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[quote=Anonymous][quote][quote][quote][quote]
My guess is they're probably wondering where they went wrong, [b]raising children who can't seem to cope with their own lives. [/b]

I do understand this is a special case, OP, and I'm very sorry to hear that your husband is in the hospital. But, I don't agree with the idea that grandparents should be responsible to help raise grandchildren like many people seem to. It's nice if it can happen, but shouldn't be an expectation. A retired parent has put in more than enough sacrifice time raising YOU TO 20/30/40.

There's definitely an element of selfishness in the baby boomer generation. My grandmother raised me when I was a kid so my momcould finish school. She supported my mom in so many ways, and honestly without her mom would have probably needs to drop out of college. I had a super close relationship with my grandmother which is something I'll always treasure.

Fast forward to my children: my mom could not even be bothered to spend one week helping after the birth of my child. To add insult to injury she minimizes all the work that goes into caring for a young child - because she never had to do it! Plus she always critiques my grandmother for not getting an education. In the months after the birth of my first baby i realized that the mother child bond this was never going to be an experience that we could share. Some people are too selfish - and sometimes that attitude is pervasive throughout an entire generation. My grandmother raised both of us but family values must have skipped a generation.[/quote]

So what? If you want help, hire help. [b]NO ONE owes you ANYTHING[/b].[/quote]

It's this attitude that is the problem, not generation. I am an immigrant and American families are weird to me. Overly indulgent to small children, obsessed with pointless activities to the point of missing meetings to sit on some irrelevant game or such, but then all of a sudden, you are 18 and "nobody owes you anything". People hoard millions of dollars do that they can spend 15k month living In a village for old people only etc. I don't get it and I don't want to.[/quote]

+1 I agree, it is really sad. [/quote]

+10.  What interesting is how awful the defenses of the "boomers" are (defense provided, I assume by other boomers or those sympathetic to the extreme individualism that generation is associated with).  How dare you hope from help from your Mom when your spouse is in the hospital, you worthless ingrate?  It's like... far from justifying this behavior, you are further proving OP's point.

To turn to generalizing whole generations, which I agree is always highly unscientific at best, and grossly unfair at worst, my parents *are* boomers and much more helpful (though hampered with serious health issues).  My mom is an immigrant and my Dad is first generation though which may change the calculus at bit--and in fact, my Mom has had interesting things to say (generalizations!) about what she observes about her cohort of women.  How they were caught in the middle of the big wave of change for women--benefiting to some extent, but also expected for much of their life to adhere to more traditional and restrictive roles for women including "mandatory" care taking and watching later generations truly having the chance to take opportunities they did not have (but helped create).  I think that the dynamic leads to interesting results in terms of their perspectives on caretaking in their later years that go beyond mere "selfishness."[/quote]

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