We Literally don’t have it easier

For my ADHD friends, there’s a TL;DR at the bottom.

Our parent’s generation is constantly telling us how much ‘easier we have it’ these days & how they ‘just got on with it’ when we were kids.

The ‘easier we have it’ part makes me stabby. What is it about my generation that they think is easier?

Is it as simple as the selection & innovation of sippy cups, prams & most baby products have grown it’s perceived that certain elements of parenting babies & toddlers are simpler? Or maybe it’s because our kids are allowed so much screen time which is presumed to be giving us more downtime. Is there more help for us?

Most of my parent’s generation of mothers were stay-at-home mums or worked part-time, to be flexible & available for their children & their needs. My generation all have massive mortgages (in Australia anyway), or can’t even afford their own housing resulting in most mothers also working to make ends meet or working out if it’s most cost-effective to work & pay for child care, or not work at all. So we might be doing paid & unpaid work or no longer doing paid work, raising a family & managing a household.

Still struggling to see the ease in our lives.

Our parents needed to grow up faster, be responsible for themselves & be self-sufficient because their parents worked hard (being immigrants) & there were no grandparents to look after them, & now they’re grandparents & able to help us. Maybe our folks are still working & unable to help us, but we have daycare & nannies to help us …. that’s plenty of help at our fingertips!

There’s just no way we can compare our childhoods to that of our children as SO much is different & has changed; medical advances, scientific understanding about the brain & body, social & emotional progress in terms of ways to raise emotionally intelligent & resilient children, the amount of information at our disposal to refer to when querying the latest research about (effective – which is still questionable) childrearing, education, aspects of parenting, appropriate & proportionate discipline & the plethora of parenting & medical experts that we’re directed to all the time. We’re also needing to coach, educate & arm our children strategies to protect themselves from about abuse, abduction & cyber threats.

We have so much more information at our disposal than our parents for each & every aspect of motherhood & parenting & we need to stay on top of it all to ensure we’re doing all we can to physically, socially & emotionally support our kids.

Which has me still asking, how exactly have we got it easier?

We’re constantly thinking, exploring, deciding, investigating, weighing options, seeking advice & reassurance & also trying to anticipate the next thing we need to think about, explore, decide on, investigate every single aspect if raising self-confident, resilient, street & cyber-smart & kids. This is bloody exhausting.

One might assume that the number of experts, books, blogs, research, recommendations, advice, associations, foundations, organisations, webinars & workshops makes this all easier, but more often than not, it overcomplicates, overwhelms & confuses us. We can spend hours exploring options & figuring things out & then questioning our choices ensuring we’ve understood & interpreted the information correctly. We then look to our peers & wondering what they may think of our choices, while at times, graciously accepting their decisions when they don’t align. Even when our mind is made up, we might still need to explain, justify & convince others of it or have to wear their judgement.

With all this information, decisions & choice cometh another category by which we measure ourselves & the success &/or failures these decisions have resulted in. Hell, if we’re going to be assessed & judged, we might as well jump on this bandwagon & do it too!

The more we know about neurological conditions, the more complicated life becomes. It’s always been that way. It’s assumed by our elders that we’re using these advances to make life easier when in fact, it’s added layers & layers of complexities & complications as well as created new pathways & opportunities for us to either form blueprints for effective & accurate support that others can benefit from or we choose the wrong path & fuck it all up completely & have it all documented for the rest of time.

And still baffled by this concept or notion that is easier for us.

Because it’s literally.not.easier.

And now to the ‘we just got on with it’ part….. They absolutely got on it; the alcohol & valium because they struggled in silence…

Sorry I meant, ‘got on WITH it’ because the appearance that one was struggling was fought ferociously. No one ever struggled. Ever. Nothing was too hard. And the kids were all ‘fine’ & nothing was ever ‘wrong with them’. And if something was ‘wrong with’ their child, it was ignored, hid, brushed aside or even blatantly denied. And the alcohol & valium helped with that too.

Children that were obviously ‘different’ or had severe physical or intellectual disabilities were shunned, hidden, re-homed or even heartbreakingly, given up. High-masking Autistics (that would have been diagnosed with Aspergers back then) had zero support, zero understanding of themselves & were forced to conform & navigate a world that they didn’t understand & a world that didn’t understand them. Their weirdness & oddness (they didn’t use ‘quirky’ back then), their challenges or differences were explained & justified into socially acceptable narratives & kept their parents on an even playing field & social standing when their children met their milestone, were accomplished & successful.

