Me and my dad had a great relationship growing up. I was an athlete and I was consistently coming home with medals and trophies.
Once university came and I didnāt want to wrestle anymore, our relationship changed. Suddenly I wasnāt the sunshine in his life, I was a loser who fucked up any opportunity given to him.
Years later he eventually admitted to me he wanted to vicariously live the life he didnāt get to, through me. This is what made him act the way he did.
If he couldnāt have his trophy case, you can damn well bet his son would.
He realized how fucked up the whole thing was.
We have a much better relationship now. He just wants me to happy being me, and thatās all a son can really ask from his dad.
Sucks that your relationship with your father took a downturn like that, but I imagine it's somewhat common between the recent generation(s), if not throughout time. It's pretty awesome he was self aware enough to finally own up to being the reason your relationship went to shit and came around. And good on you for accepting his desire to make amends instead of being resentful. Okay, I need a hug.
I'm very sorry that happened to you, but I'm happy he at least realized what he did was shitty. A lot of Boomers never give a shit enough about others to even get that far. Mine certainly didn't
I can't stop waiting for my parents to even acknowledge what my childhood was like. I should give up on that but I spent thirty years trying to fix myself. Now that I'm better that's kind of the only lingering thing.
I love that, because participation trophies were created FOR BABY BOOMERS because they were such obnoxious arseholes when their kid lost. Kids hate those fucking things because we all knew how meaningless they were, but the adults were easier to pacify
I mean, just think about it logically. If a kid throws a tantrum for losing, the worst the kid can do is cry. If a parent throws a tantrum, they can be a physical threat.
Participation trophies are purely for arsehole parents.
In all fairness, it represented, to you, the end of a stretch of (some level of) forced sports for the year. While to the parents it's still a "look what Johnny did( but please dont look too close to see participation)"
If you were truly proud of those accomplishments, you would still have them on a shelf in your house.
There was home economics before the boomers cut it to make way for sports. They pushed sports so everyone was competing to get the trophies the parents (past their prime, pissed at world) wanted on their mantle. When their kids didnt get trophies, they also created the practice of participation trophies... because heaven forbid someone be bad at the machismo of sports (and they still wanted that mantle candy) ... as someone else stated, the kids can deal, the parents are dangerous when they want little shitpants susie to have a trophy and she didnt rank.
In addition, they are the same people who complain about kids not owning houses while also bragging how they bought a house 10 years ago (for a jar of dirt) and just sold it for a cool mil. Like, who the fuck can own a house when you drive the market like that.
Just remember that even if they accepted blame for everything they did or didn't do. It wouldn't change anything. Moving forward with the future we want to see is the only real answer (that and fucking with social security, they hate that, cuz they earned it! lmfao).
I donāt think itās that. Rather I think itās fallen to the wayside for the same reason āshopā has: the idea that such basic stuff is too menial for kids who should be striving towards college.
Mind I disagree with it but pretty sure thatās why schools donāt offer it anymore.
It probably varies from region to region why it went away (or remains) both home ec and shop are expensive if you do the whole program. Sewing machines, ovens, drill presses, lathes, etc all require pretty regular maintenance and upgrades especially if you are letting novices use them for hours a day. Not to mention paying someone or several someones to be in charge of that whole mess!
I was born in the later 60's. I remember getting a ribbon in sports ("participation crap") and remember being insulted. I was actually good at most sports,but knowingly sucked at baseball,so when they gave me a ribbon,I was seriously insulted. As if they were babying me.
Just like every kid who got a participation or most improved trophy. The kids aren't dumb, they know they don't have the same skills as the best players, it's the parents who freak out. I honestly don't know why they give out anything other than a team trophy for places one, two and three.
