A Teacher Got Real About Parenting Styles From Baby Boomers, Gen X-ers, and Millennials

It’s hard to not notice that as the generations progress and the world changes, what parents expect from their kids and how they treat them is bound to change a lot. It’s impossible to say which generation got or is getting parenting right, but one teacher who hopped online to talk about the difference between different generations parents have made it evident that people in her profession might be the best judges.

The teacher broke down parents into the three main generational groups with kids. That is Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials. To avoid a bias accusation, the teacher refrained from giving her own age but made it clear that she’d be laying out the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to each of them. Given that Baby Boomers are almost all past the age of having children in school, the teacher has had the most experience with them.

For the good, she said that Boomers “Invested in their children and their futures, meet with me when requested, will listen to what I have to say, will (usually) use my suggestions with their children.” But, she also noted that they have a capacity for being demanding, rude, and impatient. In terms of the ugly, she sarcastically said that “They know best…about everything,” “get angry the easiest,” and are prone to going “BALLISTIC.”

Gen Xers, while she described them as fantastic providers who manage to have a “good sense of humor about things,” the bad and ugly were just awful enough that she had to break the entire generation into two separate categories to cover them. The teacher said that most parents fit neatly into the first category of people who “don’t have much to do with their kids.” That doesn’t mean that they’re mean to them or don’t love them, but rather that they don’t put a lot of emotional investment into them and put more into “themselves and their partner.” The ugly is that those parents are the ones who “believe their kid is a perfect angel that can do no wrong, and any problem they are having is my or the school’s fault.”

She admitted that she has the least experience with millennials, but called them extremely “polite, good listeners, really take my advice to heart, care about their kids.” The bad was that they were “Timid, naive, and tend to overreact/blow things out of proportion,” which led right to the ugly, which is that some of them go on “Gordon Ramsay-esque tirades” against their children.

When all is said and done, there really isn’t a perfect way to be a parent, and by proxy, it’s fair to say that most parents are far from perfect. Beyond that, the teacher was sure to explain that she explained that parents with any of the aforementioned traits can come from any of the listed generations.