(NOTE: I need to acknowledge that it wasn’t necessarily just the parents that brushed things off. GPs & Peads also did as not as much was known about the presentation of Aspergers/ADD (as they were known at the time), especially in females, resulting in professionals brushing off legitimate parental concerns because they didn’t know any better).

I was an anxious child & had no understanding of what these feelings were & didn’t get any strategies to support me. Sure I pushed through & managed, but the cost of this was significant & severely impacted my mental health & wellbeing. As soon as my daughter appeared to be anxious, I took her to a Psych for support. There was no shame, no need to explain or justify this decision because, ‘doing the best we can’ sometimes means we might be uncomfortable with something, but it doesn’t stop us from doing what’s required or necessary to support our kids. When the diagnosis of anxiety seemed to be covering up something more, we dug deeper. There was no way this could have been my story as we didn’t need Psychs back then. Psychs were for really troubled kids & I was *just* anxious.

Our parent’s generation was filled with insecurity & when advice was required, it was often solicited to comfortable resources such as friends, family, trusted doctors (with conservative views) & publications where advice was based personal opinion & popular theories. There seemed to be no circumstances or conditions for parental instincts beyond the age of three, once reflux, colic, nappy rash, teething, weaning or solids were done & dusted, & even then, one can seek out & source information to validate what you want to hear.

So did our parents fail to see it, or fail to acknowledge it? Did this make it easier for them to just ‘get on with it’?

Age-inappropriate meltdowns can be justified to be emotional releases from the pressures of school, toe walking means your child is a prodigy ballerina, a child’s obsession with Lego means they’re a gifted engineer & the fact they struggle to socialise is because they’re gifted & simply can’t relate to their peers & their insistence on only playing with yellow coloured Lego means that your child is sunny, bright & happy. You can literally enable & change the narrative on anything.

So, they didn’t really get on with it, did they? It feels as though they literally just made excuses, ignored &/or denied it.

A friend of mine was diagnosed as having an allergy to preservatives to explain his hyperactive behaviour. He was diagnosed as having ADHD at the age of 48. When he questioned the accuracy of the preservative allergy from his mum, it was revealed that a family member had shared an article from Choice Magazine that published a piece about the links of preservatives with hyperactivity. No doctor, No Psych, No allergy testing. Just an article shared by a family member to either help or hinder the parent.

Maybe then we DO have it easier as there’s so much information to draw on that can twist, justify & explain just about anything. The only thing they back then had was Choice Magazine; Read an article, assign a reason, get on with it.

What is it about us that they think it ‘easier’ & what is it about us that doesn’t seem to ‘get on with it’?

Is it shame & stigma associated with mental illness, mood disorders &/or neurological conditions that sailed through de-Nile river when our parents were raising us? Was it the attitude of that generation to just suck it up as their parents lived through depression & war? Is there some kind of invisible, yet assumed level of privilege that’s been pinned on us not living through wartime, post-war hardship & trauma? (Except we do vicariously via our parents). Is the fact that we have more information & resources at our disposal, that we’re viewed as a pack of whingers needing to assign or blame our kids’ behaviours, challenges & issues to fancy names & acronyms?

We’re constantly accused of flippantly labelling our kids to explain or justify their conduct & to take ourselves off the ‘shit parenting-style’ mantle. The truth is though, kids have always been labelled. They’ve been labelled naughty, socially inept, weird, having anger issues or worse. And as a result, parents had been labelled too. I’m sure that many of us, if not all of us, grew up knowing exactly what our parents thought about certain kids &/or their parents that we hung around with, or more to the point weren’t allowed to hang around with because of what our parents thought about the kids &/or their parents.

The difference between our parents & us is that we search for explanations that may or may not be ‘labels’. We don’t seek out ‘labels’ to justify anything. We do this to provide our children & those around them with context. We do this to provide them & those around them with accurate & beneficial explanations of why they behave, think & do the things they do. We do this to provide our children with an understanding of who they are & why they (might) feel different from their peers shielding & protecting them from a life filled with comparisons, questioning, judgment, low self-esteem, self-worth & self-confidence. We do this so we can provide our children with clarity & productive, conducive & relevant support to live their best lives.

