Therapy speak. What are you hearing from your kids?

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I don’t know why I am jumping in, as I think I am likely in a true minority, but if your kid tells you that they have experienced things maybe believe them.

My siblings also would think that I was nuts if I complained about my childhood. I asked my mom whether we could get family counseling when I was 19, and she laughed at me. Different kids can see the same things differently. None of us is definitively “right.” It’s no wonder that my sibs still live minutes from my parents and I live three hours away. I’m not saying I am right and my sibs are wrong in how we see our family, but I think there is enough nuance for all of us to see things as WE lived them. Because I am several years younger than my two sibs, who were born 364 days apart, it makes sense that my experiences are different from theirs. So, personally, I would believe the kid who says that their experiences aren’t the same as their siblings, and the siblings can roll their eyes all they want but it won’t change anything other than to further estrange the first kid.

I heard a guy on TV talk about this topic and how he grew up. Basically, it was a given that he would get beaten up and bullied by his brothers. It was sad to me that he thinks he should just put up with this behavior. Kind of like spanking – hey, I was spanked and I survived. What I hear a lot in this thread is a misunderstanding of how others can see things differently and that wanting something different is somehow a rejection of you. One of the most important things I have learned in therapy is that we often excuse bad behavior on the part of family BECAUSE they are family. “But he’s your uncle.” But she’s your sister." I have put up with $&%* from my family that I absolutely would not from anyone else.

I think of the word trauma perhaps differently than some here. I think most think trauma has to be something HUGE. When my therapist talked about MY childhood trauma I was all, uh, wait, what? When she broke down what she meant my mind was blown. She asked me to define trauma, and then she applied my definition to what I had told her, and, well, she wasn’t wrong. Just like when my mom laughed at me for wanting our family to go into therapy, my sibs absolutely would scoff if I told them how I felt growing up. I think because my telling them would require them to examine themselves, and that’s uncomfortable. Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

When my sister finally divorced her horrible husband after 44 years my mother said she couldn’t believe all the things she learned about him and how awful he was. I looked her straight in the face and said, “I tried to tell you.” She said, “I know.” That was satisfying after all these decades of her telling me to not say anything to not cause waves.

As an aside, one thing I’ve learned is that my hyper-independence is in part because I was so often left uncared for, physically and emotionally. I learned to fend for myself. Just wanted to throw that out there in case others recognize that in their kids or themselves.

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I so agree with your post. Amen.

I also want to add…WE are one of those generations (maybe all before us) who are quick to refer to the “simpler times” when we grew up. People like to say “You couldn’t pay me enough to be a teen/young adult again” or similar.

Yet here “we” are, in this thread for one, claiming that the problems/situations experienced by young adults today are no different than the ones we had growing up.

Which is it? Did we have it easier? Do young adults have it harder? Why do we have to measure???

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I do think young adults in the past were more outward focused, often with far greater responsibilities, than the more introspective youth today. One’s expectations of quality of life, privacy, free time etc were much different, and since they were lower, those expectations were more frequently met in the past.

The delta between expectations versus experience is responsible for a lot of our happiness level.

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Who set up those expectations - then or now??? Did kids dream it up or did parents put it on a plate and then kids came to expect it?

A genuine question for anyone.

It’s clear here on CC (and to different degrees for all of us in real life) that many kids plates were made FULL by parents who provided all needed and much more, who gave varying degrees of responsibility or accountability to kids who became young adults…yet at some point parents “flip the switch” and can’t figure out why kids expect so much or do so little or need help navigating life…

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I have had much experience with my kids and depression. Not to mention anxiety, ADHD, executive function disorder, and more.

I would encourage those who know someone who experiences depression even with therapy and meds to look into TMS (transcranial magnetc stimulation.) It is a legitimate treatment offered by many psychiatric practices. It is not electroshock treatment. It helped one of my kids enormously.

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I’ve never heard of that. Thanks for the info. I know several people who have tried ketamine. Some it helped, some it didn’t.

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NOT criticizing, and not a fan of toughing it out. Just observing differences in society between then and now. Sorry it came off that way.

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And for serious cases, electroconvulsive therapy (not shock treatment) can be lifesaving. It was for my son, as well as a close friend who experienced a bout of depression so severe she ended up in the hospital. She’s the LAST person you would expect to go through something like that. She is very thankful for ECT. And it is NOT like the primitive treatments used decades ago.

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If you were observing- I’m with you.

