What It’s like to Parent as a Millennial

What is it like to parent as a millennial? This is a fun question. The answer is… interesting. Us millennials have had an eventful life so far. Just in case you need clarity, most sources classify a millennial as someone who was born between 1980-1996, which would make them between the ages of 24-39 currently. Some studies include people born up to the year 2000 but in my opinion, people born after 1996 are just… different.

Being Raised in the 90’s 

Being raised in the 90’s, one of the most lauded and immortalized time periods really colors the way we interact with and experience the world. To be honest, we are tired. To reference a tweet by @MegRoseJoy “Millennials have lived through a major terrorist attack, two wars, two recessions, and a global pandemic and were only in our 30’s”. This tweet covers a lot of ground but it doesn’t even scratch the surface! Think about all the times the world has ‘ended’ or nearly ended in our lifetime: 2 recessions, the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, Flint water crisis, and the second civil rights movement. Not to mention us poor POC had to deal with parents who experienced the crack epidemic, the war on drugs, and subsequent mass incarceration of our people, which greatly affected our household dynamics and economic situation. After all of this, here we are now dealing with a global pandemic and the 3rd recession. Yeah, we are young but we have been through a lot! 

via MEME

A lot of us millennials were in high school or grade school when a good portion of this happened. I remember being in 5th grade when 9/11 happened and thinking we were all going to die when Bush declared war on Iraq. This time around we are grown and many of us are parents. From what I can see, our childhood has made us jaded and desensitized in many ways. We have seen so much, and honestly, we’re used to dealing with the occasional national crisis, so this might make us more apt to raising kids during a time like this. This doesn’t mean we are okay, because we aren’t! We just know how to carry on through the mess. 

How our upbringing has affected our parenting 

This whole blog post was inspired by a meme about how 90’s parents left their children home alone back in the day. As a former latch key kid, I can tell you that this meme hits home. This might be a specific experience of us poor folks, especially POC, but this is how many of us survived. My mother couldn’t always afford after-care, daycare or anything else like that so we had to walk home from school and hold down the fort until she returned from work. It was as illegal then as it is now, but we did what we had to do to survive. This way of life made us independent and cunning. We learned to navigate our neighborhoods independently, feed ourselves, get homework & chores done, how to lie to strangers at the door and watch our younger siblings all while waiting for our parents to come home.

As a parent now, I know we don’t want to do this with our kids but, us poor folks are running out of options. If things don’t ease up and schools remain closed, we might have to return to our roots. If need be, we know the exact speech to give our kids too! “Don’t open this door for nobody but me, not even Jesus! Don’t touch the stove, use the microwave to make yourself some noodles. Your homework better be done and my house better be clean by the time I get home! Here is my number, call me if you need me. See you at 5:30.”

Being a millennial with parents who grew up poor in the ’70s & ’80s also made us resourceful. I was so confused when there was a tissue shortage earlier this year. For whatever reason when the president announced the national state of emergency, people put tissue at priority one. Well, not us poor folks! Growing up, oftentimes running out of tissue, we learned from our parents how to get by. Cut up paper towels, newspaper, or a good ole fashioned shower did the job. You can even attach a bidet to your toilet, so all you have to do is get creative and use what you got. We have those skills in our arsenal thanks to our parents and grandparent’s ability to adapt and survive. 

But everything isn’t ‘Rona virus related. Growing up in the 90’s changed many other aspects of how we go through life and parent our kids. In this age of self care and self awareness, we aren’t scared to seek out therapy for ourselves or our children. We have open minds and a lot more resources, since online therapy has become available and many jobs offer a few therapy sessions in their benefits package. 

Technology has been a game-changer. We grew up in and molded the era of the internet and social media, so this is second nature to us. We have these quick and useful online resources for everything. Google, Facebook groups, youtube, and facetime makes everything easier and harder at the same time but it’s still crucial to our way of life. Blogs like mine, or the lack thereof, played a big role in my learning to be a parent and wanting to help others as well. 

More on that point, the internet has helped lead to a big value shift among most of us. After seeing so many viral sensations, online business owners, and content creators cultivate an audience and gain monetary growth from internet success, we have now seen that there is a new path. No longer do we put all of our eggs into the 9-5 basket. We are pushing entrepreneurship onto our peers and kids, hard. I attribute this to the betrayal we have received from the workforce. We were promised that if we went into debt for a college degree that we would be given reasonable pay and a lucrative future but that isn’t always the case. Most of us end up never seeing the return on our investment and end up in careers completely outside of our desired field. There are so many of us trying to create our own businesses and side hustles to survive but also to gain some control over our lives by being the source of our own income and using our time to invest in ourselves instead of the dreams/companies of others. I can’t even get mad at the parents who manage their child’s youtube page or the family vloggers. They are just trying to create a revenue source that they control. More power to ya! 

My take away 

All generations have had their issues, our grandparents lived through Jim Crow and the civil rights movement for god’s sake. What I’m getting at is that the world we grow up in affects us both positively and negatively, and it directly affects what goes on in our households as adults. Us millennials get a lot of flack for the way we are but I’d like to stop and give us some respect. We have been through a lot, very early in our lives and we are coping. Our parents have taught us so much about how to parent, what to do, and what not to do, so we have to give them props as well. After writing this and really thinking about how my husband and I are navigating these times in regards to our daughters, I couldn’t help but wonder what parenting will be like for those kids. Unlike us, they have to do live shooter drills, online school, 5-month quarantine, and grocery store raids. At 4 years old my daughter has had to learn what social distancing and quarantine are, it’s going to be interesting seeing what world events she will live through and how it will shape her.

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