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‘How do we reconcile the conflict of something so huge, and the politics going on with the mundane everyday living tasks?’ was a question on Danielle’s mind while living through the pandemic.  A proud mama, her young childrens’ drawings behind her on the wall as we talked, Danielle works from home as a digital and content marketing specialist.  She loves her urban life in Chicago, especially having amenities and entertainment close at hand, although found the absence of a sprawling yard for her children to play in difficult in pandemic times.

A curiousity universally on the minds of mothers of young children, she wants to know about and prepare for what’s coming ahead.  I was able to satisfy her thirst for knowledge of the future a little, having older, teenage kids, but the funny thing about parenting is there are no right answers and no right way or even best way to undertake the task of parenting.  I suppose this ensures our questions and the nuggets of wisdom we write about parenthood will be well received.  There is an endless supply of learners wanting to know what’s coming.

Danielle is a candid, deep thinker who has made life choices that work for her and her family.  Her deep thinking is evident in our conversation and her article “I’ll Never Make a Million Dollars Freelancing and I’m Okay with that” https://contently.net/2019/10/09/voices/never-make-million-dollars-freelancing-okay-with-that/.  She always wanted to be a writer and chose to write for digital and content marketing to have a flexible job in which she could incorporate parenting duties as well.  She would like to do more freelance writing, which is one of the reasons she is taking this course.  Danielle maintains the Oxford comma is a necessary grammar device because it provides clarity and she likes the colour red because it goes with her style.

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My teenage son went through pretty intense unusual social and physiological learning courtesy of the pandemic.  At first in lockdown, didn't know what to do with himself, played video games all day.  We joked that it was a teenagers heaven for him and his sister to be allowed to be in their rooms all day, with nothing they had to do.  That wore thin.  Started eating badly.  As he was home all day and sleeping at odd hours it was tough to manage.  For sake of mental health, husband and I decided to somewhat let it go being unusual conditions.  Eventually he went back to school part time.  Was irritable, I'm sure with friends as well as with us.  Finally, husband and I decided he should go on runs with husband.  Bingo, he started to feel better and completely got the connection to exercise and fresh air.  Started a running club with friends and eating better.  Now understands the value of exercise and being social. Hopefully the lesson sticks with him.

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My mom passed away two years ago. Like many women of her generation, the family was her domain. She was omni-present, every family plan went through her, she was master communicator and chief cook and bottle washer. My dad is a quiet man. Now that my mom is no longer the centre of the family, I am enjoying having a relationship with my dad for the first time ever. I am discovering he is a funny guy, he writes emails with humour. He walks fast and I try to keep up with him on our weekly walks. He likes to take note of the progress on building construction sites on our walking route. He writes nice sentiments in birthday cards. I will always miss my mom but I am enjoying the unexpected gift of forging a new relationship with my other parent.

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As an introverted mother, I knew I needed a lot of space when my kids were young but it was very challenging getting others to respect that, even my husband. I realize now how that lead to me not connecting to my kids as much as I would have liked.

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Years ago, I was chatting with my sister-in-law, who had babies at around the same time I did. She was talking about how much she loved her kids. When they were napping, she would go in and watch them sleep. Sometimes, she said, she was tempted to wake them up so that she could play with them.

When I heard that, I felt as if I was punched in the gut. I had never, in my few years as a parent, felt that way. Did she have some kind of innate mothering instinct that I lacked?

My husband and I had our children in rapid-fire succession, adding four kids to our family within four years. I was overwhelmed and outnumbered. The volume of work it took to keep my household running was exhausting. But there was something more to it than physical fatigue: parenting was emotionally exhausting. I felt trapped. I lived for naptime and bedtime. If one of the kids woke up early, I felt rage. I was desperate to get time away from them in any way I could. My overwhelming thoughts when they were napping were, Please don't wake up. Please give me a little more time to myself. Please, just a few more minutes. I couldn't imagine waking them up on purpose unless there was a fire.

It wasn't only the exchange with my sister-in-law that made me doubt myself. Society tells us that we should savor every precious moment with our kids, and I was struggling to do this. If motherhood had been one of my biggest goals in life, why did I want to get away from my children? Maybe I was a horrible mother. Or I suffered from some kind of defect, an intimacy disorder, or psychological baggage that kept me from being able to enjoy my children as much as other people did.

