Generation gap: Children about big age differences with parents
Today, the idea that you need to have a baby as early as possibleseems to be a thing of the past. People are increasingly having children at a more mature age, when they are finally ready for this, and this no longer looks like a curiosity. Perhaps the only question that arises in this situation: what to do with the generation gap? We talked with different people, whose parents are forty-fifty years old, about whether there is a difference in age and how their relationship is developing.
When I was born, my mother was forty-seven, and my father was fifty-three. I have a third child in my family, my brother is eighteen years older than me, and my sister is fourteen (by the way, she also has three children and the difference between her eldest and youngest daughter is even a little bigger than my brother and I, we laugh broke mom's record). As a child, I had a very strange feeling of age, not even because of my parents, but just because of my brother and sister: I was spinning a lot in their company, I considered their friends as my friends, invited me to birthdays (and then I was about six - seven) and so on. But they do not seem to break off.
Dad died when I was four, so basically my mother raised me. Dad, however, was busy with me a lot, and I managed to instill a lot of things, including the love of music, which still defines my life. My mother and I were always very close - I had no problems with her age, and the appearance of a small child seemed to give her some new motivation, or something. She is generally very open to everything new: she took me on a journey, encouraged my hobbies, and so on. She didn’t bring me up much, talked a lot with me as an equal about some interesting and complicated things like literature, religion or politics (mother of dissident views, and it always fascinated me) and never pressed me in anything I know, maybe this is the wisdom that comes with age. Probably, the fact that we ended up with her “through a generation” simplified our relationship strongly, “I had a conflict between fathers and children” rather with my brother as early as adolescence, and with my mother in global things, our views coincided.
The main difficulty in such a difference in age is that you very quickly change roles, and you have an elderly person in need of care. And unlike, say, from children whom you, as a rule, start consciously, this is a given that you do not choose. And this is psychologically difficult. In a normal situation, this happens when you are under fifty, and before that you have twenty to twenty-five years old when you can live independently. And then from twenty-five years your life is very much determined by this factor, when to go to work in another country, for example, is not an option at all.
My mother has a difference of twenty-seven years old with my dad - forty-five. I am now twenty-six, I have an older brother, he is thirty-two. I have a good relationship with my parents, but it seems to me that this does not depend on age. What upbringing they gave me, what cultural code was laid depended on the difference in age. It is difficult to estimate in dry numbers how significant this difference is. For example, when I was young, my father had black hair — I only saw them in photographs, all my life he was gray. Much more obvious, this difference becomes, if you understand that I am a man of the twenty-first century, I have been working in digital since childhood on the Internet, and my dad is a post-war child, his childhood was spent in the barracks at the ZIL factory, and with friends he played at the pond funnel from a bombshell. In his childhood, school went to the gym and her cap, and this was sometimes almost the only decent clothes. Dad remained modest for life, ascetic and always worked very hard, from childhood he gave me the feeling that nothing in life is given by gift.
For many years, my father was engaged in science, then engineering, not for the sake of money, but in order to change the world and do something important. It was also important for me to do my favorite and useful work, and dad was right, the rest was added. It is difficult to judge my own character, but people who are important to me say that I have a lot of maximalism and uncompromisingness, a heightened sense of justice. My dad is the same, only this is even more pronounced. Could it be otherwise, if you grow up in a country destroyed by war and play with sleeves, see the consequences of the horrors of Nazism, and then you are fourteen - and Gagarin flies into space, and then ninety-one years - and you are already an adult, you stand at the White House, and tanks are driving along the streets, and the old world is crumbling. Until the moment I was born, my father lived a great life, events made him so, and he conveyed these qualities to me. And this is the most vivid history, the most human.
The conflict of generations happened to him more likely not with me, but with my mother, and, it seems to me, accompanied all their joint life. Her parents were not very friendly about the future son-in-law of the same age, so their relationship was never cloudless. At a subconscious level, when you have such an adult father, it seems to me that you eventually begin to look for some similar paternal qualities in future men. The brightest relationships I had with a person much older than me, because subconsciously at that moment it seemed to me that he could protect me from everything and save me from everything.
And finally, from the funny (or vice versa). When I was little, it seemed to me that my father would certainly die soon, and I was terribly afraid of this, because fifty is VERY much! Now, when he is over seventy, I, of course, understand that then it was a bit. I just hope that he will have time to see the grandchildren.
My father and I have a difference in the age of exactly forty years and ten days, and with my mother thirty-two years. Now I am twenty-three, my dad, respectively, sixty-three, and my mother fifty-six. I am one in the family and considered to be a late child - at least, I always thought so when I compared myself with the families of my friends who were born at twenty to twenty-five.
I left my hometown, which means from my parents at seventeen. At school, it seemed to me that they did not understand me at all, and I took all of their advice rather skeptically. In childhood, I always wanted to have younger parents, like my friends, because it seemed to me that they understand each other better. They were always allowed to walk late (and I wasn’t), they were almost never punished, they were allowed to wear all the most fashionable things (jeans on their hips, for example), and I was told that this is how I would catch my kidneys. The young parents of my friends understood our jokes and in general seemed cool and modern, unlike mine. I always thought that I was strictly educated, and this was one of the reasons I entered a university in another city.
