this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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[–] Bronzie@sh.itjust.works 64 points 1 week ago (3 children)

They never said I'd feel like a fool, but mentioned that I'd probably understand later in life, and they were spot on, but it comes gruadually.

As an example: when I started paying my own bills, I stopped taking endless showers and later started being frustrated when my kids do.

I also very recently started understanding why they hated smartphones with small screens as they typed so slowly, as I keep mis-typing more and more myself.

So I'd say it starts when moving out and the realities of life hits you square in the face, and then the rest come dripping slowly over time.
Becomming a parent slaps you with another big load as well.

[–] sours@lemmy.dbzer0.com 27 points 1 week ago (4 children)

It feels like mine were right about a lot of the little things but missed the big picture.

[–] atro_city@fedia.io 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You think you know what the big picture is. You still have a lot to learn.

[–] abbadon420@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You think there is a big picture. You still have a lot to learn.

[–] atro_city@fedia.io 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You think you know there is no big picture. You still have a lot to learn.

[–] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

If you think others still have a lot to learn, you still have a lot to learn.

[–] huquad@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago

If you think others don't still have a lot to learn, you still have a lot to learn.

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[–] Blueberrydreamer@lemmynsfw.com 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ha, I felt the opposite. When I started seeing how cheap water is (where I live) I couldn't believe my parents complained so much about an extra $1.50 a month.

[–] Bo7a@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 week ago

And the endless whining about gas prices. Ok sis, you now have to spend an extra dollar per week. Maybe complain about the book bans and other fascism creeping into everyday life instead.

[–] JackDark@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

Becomming a parent slaps you with another big load as well

😏

[–] callouscomic@lemmy.zip 54 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

My narcissistic, selfish, and abusive parents abused things like "because I said so," "you'll understand when you're older," and "you'll understand when you have kids" among other things.

I now understand. They were shitheads that never wanted to actually explain things or be held accountable for their fucking abuse. I understand that it literally took EFFORT for them to be so goddamn angry and verbally/physically abusive to us, and it takes a serious level of hate to sprinkle in the emotional neglect and somehow be okay with treating your child like that.

I can't fathom doing half the shit they did.

[–] The_v@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Hmmm.... Did we have the same parents?

Apparently why I haven't spoken to them or seen them in over a decade is a mystery. The next time I see them will be when they are in their graves. I'll have my dancing shoes on.

[–] MehBlah@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

Be like me. I didn't go to the funerals.

[–] idiomaddict@lemmy.world 30 points 1 week ago

My dad is so, so smart in so many ways. Unfortunately, he’s completely incapable of some forms of introspection (thankfully not all). He believes that he’s even smarter than he is, and rejects anything that doesn’t fit his worldview.

I do understand him a lot more as time goes on, because my siblings and I have learned that our whole family is autistic and our parents were just dealing with that their whole lives. They did a great job with us, specifically in regard to us being autistic.

For example, my dad would warn me before he sharpened our knives, so that I could get at least two blocks away before he started, and they never cared if we wore clothes inside out to avoid tags, as long as they were otherwise neat. They educated us early about nutrition, so we could choose what we wanted to eat ourselves, but it had to be balanced. They most importantly explained that things don’t always make sense, but that sometimes people have an emotional connection to them or for seniority or similar reasons don’t want to hear us say that it doesn’t make sense.

Most effective for me specifically: my dad explained two things to me in exactly the right way for me to act in the way that was most helpful for me. He told me that I might be smarter than any given cop, but I’m not smarter than all of them together if I were to commit a big crime, and that if I kept stealing petty shit, I’d eventually get locked out of jobs where I might have been able to embezzle a lot more money. I stopped stealing and did eventually get a job where I could have embezzled a lot of money, but by that time I was better at thinking through consequences and no longer wanted to. I don’t know if that advice would work for everyone and frankly it seems like irresponsible advice to give a kid, but it absolutely helped me.

Autism aside, they were also both completely correct about how important caring for your teeth is.

[–] zxqwas@lemmy.world 30 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I was smarter.

That did not prevent me from being foolish like all kids are.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

This. This so hard.

Like, it doesn't matter how smart you are, you're working with only a little bit of data on a world filled with lies, which tends to beget bad ideas. And that's not even getting into the non-rational drivers kids can have.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 29 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I can tell you my sister always blamed my parents for mostly going on vacation to Poland, where they had a summer house and family (uncles, aunts, grandparents) instead - like the rich children from her class in Germany - to Spain or Italy.

Now she is asking if she could use that summer house to be able to go anywhere abroad because turns out it's quite difficult to earn a lot of money to be able to take your child on expensive vacations. And she has only one instead of three children like our parents.

While I can't tell you if she feels like you describe, but I think in this case she should :p

[–] sours@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Spain or Italy sound like tourist traps these days, I wouldn't mind Poland.

[–] freebee@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago

Depends where in Italy or Spain. Italy is very nice because it's almost always sunny and the food is always good and cheap. And there are so many kilometres of coastline... you can still find what you want too: small not completely tourist overrun coastal villages. Unfortunately it's getting too warm now in summer because climate change.

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[–] kadaverin0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 26 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I figured out my parents were dumb as hell when at age 11 I tried to calmly explain to my screaming father in the midst of an absolute meltdown that leaving the Windows 95 shutdown prompt on "restart" didn't ruin the computer.

He just screamed at me not to touch the prompt anymore and that I didn't know anything about it computers or the Internet. Which is rich coming from the guy who routinely downloaded porn dialers and malware from his fellow closet cases in bisexual chatrooms.

[–] MehBlah@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure he was talking about burning a after image in the screen. My parents were similarly unhinged when the atari 2600 came out. Burn in on old CRT monitors take a really long time. Much longer than it did for TV's in the 60's and 70's.