:slight_smile:

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I think that many of your are misinterpreting the intention of the discussion. No one is saying our young adults shouldn’t be believed. What started the topic was the wide misuse of therapy terms by this generation, probably due in part to things like tick toc. Having a bad day is not trauma. Feeling nervous is not generalized anxiety disorder. Liking a clean room is not obsessive compulsive disorder. Using such words inappropriately diminishes the seriousness of actual mental illness.

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I think this plus @abasket’s questions plus what @Durham1972 wrote about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are all part of why things feel harder for this generation.

I was having a discussion with a friend about interest rates. I know that we’ve heard people decry mortgage rates hitting 7%, but we were talking about how back in the day we were thrilled to refinance down to 7.125%. We could grouse and say “kids don’t know how good they have it today!” but to what end? If you’ve only known 3% mortgage rates then 7% does feel onerous, and those rates ARE keeping lots of people from buying a house. What good does it do to tell kids they don’t know how good they have it because back in my day blah blah blah. Both things are true – many of us dealt with worse, and a more than doubling of rates has made it difficult for many as well.

The Maslow’s thing always has fascinated me. I remember a LONG time ago reading an anniversary issue of Parents magazine, where they reprinted articles throughout the years. One from the mid-1900s didn’t mention Maslow’s hierarchy by name, but you could infer that it was in play. Back when you had a not-insignificant chance of losing a kid due to disease and poor health care and nutrition, parents were less attached to/indulgent with their kids. Now that most children make it into adulthood, I think we move up Maslow’s pyramid. We can indulge our kids, which, yes, sometimes spoils them and stunts their independence and maturity. So, like @abasket asks, who’s really to blame for that?

My mom was one of 16, but only 13 made it past the age of 2. I recognize that her parenting was influenced by her parents’ parenting and it was a whole other world. So, over the years I have tried to cut her a lot of slack as she was doing the best with what she knew from her own upbringing. But I also can recognize that she really wasn’t the kind of mom I needed. Again, both things can be true. I think a lot of our kids can be struggling even when we feel like we’ve given them everything we had.

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I agree with you.

But I have also observed a tendency to minimize- even with this generation. So a young woman who has gotten out of an abusive relationship (where a sibling was ready to get a restraining order) might describe the ex as 'a little controlling". (He wasn’t controlling. He was one step away from putting your head through a wall). A young man who has spent time in a residential treatment program describes himself as “I’m learning boundaries with alcohol”.

Forget tiktok. Talk to actual mental health experts who work with teenagers and young adults. There are kids who are close to an acute crisis (life-threatening anorexia, addiction, clinical depression) who are still minimizing the seriousness of their issues, and therefore, their parents continue to minimize how serious the issues are. One reason why high schools and colleges are so careful now about bringing in a team after a student suicide… parents are not always as aware as they could be about their kid’s struggles, and NOBODY wants the cluster/copycats from vulnerable kids who see a way out once a peer has shown the way.

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In the spaces I frequent, talk of sobriety and limited drinking has increased a lot in the last 5 years or so, particularly among Gen X and younger generations. Spouse and I do drink alcohol without problems, but we’re so excited to see the increased attention to sobriety, etc!

I think it is amazing and encouraging that 25 year-olds, who maybe aren’t classified as alcoholics, are able to say “I choose not to drink for X and Y reason” (or give no reason at all) and are accepted and supported without question. I feel like the younger generations are turning a corner and I hope that being a drinker will soon no longer be considered the default. How wonderful to avoid the potential lifetime of suffering for themselves and their loved ones that would occur for a subset of them if they continued to drink.

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I do think that there can be issues with people choosing to pathologize normal problems. An older friend whose teenage child was murdered once said that people would start to share a ‘normal’ struggle, and then stop and say ‘But that’s nothing compared to what you’ve been through’. This person always said that the ‘worst thing that’s ever happened to you is still the worst thing that’s ever happened to you’. As a child, the loss of your pet fish might seem to be a grief as big as losing a parent or child because you’ve never actually lost a parent or child. When I taught classes that had combat vets, they approached the class by working very hard but didn’t have the ‘frazzled stress’ look because, on a relative scale, their final exam was not even close to the most stressful thing that they had done in the past year. (As an aside, the comment ‘Ma’am, I like your class. You make it clear what we need to do to achieve the objective’ remains favorite.)