Now I understand that almost everything my parents advised me was very reasonable and timely, that they understand me perfectly, although not in everything. They are quite modern and sometimes even better understand me in some newfangled pieces, but they still think that “everything must be done on time” - by “on time” my dad means that it is already time to get married and have children. Parents think that the magistracy is a “pass to high society” and without it nowadays is nowhere at all: they won't take a normal job, nor serious people will not communicate.
Now I am grateful to my parents for the way they raised me. I think a big difference in age is rather a plus, because my parents were already conscious, when I appeared, they had a balanced approach to the issue of education, taught me many things and could answer all the questions I asked them. They managed to go through a lot, graduate from several universities, travel, find a favorite job and get a lot of experience in dealing with different people. Although they themselves believe that they missed something and needed to start a family before, I think they did everything right.
At the time of my birth, my father was forty-five years old and my mother twenty-eight. Now the father is gone (I myself am thirty-four), the relationship was not easy. And it's not about the difference of generations, but about life habits. If a person does not start a family for a long time, then he becomes accustomed to idle life. Permanent stay with loved ones can be his, he needs regular doses of loneliness. Dad always walked very quickly, and as a child I had difficulty keeping pace with him: he was used to being alone everywhere. Then he remembers that I am near, and slow down a bit. Now I understand that he was greatly disturbed by the mess that I made when I was a child, although he tried not to show his mind.
My childhood was influenced by the fact that he belonged to the post-war generation. His peers at school age are punks, fatherlessness, children of war. Half of his stories about childhood are frightening stories about how they found a German mine in the fifth grade and put it in a fire, and it exploded, and several of his friends died. As they drove to get cigarettes on the roof of the freight train, and they killed someone when the train entered the tunnel. He had a rather noticeable dent in his forehead - the trail from the brass knuckles, who flew into him in a fight with boys from a neighboring yard at the age of fourteen. And it always seemed to him that I exist in greenhouse conditions. He tried to convey to me the idea that he needed to be a tough guy, but did not succeed - he spoke to me as an adult, and I was still a child.
In addition, he was quickly bored with the educational process. As a result, all my childhood, I felt some lack of attention on his part. Then, when I grew up, lived separately and came to him once every two weeks, our mutual understanding has grown greatly. He lived seventy-six years (which is quite a lot), and he worked actively up to seventy-four. He died literally in two years: the work was over, and the family did not have enough space in his life to give strength to life.
With our parents, we have a difference of thirty-eight years. There are three of us in the family: my sister is forty-two, my brother is thirty-seven, I'm twenty-nine. We have a friendly relationship with our parents. Since childhood, they are accustomed to trust me, have accepted my independence and strongly support my initiatives, for example, moving to another city and another country. I can call them from St. Petersburg and tell them that I’m going to Europe for a month with three guys they don’t know, and they’ll be quite normal about this, because they trust me and my choice. They do not know a lot of the details of my life, but sometimes I tell them all sorts of little things - basically, of course, this concerns professional activities.
With self-realization, dreams, personal life more difficult. We rarely touch on these topics, and they already feel differences. I began to study music at the age of thirty. Mom even watched our clips, and she liked it, but Dad always asks if it brings at least some income. I always joke that I play a minus, but I hope for world tours. They didn’t understand my unwillingness to start a family for a long time, but on my last trip to my hometown, we managed to talk so heartily that they and my "features" accepted.
The age difference, of course, influenced my childhood. I am sure that when my brother and sister were children, my parents were completely different. And then a late child, they played enough of attentive and meticulous parents (they brought up two perfectly), the family has an atmosphere of happiness, and here they have relaxed with me, and finally devoted themselves to each other and self-realization. I was kind of raised in general by my older sister. Since in many respects I had the childhood of the “right” child — I didn’t particularly ask for anything, I graduated with honors, I could allow me a maximum of freedom.
It seems to me that because of the age difference with me, my parents have become more flexible. I am all tattooed, I have piercings and sometimes I look like a typical teenager. But I lead an atypical way of life for a person like me - I teach adults who are much older than myself. Almost from early childhood, they perceive me as a person, and if they see the same person on the street, they will not prejudice to judge him. This despite the fact that they were very conservative people - both former military.
It also seems to me that I had a little influence on their attitude to life and to themselves: I insisted all my childhood that it was time for them to tie up with life “for the sake of” and devote more time to themselves. For three years in a row, they have been fulfilling the dream of an ideal old age - they travel together at least once every six months. Probably, they would have done it without me, but it’s good that they managed to start doing it earlier.
Photo: Nikolai Sorokin - stock.adobe.com, Andrew Buckin - stock.adobe.com, fantasy - stock.adobe.com