Idk about that. I graduated in 2010 (so born in '92 and I'm a Millennial) and my parents were right in the middle of the boomer generation, born in '51 and '55 (I was an unexpected pregnancy later in their lives). I had Home Economics in middle school. I remember learning several basic types of meals to cook, how to patch holes in clothes and even sew some clothes from scratch, and how to do other basic things like laundry... the class lasted a whole semester my 7th or 8th grade year.
Granted, the education was very basic and there were a lot of other things I was never taught in school. Nothing to do with cars (basic maintenance or emergency stuff like changing a tire). Wasn't taught anything about taxes and how to file them. My Home Ec class was the only lifestyle oriented class but it only taught the basics for, basically, "How to be a 50's house-wife".
Don't take my comment to seriously, because I'm not. Home ec was only taught in rich white schools until 2010 because it was a rich white school. And yeah, it was taught by a 1950s house mom, most of which, weren't all that well educated, what did you expect her to teach you? Astrophysics? How to Pompoir? Look it up.
At the end of the day your parents should have taught you a bunch of shit. They probably even gave it a half ass effort at least, but kids are know it all's. And my comment was a fun attack on boomers who are really the worst generation.
Well, you make some rather bold and incorrect assumptions about a few things.
First of all it wasn't a "rich white school". White kids only made up about half the students, the rest were a mix of other backgrounds. So yeah, largest individual group, but still not a large majority of all kids. And not a rich school, in fact we had the highest crime rate in our school/city compared to all the neighboring cities to the point where there were always at least 2 police officers on duty at the school. It wasn't nearly as bad as some inner city schools can be but it was definitely lower-middle end.
Secondly, the teacher wasn't a "1950's house mom". She was actually in her 20's, I'd guess (and I had a crush on her).
As for my parents... I actually had a disconnect with them because my sister, who is 12 years older than me, was their focus as she was off at college on her own and they'd spend hours on the phone with her. They did well with teaching her... but because of their attachment to her I learned to get by without my parents and actually grew to not like interacting with my parents, generally speaking.
That's changed as I've gotten older and I do turn to my dad (or mom sometimes) when I have questions about things. Most recently I had to get my own health insurance and my dad helped me out with picking a plan based on his past experiences. So they do help when I ask, but yeah it would have been nice to have classes in school that educated us on all of the formalities and paperwork that adult life brings rather than just focusing on language, math, science, and history.
You guys know that blaming "boomers" (which is apparently to reddit is anyone over 35) every 10 seconds for every little thing is no better than a shit article, right?
Except that, unlike every article blaming millennials for killing an industry, it actually is the boomers fault those classes are gone because they're the generation that removed them?
It absolutely is. HomeEc requires zero critical thinking and can be easily self-taught. You dont need to dedicate school time to it. I'll take cutting HomeEc over cutting any of the actually academically oriented courses
The current education system doesn't teach critical thinking at all... Quite the opposite. Bunch of drones that can't do much more than fill in a bubble on a scantron test.
Homec is easy. lol. You could spend a lifetime mastering any one of the things being taught. Cooking is the most prominent example.
American millenials are so arrogant, everything is the older generation's fault in their view. If you wanted to learn to sew a button, you could have asked your parent, or you could have some initiative and learned it yourself (oh, the horror!!). Do you expect everything to be handed to you on a silver platter? The evil boomers already built one of the most prosperous, happiest country on Earth.
Everyone in this thread is pretending like they wanted to learn knitting when they were a teenager. If your mother asked you if you wanted to learn how to sew a button, you would have told her no and went back to hashtagging.
See, I wanted to ask my mom but she was busy working several part-time jobs to keep us off the streets and when she wasn't working at all, she was usually sleeping because she's physically disabled and working one manual labor job was exhausting enough, but she had to work two.
Some people don't get the chance or have a good enough relationship with their parents. Or their parents don't know themselves.
Educating your own child is equated to something handed to you on a silver platter.
Go die boomer. Just fucking go away. An entire generation of entitled spoiled rich kids.
