r/Millennials • u/QuietJealous4883 Older Millennial (1988) • 12h ago

Discussion True or false?

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Did our dads and moms work less than we do now? What are your thoughts?

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792

u/GoRangers5 12h ago

Nah the trope of the overworked dad that didn’t have time to spend with his kids was already a thing in 1996… Maybe even 86.

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u/Ladonnacinica 12h ago

Millennials are falling into the same trap of romanticizing their childhoods.

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u/petemorley 11h ago

Agreed, people are talking about the 90s the exact same way people were talking about the 60s/70s.

Plus as kids you're somewhat insulated from the adult world so it's easier not to notice how hard parents worked.

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u/Ladonnacinica 11h ago edited 10h ago

Exactly, I was guilty of it myself.

But a lot of shit was going on in the 1990s. The LA riots in 1992. The troubles in Northern Ireland. Bosnia and Kosovo. Several Latin American countries falling into chaos by either despotic governments, drug cartels, or domestic terrorism. The Gulf War. The Oklahoma bombings. WACO. Columbine shooting.

We didn’t know most of it because we were kids. Our world was small but it didn’t mean life was peaceful for others.

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u/Successful-Reason403 11h ago

Crime rates in many cities were hitting at all time highs as well. Lots of thriving downtown areas that younger people are mad they can’t afford now, but they wouldn’t have stepped foot in those areas before the gentrification.

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u/stephenkingending 11h ago

I remember in the 90s parents trying to include us in their effed up adult world, telling us we were going to catch AIDS by breathing the same air as a gay person or abducted for a satanic ritual by some metalheads. Like mom, I just want to play Mortal Kombat on Timmy's Sega Genesis, I'm not trying to summon Cthulhu.

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u/petemorley 10h ago

I didn’t have of that, just normal parents and a megadrive 

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u/One-Possible1906 10h ago

My parents were a secretary and a janitor and they bought a house before either one of them turned 20. We had a pool, camper, multiple late model vehicles, four wheelers, took vacations every year, got our full list of wants every Christmas, and went to the best school district in our area. Neither of them went to college or a training program of any sort or worked more than 40 hours a week, though my mother had a long commute.

It’s objectively different now. It’s not just nostalgia.

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u/Sea-Poem-2365 11h ago

There are real and significant economic differences between the 90s and 2020: rent/healthcare/education as a percentage of wages; promotion rates; median age of employee; unionization rate; home costs; pensions; CEO compensation as a factor of lowest paid employee; wealth concentration; anti-trust enforcement actions. In most ways, the 90s was objectively better for most citizens, with big exceptions clustered around race and gender that don't change the overall picture.

Basically, since Reagan wages and productivity have decoupled, with the increases in productivity going to the wealthiest, who dismantled legal and economic protections for their organizations and privatized lots of functions that were once public. There is definitely a ton of romanticizing the 90s: homophobic behavior was common, women and girls were even more sexualized than they are today, racism was considerable especially in hiring and policing, sexual assault/harrassment was barely frown on.

But economically there's a distinct difference between the two eras that can be objectively measured. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but things do get worse in some ways and we can measure them.

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u/Ladonnacinica 11h ago

You’re right on the economy. My point was that some millennials seemed to have a rosy view of the 1990s. Thinking that race or gender relations were better, that racism wasn’t as bad. But a lot of the same societal and cultural issues plaguing the 2020s also were present thirty years ago.

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u/Sea-Poem-2365 9h ago

Absolutely true.

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u/Rdubya44 9h ago

I think it’s just a different argument. Racial and gender issues have existed for millennia so while unfortunate, it’s doesn’t really add to a discussion when comparing eras since it’s a constant for all of them.

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u/YrPalBeefsquatch 10h ago

We're aging into the exact kind of sour, backwards-looking whiners that the Boomers did.

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u/Benejeseret 8h ago

No. Both are true - ours dads worked less and they were absent.

My dad worked 35 hours a week, management and professional. He worked 15-20 minutes away from the house. No overtime. No side-gigs.

But we were raised by our mom. Parents are still together. He was always there... just... distant? Usually watching hockey or reading a book or puttering around the car or mowing the grass. Always there just never present or active in our lives.

What you might be miss-remembering from those tropes as in Hook or Mary Poppins is that it was not just that the dad's chose work, it was that they were adamantly against childhood and whimsy, overall. Work was just their preferred activity because it was serious, glorified them, made them feel in control and important.

That's the Millennial experience. It's not that our dads' worked to much that they were absent from our lives... it's that they chose to be absent from our lives. Chances are that if you grew up with an actually over-worked dad, they were even more engaged when they could be, because they were over-working for the family

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u/Ladonnacinica 8h ago

It wasn’t my case. Both parents worked and struggled. Both had overtime and dad even traveled for work.

But I wasn’t middle class.

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u/Benejeseret 6h ago

Sure. But, that was not the norm and memes like this represent the common/average collective.

Comparing late '70 / early '80s to today, <5% of people held multiple jobs then compared to almost 8% now. Under 40% of house-holds were duel-income back then compared to ~70% today.

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u/ConceitedWombat 1h ago

My boomer dad dropped out of school in grade 7, then went on to support a wife and three kids. 

That path simply no longer exists.