Here I set out to discuss what influences my parents have and have not had on me. (Ditto, to a lesser degree, other relatives and adults of my childhood.) Based on the ideas that I had when I began to write, this should have worked out well, but, with this particular text, it did not. The core parts ended up thinner than intended and foreseen, while a drift towards topics like what-causes-what-behaviors took place. Moreover, I have yet to address what influence might have been present and bigger life-choices/-whatnots than the comparative trivialities used as examples.
I very strongly considered leaving the result entirely unpublished and (caveat lector!) this might have been the best decision from the point of view of a random reader. However, there are a number of points that interest me in a personal manner and for personal reasons, and I publish with the justification that it eases my own long-term access. Moreover, publishing increases the chance that the text will remain on my mind, which occasionally leads to renewed ideas and edits.
Lately, I have been pondering parental influence and how little effect it seems to have had on me. (With the major disclaimer that the size of the effect can be hard to judge and can depend on perspective.)
A particular issue is how some habits, behaviors, clothing choices, etc. have not rubbed off, despite the seemingly high likelihood.
In some other text, I have mentioned how some objects of my paternal grandmother’s had given me an impression of what my future apartment “should” have, which did last into adulthood. Based on this, a much larger effect from my parents might have been expected.
For instance and for as long as I can remember, my father has been a heavy user of bathrobes and slippers, including wearing slippers almost all the time when at home and a bathrobe when merely relaxing or retiring for the day, regardless of whether a bath or shower has actually been involved. I have long associated them with him, and chances are that I, when sufficiently young, viewed them as something that adult men wore. (My memory is understandably a bit vague.) However, since leaving home for college, more than thirty years ago, I have not even owned a bathrobe and I might never have owned a pair of slippers at all, before or after. (With reservations for the exact definition of “slipper[s]”.) On some rare occasion, during hotel stays, I have worn a (provided by the hotel) bathrobe, but I have never been moved to buy one for myself; and I did not make much use of bathrobes even before leaving home, when I owned one, past the quite early point when I began to handle showers, bathing, and subsequent dressing on my own.
In Sweden, it is otherwise customary to just walk around in socks in one’s own home and during informal visits to close friends and relatives. In countries where shoes are more common “at home”, slippers are a more understandable alternative.
Chances are that such longstanding own (non-)habits are a portion of the explanation: if I have a habit and the habit works, why should I change it? (Absent signs that a better habit is available, of which parental precedent is, admittedly, an example, but hardly a conclusive one.) This might be particularly important when transitioning from one phase of life to another: There are some transitions in clothes/behaviors/whatnots that come naturally with a phase change, e.g. that someone who begins to work in an office might pick more “professional” and less “student-y” clothing, but why, say, would a transition teen–adult or college–office make me wear slippers at home when I did not do so before? (In contrast, the constant risk of treading on an unexpected Lego piece might bring such a change.)
Inborn preferences, aversions, priorities, and similar might be another important source of explanations. For instance, looking at sunbathing, immediately following this side-note, potential differences include lesser/greater enjoyment of sunbathing, willingness to spend time to get to a beach, need for intellectual stimulation before boredom sets in, and similar. A wearing of bathrobes could also conceivably be explained by the seeking of physical comfort: for instance, as an adult, I have noticed that my father keeps an unusually soft bed, while I keep an unusually hard one—this and the use/non-use of bathrobes, maybe even interest in sunbathing, could result from different attitudes to physical comfort.
(If preferences, etc., are not inborn, they can still serve as an immediate explanation, but would then usually just create a need for “deeper” explanations, e.g. by changing the question “Why does my father sunbathe more often than I do?” to “Why does my father enjoy sunbathing more than I do?”, “Why does my father see the investment of time and effort to get to the beach as more worthwhile than I do?”, and/or some other question(s).)
In other cases, my father’s influence might have reduced the likelihood of my adopting a particular habit. For instance, he has spent ages sunbathing on the beach and often seemed to see visiting the beach as the main purpose of a vacation—especially, when traveling to warmer countries. However, now imagine being a boy in his early teens with no control over how long we should remain at the beach, who, by necessity, was then stuck there even after the sun had grown boring, after a book had been read to its end or when a book had proved less engaging than he had hoped, after swimming had lost its charm, whatnot. After a few such occurrences, I began to develop an aversion to visiting the beach. (While, independently, earlier, and unlike with my father, my general attitude towards beaches, lakes, and whatnots, had turned from enthusiasm to indifference as I moved away from the dig-around-in-the-sand and, later, splash-around-in-the-water ages. Note that my phrasing is “reduced the likelihood”—nothing more.) As an adult, I have made some odd visit to a beach because a girlfriend wanted to go, but even that has been minimal, and I have never bothered on my own.
Writing the above, I see an obvious question, namely, “Why I did not find some other kids my age to play with or, better, specifically girls to flirt with?”.
Thinking back, I do not believe that the idea even occurred to me. (Note that I am extremely introverted and that I, mostly, prefer books to humans. However, own interactions with strange kids were somewhat common in the “dig” and “splash” ages.) Likewise, I have no immediate recollection of other family members engaging with strangers on a beach, unless for some specific purpose (say, buying ice cream), although it is bound to have happened from time to time.
There are still interests/habits/whatnot that are present in more than one family member, but this raises questions like whether they have rubbed off, whether they reflect some common inborn factor, or, say, whether they might be too common in general to be noteworthy. (What?!? You like pizza too? What a coincidence!)