Along the same lines, I think that frequent exposure to psychiatric terminology can cause people who don’t have a lot of experience to think that normal experiences are the thing being described. My concern is that some kids will start to reframe normal conflict and interactions with the labels, and then when they see recommendations for how to deal with those labels they’ll follow them unnecessarily. If your parent is a narcissist, cutting them off might be the best course of action. If, instead of calling parents mean because you are an angry teen, you label them a narcissist and every parental decision that you don’t like as part of their narcissism, then you may decide to cut them off instead of outgrowing this type of conflict, which often resolves itself once a teen graduates and moves out.

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Good point! I do think it’s good that people are aware of mental health and I do think parents should never trivialize their kid’s feelings. That said I don’t think it’s a good idea to throw therapy speak around willy-nilly especially when you’re not a mental health professional. And I really don’t think it’s a good idea to be getting mental health advice from TIK TOK, not everyone on TIK TOK is a doctor or an expert. People need to be mindful of that.

Very true! Again, that’s something people need to be aware of.

That’s a good point. Also, in my affluent area I see a lot of families where everything and every bit of family life seems to revolve around the kid. And there are a lot of parents who will monopolize the conversation by talking about their kids and don’t even think to ask about the other person or their kids. And then these parents later wonder why the kid seems to self-centered or always expect others to step in and solve their problems. I’m not saying every family in our area is like this, but it does seem to be somewhat common in our area. I will say that my kids were very fortunate and we were able to provide all of the essentials and more. That said, they still had chores and when they got older they had to earn their own spending money. Also, my H and I always tried to watch how we acted around our kids, kids can pick up on how their parents act. H and I never bragged or acted entitled, so our kids learned not to act that way. Were we perfect? No. Also our family life did not revolve 100% around our kids, everyone in our home is/was important. And H and I tried to have our own interests outside of our kids, which I do think is very healthy…

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@Clemsondana Great Post! That is where the challenge lies - determining the difference between actual trauma/mental health issues and the normal range of human emotion. Yes, as @Youdon_tsay pointed out, lived experience can be different for each child in a family. Many of us know as parents that what worked for Kid A didn’t work for Kid B. IMHO, however, not every hardship or bad parenting decision equates to a true traumatic event. Not every case of a mean kid is bullying. Not every bad parenting move is abusive.

That doesn’t mean that the kid’s feelings are not real and need to be accepted. As parents, we should learn from our children’s feelings about our actions. Saying we are sorry that our actions made our kid feel that way, and that it was never our intention can be healing. OTOH, that also does not mean we have to be the whipping post for every grievance.

At one point my kid blamed me for having him evaluated for ADD and getting him on meds (he went on and off a lot), saying it was only because I wanted him to be someone he was not. Now, some time later, he accepts the benefits of those medications and appreciates my trying to help him.

Of course it is better for kids to get help and not be told to simply get over it. Yet there also is a place for kids that have had a decent childhood to recognize that privilege and that so many others have it so much worse. Again, not negating negative feelings that result from dysfunctional families or bad parenting, but there is also a price to pay when we assign pathology to every unhappy or challenging aspect of our personality.

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My sister told me early in her marriage, she yelled at her husband. Her husband stopped her and said, “you can’t talk to me like that. We can disagree/argue, but I won’t be spoken that way.” My sister could be very harsh and mean when she got into a fight with someone, but she took what her husband said to heart. They are still very happily married after 35 years.
My BIL set boundaries with my sister, but back then we didn’t use that phrase.
When we bare our heart to our friends, SO and family, we want them to sympathize with us and understand our feelings. We don’t necessarily need them to come up with a solution, but to “validate our experience.”
What I am trying to say is that we may have some fancy words/phrases that are considered to be therapy speak today, but we have been feeling/doing/wanting to do those things forever.
I think my kids have had fairly idyllic childhood. I am surprised and upset when my kids told me things I’ve done to upset them. The only thing I could say to them is that I did the best I could and my intentions were good.

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Well, my S informed me that I ruined his faith in adults because I lied to him. About what? Santa Claus. I am sure it was one of the things he discussed in therapy. Hey, I didn’t mean for it to backfire that way.

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Well, we didn’t tell my kids Santa existed for just that reason…and they feel like we squelched their sense of wonder and joy of the unexplainable by our actions. :roll_eyes: So, I guess you can’t win either way.

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D1 asked out of the blue what happened when people died. I was so taken back, the only thing came to my head was “it’s kind of like when you fall asleep.” She told me that for the longest time she was afraid to fall asleep.
That was a complete fail on my part.