I made an appointment with a therapist and explained my feelings to her. I love my kids dearly, I told her. I enjoy being with them. But I felt like I needed a bigger chunk of time to myself.

I was eager for the therapist to explain my glitch. Was I innately selfish? Was I a narcissist?

After a few weeks of listening, my therapist put her clipboard away and asked me to listen closely to what she was going to say.

"Kristen, you're an introvert," she said. "There is nothing wrong with you beyond the fact that you need time to yourself to refuel and recharge. You are running on empty. And you need to stop beating yourself up over the fact that you need time alone. It's how you're wired."

I'd never considered myself an introvert. I'm not shy. I'm not scared to speak to a room full of people. I consider myself a "people person." I always assumed those traits meant I was an extrovert. But as I began to read some of the books my therapist suggested, it became clear: I'm an introvert. I need a lot of downtime to recharge for social interaction.

I spent a few months wrestling with my therapist's interpretation. I wanted a quick fix, and introversion wasn't something I could take a pill for or change with therapy. I disliked the idea that this was just how I was made. I was also worried that the introversion diagnosis was a convenient cop-out. As a person who struggles mightily with guilt, I found it hard to take my therapist's advice and let myself off the hook-especially when berating myself is something I'm so good at!

Eventually, and slowly, I came to understand that my introversion was indeed behind how I felt and that my desire for time to myself was not an indicator of how much I love my kids. My therapist had to remind me many times that the fact that I was there, sitting in her office looking for a solution, was proof that I cared deeply about my children.

Eventually, I learned to accept-and even embrace-my identity as an introvert, and I found some tactics to help me survive parenthood.

I let myself off the hook. This was the most important step. I accepted who I am and the personality I was born with and stopped trying to change myself. Instead, I looked for external solutions to make my life more conducive to my needs as an introvert.

I shifted my career to involve less face-time with others. At the time I had children, I was working as a marriage and family therapist. My job was 100% human interaction. It's no wonder I was drained. I spent all day listening to people talk, which left me little energy for anyone else. I shifted my role-I began writing more, and I also began teaching, which I found less draining. As I altered my professional role to give me more time to myself, I found I had more energy at home.

I found out-of-home childcare. Previously, any childcare I had for the kids involved someone coming to our home to watch them. Our house is small, and even if I worked from my room, I could still hear the kids and would inevitably listen in on their day. I finally decided that I needed alone time at home and found a quality Montessori preschool that would take my kids for three mornings a week. Those mornings alone were my saving grace during that stage.

I instituted quiet time. While naptime provided me with some daily downtime, I also scheduled our day to include designated quiet time, when each kid played alone for about 30 minutes. In addition to giving me a mental break, this time was of great benefit to my kids who learned quiet, independent play. Some of my kids are introverts as well, and this quiet time was just as helpful for them as it was for me. As they've gotten older, quiet time has morphed into reading time, and it remains a great way for all of us to have a little time alone to recharge.

These small shifts made a huge difference in my ability to parent well and to be present and connected with my kids. I didn't need to change who I was, and I didn't have a fatal flaw that prevented me from being a good mom. I just needed to accept my temperament and honor my own needs.

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Surviving as an Introverted Mother - Quiet

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Years ago, I was chatting with my sister-in-law, who had babies at around the same time I did. She was talking about how much she loved her kids. When they were napping, she would go in and watch them sleep. Sometimes, she said, she was tempted to wake them up so that she could play with them.

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Grandparents (especially Boomers) and teenage grandkids have so much in common but act worlds apart.  Both generations are self-involved, have relatively little responsibility, have a lot of disposable income, spend a lot of social time with friends, experience difficulties related to their changing bodies (hormones/health), have strong values (boomers - stick it to the man, environment; teens - technology is good, environment) and yet they often have difficulty connecting to each other and each thinks their generation is better.
This adds stress to us, the sandwich generation, which ends up stuck in the middle and "parenting" both.  We saw how hard the older generation worked and how much they contributed to society and we appreciate that they raised us.  We see how hard the younger generation works to be taken seriously and how earnest they are and how much they want to contribute.
If only they would choose to see how much they have in common and relate to each other we might not hear disrespectful terms like "OK Boomer".
I have lots of examples of the lack of connection.

