When you grow up, which you clearly yet haven’t.
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.
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.
Depends on whether your parents are actually dumb or not.
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.
I figured out my parents were dumb as hell when at age 11 I had to explain to my father that leaving the Windows 95 shutdown prompt on “restart” didn’t ruin the computer.
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.
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.
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.
What an asshole. I’m sorry you had to have that for a father figure. Mine was stupid and belligerent but never malicious.
That is some of the least shitty stuff he did to me but thanks. Having shitty parents is something only someone who had shitty parents can really understand.
It doesn’t happen until you have your own kid who thinks they are smarter than you
It sounds kind of like hubris or face-saving when you put it like that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Be like me. I didn’t go to the funerals.
Thankfully, my parents never tried to undermine my self-esteem like that.
Yeah, this thread and many others shines a light on a lot of folks who are (and maybe with good reason) very bitter. My folks weren’t perfect, but I understand life is a difficult thing and there is no manual. My mom at times will apologize to my brother and I for not doing well at times, but from my point of view she’s got two good sons who are well positioned in life, and that’s about all you can ask for.
And as many others have said in this thread, becoming a parent shines the light on you. And not that one has no right to judge as the child in the relationship, I think having the perspective of the parent can be difficult. I constantly try to remind myself how I felt at my child’s age, and sometimes it leads to a battle within to do what’s right, because “what’s right” isn’t always this crystal clear thing.
Kids are difficult. Life is difficult. We’re all just trying to plod our way through. Nobody here is a billionaire, many of us need to balance working and our family, and the lack of sanity both bring. I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but also guide in such a way that I’m not doing them a disservice later.
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?
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.
When you have kids.
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.