Consider doing crosswords: Both my grandmothers were big on crosswords, my father is at least semi-big, and I have been much into them during several periods of my life. This might seem to point to a connection, but crosswords are (or were—I am not up to date) very big in Sweden in general and this need be no more remarkable than that several family members like pizza. (The particular type of crossword most popular in Sweden even often carries a reference to Sweden in its foreign names.) In as far as there is a connection, chances are that it is more a matter of something inborn than something acquired.
Family members who like coffee? Well, Swedes were very big on drinking coffee long before the Starbucks, Nespresso, whatnot, boom came. Again, nothing more remarkable than family members who love pizza. (Going by memory, the top consumption per capita might have been between the Swedes, the Finns, and the Swiss.) Here, however, the acquired might be more likely than the inborn, should there be a connection, as coffee largely appears to be an “acquired taste”.
Etc.
Judging what happened in the previous generation, from my grandparents to my parents, is tricky. Most notably, my paternal grandfather died so early in my life that I cannot compare him with my father in a meaningful way (including whether slippers and bathrobes were specific to my father or something that he did inherit from his father).
However, based on what little I know, there might have been more differences than similarities, e.g. in that my grandfather had an academic interest that “skipped a generation” and that he was a pipe smoker, while my father, at least as an adult, has not been a smoker of any kind. An interest in playing music might be an exception, depending on whether the old piano and various pieces of sheet music in my grandmother’s home had been more his or more her realm.
The best comparison that I have, based on both lifespan and personal contacts, is my mother and maternal grandmother. Here, the only major overlap (beyond what might hold true between any two random women) that immediately occurs to me is a strong engagement in the local religious community (my grandmother as soldier in the Salvation Army and as a general fixer-and-doer in various other religious contexts; my mother as an officer in the Salvation Army and, later, as a priest in the Swedish state church).
However, the two might also illustrate how different circumstances, both individually and societally, can have an effect. For instance, my grandmother had a small potato field that provided some of the many potatoes that passed through her kitchen, while my mother did not. Here there are at least two notable differences in circumstances: Firstly, my grandmother spent portions of her life in times of less secure access to food, potatoes included, and likely with higher food prices relative purchasing power, while my mother was born post-WWII, grew up in an era of comparative affluence, and had no real reason to fear a lack of potatoes. Secondly, my grandmother spent several decades in a house with a large garden that allowed the keeping of such a field, while my mother had few chances between leaving home in her late teens and buying a house of her own at around forty. (I am tempted to add a “thirdly”, that potatoes were the main staple to my grandmother in a different manner than to my mother, who was more open to and had greater access to pasta, rice, and whatnot; however, almost certainly, even my mother used more potatoes than a field that size could deliver.)
While I suspect that my grandmother’s main motivation at the times of my observations was more related to personal satisfaction and to having some extra activity to pass the time, it is notable that she was big on small savings and “waste not, want not”, up to and including washing out and reusing the plastic bags in which store-bought bread came—and this at least into the 1980s. I remember at least one occasion when she deliberately finished off a loaf of bread with some mold on it, despite having no want of other food.
A very interesting question is to what degree this reflects something inborn vs. something instilled into her by periods of actual want, e.g. during WWII. (Or some other cause altogether.)
When doing comparisons, we might also have to factor in what is fashionable, traditional, or whatnot, in overall society at various stages of someones life. For instance, there might or might not have been a slippers-and-bathrobes fashion at some point, which might or might not have influenced my father, but which had passed long before it could affect me. Likewise, there seems to have been a long trend towards greater informality in terms of clothing used in different settings during the 20th century, and slippers and bathrobes might have been affected by something like that (hypothetically, in that my grandparents taught my father that slippers and bathrobes were the proper things to wear in some home settings/situations and that my father kept the habit, but did not bother to push the same view of what is proper towards me).
A common idea is that the one generation, in some sense, “rebels” against the preceding, say, by doing things differently, wearing different types of clothes, taking different political positions than the latter do/did—and because they do/did. (I first wrote the preceding sentence using the word “deliberately”, e.g. “by deliberately doing”. This well catches the difference to e.g. changes through altered circumstances, but falls short through excluding the possibility of an unconscious reaction, e.g. that someone might adopt a different take on something through an unconscious assumption that the older generation had things wrong, are stuffy old geezers, or similar.)
Such a mechanism could cause a similar set of behavioral differences and I have tried to find such examples in my own past, but have not been successful. In particular, to look at specific cases discussed above, the slippers and bathrobes above seem to be entirely independent. Even the issue of sunbathing is not a case, as the resulting aversion was not a matter of anything “rebellious” or “contrary”—it was rooted in an actual negative (cf. above).
Chances are that more short-lived cases took place, e.g. in form of a child testing boundaries, but this would not have had any effect in the now, and even this pushes the border for the “rebellious” in the narrow sense used here. Some cases that I do remember, at least in the abstract, certainly fall outside this sense. Disputes around whether it really was bedtime, e.g., might have been rooted in “I want to read another chapter!” or “Why should I go to bed when I am not sleepy?”, but not in “I want to stay up because my mother wants me to sleep!” or, even, “I want to test the boundaries of how long I am allowed to be up!”.
A pet hypothesis of mine could also explain similar differences in a more narrow area, namely that parents often are more generous towards their children in areas where they, when themselves children, saw a deficit, and less generous where they saw an abundance. (Where the phrasing should be interpreted widely, goes beyond just the material, and could include even what areas a parent is permissive and restrictive in terms of what the children are allowed to do.) In my case, this is beside the point, as I do not have children of my own.
In a more general version of the previous paragraph, it is conceivable that the next generation does things differently through (the perception of) having learnt from the errors of old. This might be outright laudable, but great care must be taken that the behaviors, motivations, situations, and whatnots have actually been correctly understood—and that new own errors are not introduced.
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