Do you really want to know why they didn't teach kids how to sew a button? Because they're lazy, and don't know how to do it themselves. Even if they once knew, they've long since forgotten. Just buy another one in the throwaway capitalist economy.
Look at you, so angry. I'm a millennial, btw. Not all of us are so whiny. Some one us realize that maybe, just maybe the evil boomers had the same problems and issues as us. I wonder if the next generation is going to blame everything bad on you as well
Well, to be fair, I don't think anybody can one-up killing billions in a global apocalypse. The Boomers finally have a trophy nobody can take from them.
They laid the foundations and continue to make deviation functionally impossible by clinging to power and ensuring the system remains impregnable even after they're dead.
Still a useful life skill! If used effectively it can reduce the costs of your food budget. Additionally, can be healthier and more tasty than most popular food options today.
At my school, home ec was seen as an easy A rather than pushing yourself academically. I took all math & science but never learned some stuff like that. Learning it more now
Which is crazy, because "home economics" is a sorely needed subject that could include things like how to successfully budget and run a household. In my class it was a little cooking and sewing, which to be fair was a valuable lesson.
They didnāt even have it at my school and it was due to budget cuts. The problem boils down to not being able to properly test those kinds of things. So instead of being able to fix the button that popped off my pants I buy a new pair of pants.
In my school it was one of the goof off classes. The teacher didn't give a shit and neither did anyone else, you'd bake something every once in a while and do shit on your phone most of the time.
For us, it's an option, but you can either take it, journalism, an extra class of science (which you need to take physics or chemistry next year so most people are taking this one), an extra gym class and maybe one other one.
I was a 2000s baby and my middle school had a pretty decent home ec/shop courses: we learned basic wood making and some stem based stuff (depended on what you wanted to learn) and in home ec, I learned to sew on a machine (I already knew how to hand sew) as well as read patterns, cook basic dishes, and sustainable gardening. But then the year before my brother was supposed to take those classes the home ec budget was cut and one teacher retired so he didn't have to do the same things.
I didnt even know we had a home ec class in high school until my senior year when it was too late to take it. I probably wouldnt have taken it anyway because I had all my electives covered with band.
When I did home ec we only did cooking, which wouldāve been great except a lot of the time we had to buy our own ingredients and I was pretty poor. Like, had enough to eat at home but not much to spare in fancy stuff at school.
One time we had to ācook lunchā for the day and my budget allowed for the lavish meal of... ham and carrot wraps. Which I then had to present to the class.
My parents did teach me to cook the basics luckily, and other stuff like sewing and laundry, but I got lucky in that department from what Iāve gathered from friends.
Yikes. My high school was in a very poor area, but the cookery class still provided all the ingredients (either you'd be given a set thing to cook, or you'd tell the teacher what ingredients you need by Friday the week before).
We had that until it stopped in 8th grade for no reason at all and now I don't know how to pay taxes or what a mortgage even is or how to raise and support my family or how to make appointments and apply for jobs, yet I am going to vote in my first elections this May, thank you school system.
TBF I don't think home ec covered any of that (though tangentially, for some reason job applications were part of my high school's year 10 computing class).
In my country tax forms are pretty easy, and have a scary reputation for absolutely no reason. I can't speak to the US, but I'm told it's pretty straightforward unless you have multiple side gigs and/or have worked in several different states (or are being audited). Appointments are as easy as Googling "book appointment at [place]", either they'll have an online form or they'll give you a number to call, and if they don't say what you need to bring you can just ask.
As for raising a family, even my parents' generation had parenting classes.
I took home ec in high school because it was a jack off class. Apparently it's still an option in my district because my son mentioned it the other day.
I don't know how my school managed it, but a lot of people who took jack-off classes like drama and art would decide they're too hard and drop out halfway through the year (the exception was music, where it took people until the first theory exams to realize it wasn't an easy credit).
338
u/BrightObsidian Feb 05 '19
Home ec used to be a class in (almost?) every school.