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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I mean, I would have to get some background info.

Yes a parent's job is to raise a kid but at some point it's put on the adult, however I hear this all the time from parents that just have different views of living life from their parents.[/quote]

This is my parents. Their problem is that they have extremely narrow views of what constitutes a successful life. I think they expected their kids to follow exactly in their footsteps (marry young, have several children young, work in the same industry for 50 years, own a large house). When their kids made different choices or, in many cases, had different opportunities. they took it as a rejection of their life and as evidence their kids were on the wrong track.

I remember a few years back visiting my parents and my mom was going on and on about how worried she was about my younger brother and how they wished they could help him out more but he didn't want their help. I was honestly confused. My brother and his wife had recently paid cash for a rambling old house that they were slowly fixing up over time. They are both artists and they have messy, delightful studios in the home where they make art together when they aren't working their day jobs. They have a funny, sweet, life-loving little boy who they obviously take great care of. They don't have a ton of money (artists!) but they have everything they need, and I get the sense they are living precisely the life they want. Plus they've obviously made smart financial choices given their choice of lifestyle -- saving money and using a small inheritance to buy a home outright so that they don't have to pay a mortgage. It allows them a lot of freedom, even though their house is old and not "nice" the way my parents think a house should be. It's clean and functional for them.

It makes me so sad my parents can't look at my brother's life and see how successful he is, how joyful and how... himself he is. I am so proud of him. That my parents think somehow he is lacking is a reflection of their limitation, not my brother's life.

I am living a more conventional life and even that my parents treat is insufficient. We live in an apartment instead of a house (partially by choice -- we want to be in the city and can't afford a row home, so we choose to live in a condo instead of a house further out). This is embarrassing to them for some reason. We focus our money on saving for our kid's education and on traveling abroad, because those are our values. My parents instead feel we should drive a nicer car, wear nicer clothes, and own lots more material possession or upgrade more things in our home. When we gently say we'd rather visit Japan with our daughter in a few year's than get a really nice new dishwasher, they seem to think we have weird priorities.

Anyway, this is all on them. They value conformity and they want to be able to brag about certain things to their friends and siblings, and their children's happiness is secondary at best. It is a shame, but not in the way they think.[/quote]

This was my mom in a nutshell as well. Very disappointed, but I have a fairly successful life--just not the one she wanted me to have. And no prison, no addictions, not even a single tattoo--and I am a white color professional with a nice dh and a home- yet she was disappointed til she died. [/quote]

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