We try not to care what people think (as we were raised thinking that this mattered) & shove pride & shame aside to put the emotional well-being of our kids first because we know precisely how it feels to live a life wondering, measuring & questioning ourselves. Caring what others think creates excuses to stop, convinces us to ignore our instincts & delays our actioning.

We don’t have it easier. And sometimes, the hardest part of this very idea is the constant dialogue we have with our elders about this very presumption trying to explain – not convince, as their minds are often set – why their conclusion is minimising, dismissive & literally insulting. The language that’s used during these conversations is often negative, thoughtless & downright offensive. We never said there was anything ‘wrong’ with our child(ren) when explaining assessments, diagnoses &/or therapies, so please stop referring to their neurology as a deficiency or shortfall.

How much easier is it for us when we’re managing, arranging & ferrying our kids to appointments & therapies? Not only have we pushed for answers, but we’re actually doing something about it.

We’re told that our kids do too much… they need to just be kids & not have too many commitments. All this additional ferrying & scheduling just make things harder for ourselves & we have no right to complain. Firstly, we’re allowed to complain because fatigue, exhaustion & burnout isn’t exclusive to parents of neurotypical children & secondly, these activities are selected specifically to provide our kids with outlets to either support their pent up frustrations &/or daily challenges, to provide them with critical & necessary sensory input, to foster their areas of interests or nurture their unique talents.

How easy do our parents think it is for us to come face-to-face with shame &/or unwrap generations of fine-tuned denial; something that our parents perfected & raised us to do the same?

Even though there’s concrete evidence that denial is damaging & causes long-term trauma for the person that requires support & for the whole family unit, we won’t sit idly by & watch our kids struggle out of fear of any possible repercussions for disobeying the values instilled in us by our parents. We literally can’t & won’t allow the fear of disappointing our parents, get in the way of us providing the right support for our children. We’re not saying that our parents are expected to embrace the denial & shame they’ve managed to dismiss their whole lives, but they need to recognise that these feelings, interpretations & perceptions are based on their experiences & their upbringing & that their expectations of us to adhere to these values are unlikely to be met.

If the outcome of us ‘labelling our children’ uncovers their discomfort of shame, they need to make the choice as to whether this shame bears more weight than accepting & supporting our decisions as parents & whether they’re able to at least ‘appear’ supportive despite them ‘knowing better’ as well as being able to sit with the (perceived) judgement of their peers for having imperfect descendants.

When advising (or reminding after repeated questioning) our parents that our children won’t be partaking or attending various traditions, milestones or rights of passages as we did as kids, we’re met with claims that they’re ok & accept this to be the case. They’re saddened that they’re unable to experience the same honour as their peers in celebrating or honouring their grandchildren, but fail to see that we are grieving too by not experiencing the same as our peers & not seeing our imagined lives as parents come to fruition.

So many of us are still processing, navigating & dealing with the consequences of the failings of our parents &/or the medical & Psychological professionals at the time but we push through it all in order to ensure this cycle is broken & won’t be repeated. And, it can take years for us to process our children’s diagnoses, & often our own too often realised following the outcomes of our kid’s, as we’re busy & focussed on relieving our children’s challenges & stressors by our constant advocating that interrupt us ‘coming to terms’ with it all.

What’s the point of these comments? Is it for comparison? Is it them fishing for approval or a place on our mantle? Is this some sort of parental self-assessment of their performance & asking us for feedback as evidence to substantiate their result? Is this pure insecurity on their part & planting seeds of doubt in us? Am I slow in realising that I was in a competition?

TL;DR

To our parent’s that think we have it easier, we literally don’t.

To our parent’s that professed they ‘just got on with it’, you literally ignored it, parked it or pretended it wasn’t there.

WE get on with it.

WE face it front on.

We push aside the uncomfortable feelings of shame & open ourselves up to vulnerability. Denial has no place here.

We push our kids & then deal with/manage the fallout.

We don’t stop until we have answers & plans in place.

We’re often questioned or forced to justify our choices, decisions & lives.

We’re constantly being criticised & judged by educators, family, acquaintances & Govt bodies when accessing supports.

We are everyone’s punching bag.We request for adjustments & accommodations to make life easier for our kids.

We grieve.

We explain.

We advocate.

We champion.

So before you profess that we have it easier & that you all ‘just got on with it’…

We don’t & you didn’t.

Literally.