[–] kadaverin0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

No, that was was actually a whole other incident onto itself. He didn't know about CRT burn-in until I had to explain to him what the point of a screensaver was when he kept turning it off and leaving the monitor on all day.

He actually ruined our old Apple IIc doing that shit. We had a ">" symbol burned into the upper left corner of the screen. We ended up having to use the flat panel screen which was absolute ass to game on except for text adventures.

My father is just worst kind of stupid: angry.

[–] MehBlah@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

My dad heard something from some random person about burn in and as a result was convinced every time I turned on a console it was going to ruin the TV. He had all kinds of weird bit of false knowledge gleaned from listening to random strangers. Somehow their unsubstantiated claims about how the world works had more weight than my demonstrated ability to make things work. He would never run the AC in the car on max. Thinking it made the compressor work harder not realizing that max just closed the outside vent on the car. He hated for me to succeed and enjoyed every mistake I ever made.

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[–] Opinionhaver@feddit.uk 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

My parents didn't talk down to me like that.

What I have been told, however, is that I wont stay lean like this all my life and will start gaining weight as I get older. That I'm still waiting for to happen.

[–] sours@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They told me i'd gain 10lbs a decade and they've been right so far but I'm not unhealthy or massively overweight so eh.

[–] Dozzi92@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Ha, same. I'm 37 and had my reckoning a bit. I was a bean pole kid, though I worked at it, swaam competitively, played sports my whole life, did the military thing. Got my own kids now, and COVID was peak lazy for me, and took me some time to get out of. Getting back on the exercise thing was tough, and the pounds did come on in the interim. Nothing crazy, but definitely noticeable for me.

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[–] samus12345@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 week ago

Depends on whether your parents are actually dumb or not.

[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

At age 46 I’m more smarter than them now than I ever used to be. They do literally 93% of things incorrectly, yet are convinced of the opposite, and that they are always the smartest people in the room.

[–] Spacehooks@reddthat.com 9 points 1 week ago

My grandma does this. Meanwhile she does the worst decisions and no one trusts her. She never asks for help because she is the smartest ever and none of us "know the value of a dollar". Pride is one hell of a drug.

[–] TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Do you have kids, yet ?

I do not, so I expect it is related to that moment in your life.

[–] sours@lemmy.dbzer0.com 42 points 1 week ago

Kids? In this economy?! What am I? My parents?

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yes, that's a pretty famous moment for your parent's lines to start coming out of your mouth. TBF the reaction to that seems to be "I can't become my parents" more often than "they were right".

[–] laranis@lemmy.zip 13 points 1 week ago

I definitely see myself understanding the world more, and that obviously will come with experience. However, with that also comes wisdom, and specifically the wisdom to look back and see that some adults were fucking fucktards.

I was a better person than them then, and am certainly a better person now.

Enjoy hell, Mr. K.

[–] sugarfoot00@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 week ago

When you have kids.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I'm guessing the average Lemming was a weird little nerd. I was.

If anything, my own parents had trouble recognising I actually still was a kid.

[–] chunes@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They might have meant to say wiser. When I was a teenager, I remember being sharper than my parents with academic subjects, but there is much more to life than that.

[–] sours@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I suppose I can't fault them too much. I did have the benefit of learning from their mistakes (and being one of them.)

[–] shaggyb@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago

You mean the dad who had me rewire the telephone lines in our house when I was 14 because he couldn't figure out four wires? That one?

[–] Nemo@slrpnk.net 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thankfully, my parents never tried to undermine my self-esteem like that.

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[–] jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Ignorance and hubris are consequences of youth. The fact is that your parents do probably know quite a few things that you don't, if for no other reason than they have more lived experience. That shouldn't necessarily make you feel foolish. Part of growing older is realizing that you possess a microscopic fraction of all the knowledge in the universe. Meaning that most people know things that you don't and you could learn something from them. That's wisdom. Some adults never embrace that, seeing their ignorance as an asset and turning their hubris into blind arrogance. Those people should feel foolish because they are fools. But they probably don't.

I don't agree with every decision my parents made. But in my mid thirties, I do now understand why they are the people they are and why they made some of the decisions they made. They were far from perfect parents. But they did ok, especially in light of the incredibly shitty examples they both had for parents.

[–] Balerion@piefed.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 week ago

I'm 29. My opinion on my parents has not changed much since I was a kid. My dad has a lot of practical knowledge, but his worldview is pants-on-head stupid. My mom is a far better person than my dad, but her technical knowledge is limited.

[–] AAA@feddit.org 6 points 1 week ago

At the same time we stop believing everything we read on the internet. As told to us by the people who now happily believe every oh so absurd made up bullshit on the internet or TV.

[–] anarchy79@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

When you grow up, which you clearly yet haven't.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I am smarter than my dad in a lot of things. But not programming. Or math.

At the same time, though, a huge portion of what I learned in school was wrong. I got As for being able to remember information that has since been changed, debunked, or otherwise made inaccurate due to new discoveries. So kids today probably are smarter than me, but will likely end up in the same boat at my age when everything they were taught is discovered to be wrong.

The only real constant is math. Math never changes.

[–] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It doesn’t happen until you have your own kid who thinks they are smarter than you

[–] sours@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago

It sounds kind of like hubris or face-saving when you put it like that.

[–] altphoto@lemmy.today 3 points 1 week ago

On your teens maybe a couple of times. When you're 20 you'll notice those things and have this passing "oh, I see" moment. On your 30's you'll experience that often. On your 40's you want it to slow the fuck down. You'll probably tell someone to wash their face or brush their teeth a lot.

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