviour. We know what's "right", can recognize abuse, and prefer to associate with those that treat us well.

Millennials are way worse off than previous generations by many metrics, that's why so many of them are angry. The tipping point already happened.

Doesn't not wanting kids for X reason mean that you consider the moral worth of a new person to be less than X.

I think a lot of people don't consider a new person worth anything at all. Or at least would prefer 9 people at happiness level 10 over 10 people at happiness level 9.

Humans have moral worth; to remove suffering of humans, make sure they don’t exist to experience suffering.

That's a pretty bleak outlook on the future of our world. Do you really think getting born today is significantly worse than being born at a random time in human history?

I guess my question to you is, what would be a helpful reply for your mental state?

I could say “people like that shouldn’t have kids. They’re lucky you didn’t post their address or I’d go remove their ability to reproduce myself”.

Would that help you?

What if I said “what were their childhoods like?”

We’re all doing the best we can. Sounds like in your parents case that wasn’t very good, but perhaps compassion and acceptance will help you do better if you choose to make the next generation.

My mom is a raging narcissist, and until I accepted that in her, we had real problems. Now I just understand that I’ll never get an apology from her about anything, and enjoy the good parts.

I mostly feel sorry for her that she lost her father to alcoholism at a young age and is sort of stuck at age 13 in some ways. She burdened me with a lot of stuff growing up that she shouldn’t have, but it’s relatively simple to trace that back through history and see that this was inevitable.

My parents told me the same when I was young. It wasn't until about age 25 that the dynamic between us radically changed. There is a fine line to cross between being a primary caregiver and being an onlooker to someone's life. If you were a parent for 18 years it is understandable to have some "growing pains" associated with transitioning to a new type of relationship with your kids but it certainly is doable, even if it takes a while. I still seek advice from my parents (and they me) but it does not have the affect of authority as it did in childhood.