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"They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it." No, these are not the words of a disapproving baby boomer bemoaning snowflake millennials on social media or breakfast television, but a quote from ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle complaining about young people BC. Cross-generational conflict is an issue as old as time.

While the concept of "generation wars" might not be new, conflicts between different age cohorts do seem - at least on the surface - to have intensified in recent years. In summer 2020, Gen Z took to TikTok to mock millennials' apparent obsession with Harry Potter, coffee, using the word "doggo" and describing adulthood as "adulting". Then they came for millennial's side partings, skinny jeans and the crying laughter emoji.

The battle lines aren't just drawn here. Before the arrival of Gen Z, millennials' primary adversary was the baby boomers. Who could forget the Australian real estate mogul (and every subsequent news columnist) who told millennials that the reason they couldn't buy a house was because they were spending all their money on avocado toast?

And millennials aren't just blameless victims sandwiched by dislike from above and below, the now ubiquitous "OK, boomer" emerged as a millennial way to dismiss baby boomers' criticisms. The term was even used by a 25-year-old MP in New Zealand to shut down an older heckler in Parliament. The phrase is said to "symbolise the advent of a generational war in society".
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The Pew Research Centre defines the generational divides as follows: the silent generation (1928-1945), baby boomers (1946-1964), generation X (1965-1980), millennials (1981-1996) and generation Z (1997-2012). Of course, categorising people can be problematic in itself. Clearly a 23-year-old Gen Z-er will have a very different experience of the pandemic, for example, compared with a nine-year-old child who also falls into Gen Z.

This nuance is something that Eliza Filby, a historian who specialises in generations, is conscious of remembering. "As a historian, I'm trying to understand [society] through the prism of age," she says. "But these cohorts are arbitrary. They describe some people but not others. It's about teasing out the nuances of those categories." Filby, who describes herself as an "old millennial" and a "bridger" (someone who bridges millennials and Gen X), says that "generations are a bit like horoscopes - they're generalisations".

Generations are a bit like horoscopes - they're generalisations

Despite obviously not being a totally watertight metric, it is undeniable that generational divides are reflected in responses to real-world issues and in cultural conversations. Unsurprisingly, two of the biggest issues to affect modern society - Brexit and the pandemic - are frequent sources of generational conflict. While older people are more vulnerable to Covid in terms of their health ( the latest ONS stats show that even though more young people have been infected, hospital admissions and deaths are highest among those aged over 65), research from Ipsos MORI suggests that younger people have struggled more economically.

A survey in April last year found that 35 per cent of Gen Z were worried about whether they would still have a job in a month's time and 30 per cent were worried about paying bills, compared to eight and 10 percent of baby boomers, respectively. These tensions along generational lines also surfaced in the 2016 Brexit referendum, too - 75 per cent of 18-24-year-olds voted to remain, while 66 per cent of those aged 65-74 voted to leave. Lib Dem Vince Cable told a reporter: "The older generation shafted the young."

And something about these descriptors clearly sticks in the public consciousness. An Ipsos MORI poll in 2019 asked Brits to describe different generations using a predetermined list of phrases and words. It found the top three terms associated with baby boomers were "respectful", "community-orientated" and "well-off financially". For millennials it was: "tech-savvy", "materialistic" and "ambitious" and for gen z: "tech-savvy", "materialistic" and "selfish".

Historically, Jennie Bristow, a senior lecturer in sociology at Canterbury Christ Church University, who has written several books about generations, says age labels are often derived from key events that mark coming of age for certain groups and define the way they interpret the world. She points to the work of Karl Mannheim, a sociologist who wrote an essay in 1928 called "The problem with generations". "He looked at why you get inter-generational clashes. His argument was that historically, you get periods where the world suddenly seems to change," she explains, that this creates a rupture between old and new.

Bristow says events such as the second world war, 9/11 and the pandemic become "key moments'' for those people that their worldview is shaped around. "They have an understanding of the social shift [during these times of upheaval] and it becomes part of their consciousness - this is what forges this idea of particular generations."

People turned on millennials in the same way, 'as they got older and less cuddly and less sympathetic'.

As these groups grow older, our negative or positive perception does change. Bristow says that often we hail the younger generations in a positive way before a backlash emerges as they get older. For example, she says at the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, there was a perception that "the boomers are going to rescue us" - they had rallied against the more conservative norms of their own parents in the 1960s and 70s - and "then by 2010, you get this massive backlash saying: they really messed it up." She says people turned on millennials in the same way, "as they got older and less cuddly and less sympathetic".

Of course it seems totally understandable that shifting priorities are naturally forged in the fires of change - for example, younger people became ever more vocal about the climate crisis as their futures are more interwoven with its impacts. But Filby says there are other manufactured reasons why, saying "[generational categories were] invented by the ad industry to segment their advertising audience".

Regardless of the reasons behind it, whether social or economic, why do there seem to be ever greater hostilities between these groups - especially when people's social networks are unlikely to exclusively exist within one? Families are, by definition, spread across these lines.

Filby says one of the biggest catalysts in the increasing divide between groups is the economic disparity we see today between the older and younger generations - millennials who witnessed a huge increase in higher education costs, entered the workforce during a historic recession, and live with a ever-closed housing market (one in four millennials have given up on buying altogether). "There's a huge overriding factor of economic disparity," says Filby. "That's largely to do with boomers and the rest of us - because boomers are the exception, not the rule."

Filby says that baby boomers are described as "a pig in a python", referring to their large post-war population bulge, becoming a dominant demographic. "When baby boomers were young, society's money was geared towards babies. When baby boomers were students, society's culture and money was geared towards students. When baby boomers were buying houses, guess what? Society, politics and economics were geared towards buying houses".

As well as resentment breeding over economic issues, Filby attributes the current particular intensity of generation wars to social media and technology. She says social media has "heightened division between the young and old" which has always been there but "feels more exacerbated and intensified". She adds that "the impact that technology has on people's behaviour".
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Matt Schimkowitz, senior editor at Know Your Meme agrees that the generation wars "would exist regardless of the internet", but says the internet plays a role in terms of how and why people engage. He says that in the past, these kinds of conversations would be driven solely by mainstream media but now anyone can chime in. "If you catch the algorithm at just the right time, you can be the generational warmonger," he says. "The internet will reward your usage of these polarising topics on Tik Tok...I'm sure this is what spurred on the millennial versus Gen Z 'wars'. They're very popular, so if you post about them, you will see your engagement numbers rise."

As a millennial, Schimkowitz says he wasn't actually offended by the videos. "They were nailing the stereotypes. I was appreciating the ribbing we were getting because that's kind of the game - the younger generation replaces the older." In fact, what he objected to was when millennials responded with their own Tik Tok videos and memes trying to defend their generation. "That felt a little OK, boomer-ish to me," he says.

The thing with social media, particularly at a time of intense isolation, is it becomes the way that people constitute their identity

It's likely that people being stuck at home during the pandemic and spending more time on social media has fueled this too. "The thing with social media, particularly at a time of intense isolation, is it becomes the way that people constitute their identity and try and seek meaning," says Bristow. "So all the stuff that's already there within the culture wars - the echo chambers, the fighting and search for validation - all of that becomes more intense."

Is there a solution? "I would say the answer is getting rid of social media," says Schimkowitz. "But that's not going to happen." In the absence of obliterating online culture wars completely, he thinks the answer lies in "better moderation from the companies that own these platforms" and "you have to allow people to opt in and out of that kind of level of engagement".

Although it is the natural order of things to think your elders become out of touch, knowing less than your generation about the world and how it really works, each generation is certainly not the first nor the last to feel this way. But in the face of increasingly disparate economic and political weight - more Boomers voted to leave the EU and for the Conservative government (in the 2019 majority in the over 60s two thirds voted Tory versus around 20 per cent in the under 30s) - and a technological revolution, we're seeing the chasms laid out clearer than ever.

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Why do the generation wars feel worse than ever?

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"They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it." No, these are not the words of a disapproving baby boomer bemoaning snowflake millennials on social media or breakfast television, but a quote from ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle complaining about young people BC. Cross-generational conflict is an issue as old as time.