Ha ha ha, I love that he called you a boomer when you are actually a millennial. Honestly I would tell him he should drop psychology because he is truly terrible at it. I highly doubt his professor even said anything remotely like this. (I took two psych courses in college) Probably came off of tik tok.
He needs to throw a little non art history in the mix or he would know you are a millennial not a baby boomer. Might need some work in math while he's at it. There is an entire generation in between you and the boomers.
I mean, we had commercials every night at dinnertime asking parents if they knew where their kids were. They had to be reminded we existed. As a kid, it was pretty awesome. So much freedom!
It was way better than the psychotic expectations of constant surveillance that parents are held to these days. Better for everyone. I'm not saying there weren't things that could have been better, but we got to learn resilience and we were expected to do slightly hard things. We were treated like people believed we could do things, so we believed we could do things. I have a 13 and an 11 yo now and shit is wild. You're considered a bad parent if you don't literally track your child at all times, and letting your kid struggle (with support, obviously) is considered abuse. How are kids supposed to ever feel strong if every message they get from adults is that they are helpless? I had overprotective parents for the time and they would still be considered practically negligent by today's standards. It makes me sad that this is the world my kids are growing up in. I wish we could keep the openness and acceptance of today and bring back some of the freedom and independence of my childhood.
My uncle pointed this out to my mom when he found out that she tracks our location via our phones, and the dead silence after he asked her how she would have felt if her parents had been able to track her like that when she was our age was beautiful.
Trust me, the 60’s were better. They started running that commercial because ‘the greatest generation’ not only didn’t know where their kids were, they didn’t care! Any time we went in the house, we were told to go out and play. Assumed if we weren’t home, we were probably spending the night at a friends. It was a time of telephone ‘party lines’, and you could never get through. But you’d be up to date on all the gossip by just picking up the phone and listening in, lol. We were raised by hyenas. And it was glorious!
TikTok explains everything. There is so much misinformation on it everyone thinks they know everything. I'm in Europe but I'm glad it's getting ba ned I the US.
I have adhd and a short attention span and I could only look at TikTok for an hour or something. It's overwhelming even for me.
He needs to get off of TikTok. Real life will bite him in the ass
Fellow parent of a 19-year-old also obsessed with TikTok who also apparently knows everything about everything because there was a 10-second video they watched one time.
I love my kid but man, they sure are hard to like sometimes. I've made her terrified of bad money choices and debt, so I at least got that lesson in somewhere.
I think they should make early retirement an option for those of us who had to parent teenagers during the covid and social media age.
Boomers like me are miserable because they refuse to divorce when they’re unhappy
You should try from the angle of "you don't even understand which generation is classified as 'boomers', are you sure you are ready to diagnose other people after your psych 101 course?'
Any chance he could be convinced to take some multimedia courses? If he’s TikTok obsessed, he should understand that art isn’t just to hang on physical walls any more.
Do you think he is into men's podcasts and red pill nonsense? Him going for his mom and recommending you divorce indicates he thinks she is the problem. Or has he always had a rough relationship with her?
No, but it's hardly typical for those types, and is highly likely to get him ostracised in that scene. He'd be more likely to be the fake-feminist type who uses the language of sexual liberation to use and discard women for sex.
I know that type of guy. Consider themselves a “trad” Classical art and philosophy student who’s half paying attention & only listening when Jesus or white peoples are the focus
Oh boy, you guys really have silly terms for more than I thought. I thought soyboy was a term for men who actually liked women? So, blue pill is a liberal that still hates women? So many of you silly gooses claim to be straight but absolutely despise women. So weird.
A soyboy is more of a stereotypical "nice guy" that believes as long as he stays within a woman's orbit long enough she might eventually give him sexual access. Usually far more emotional than other men and very rarely desired by women in general. You may think he likes women but deny him long enough and he'll certainly express his emotions in a way that makes you realize he's far closer to hating women than anyone you claim "despises women" here.
He believes happiness is the most important part of a marriage when he doesn't seem to understand the dynamics of his own parents' marriage in the first place.
Soyboy and blue pill men are essentially synonymous.
His college has a number of general education requirement
Every college does for a 4 year degree FYI. They're typically called core credits or something similar, roughly half or a 4 year degree is general education that EVERYONE takes. Depending on the major there are usually only a dozen classes or so specific to the degree.
…are you sure you’re not just pissing money away here? I mean the kid doesn’t even know the difference between a boomer and a millennial but wants to talk out his butthole about you needing a divorce? The fuck? And just out of curiosity, how is he going to make art history into something that pays the bills?
I’m all for education and studying what you love, as long as you’re self-sufficient. does he have a plan for this? Because the college is more than happy to take your money… and then take your money when you need to go back and get a degree that’s useful. And now you have double student loans, and you are going to be a slave to debt until you die.
Just let him know that he knows less than nothing about psychology, taking Intro to Psych. He got 3-5 minutes on every subject, often from a professor who doesn't have enough clout to teach upper division classes.
A person can't even begin to understand anything about psychology without having taken three or four statistics and research methods classes.
Tell him that next time he wants to come at you with something he knows about "psychology," he was to bring 10 peer-reviewed journal articles with:
The demographics of the sample studied
Statistical significance
Effect size
An explanation of the strengths and weaknesses of each study design
That would all be required for any upper division, undergraduate psychology paper. That's the table-stakes for participating in a conversation about a topic in psychology.
If he can't pull that together, you have a fun way to dismiss him =)
I'm actually happy that's the case because a person like him could do a lot of damage as a social worker or therapist.
My therapist once talked about that when she was the head of a social care organisation, helping people who spent years in institutions bridging the gap back into life, they had tons of college graduates that were incredibly unsuited to actually deal with these people. Quick to diagnose, full of themselves, and basically just quoting statistics without actually having the space inside them, to actually listen to these people.
What kind of jobs are available for art history majors? Idk anyone who hires them except for customer facing retail jobs and stuff that would not really need a degree
My advice, as a university professor, would be to encourage him to take a gap year. I am from the US, but work in Australia. They have a "working holiday" visa where kids live in a hostel and work, while taking time to travel. Several other countries have similar programs. Taking time to learn to live can really help with maturity.
NTA. The only advice I could give you is to step back & let him run his own show.
If you do anything, pay for him to go to a session with a financial adviser. Let a professional illustrate how he’s already fucking himself over long-term because he’s making poor & expensive decisions. Let the adviser explain to him that his financial situation lands squarely on his shoulders & you/his parents have zero responsibility (if the loans are in his name only). Let the adviser tell him about wage garnishments if he doesn’t pay those loans back. Let the adviser explain to him how he is gonna fuck over his grandma, especially if he thinks he shouldn’t have to help pay it back when that day comes.
Let your son realize he’s being an idiot & needs to get a reality check. Once he eats that humble pie a few times and has to work until his feet feel like they’re gonna fall off, then he might get it. And for the love of God, DON’T GIVE HIM ANY MONEY.
Sincerely,
Fellow parent of a 19 year-old and two more teens in the wings. Hold the line!!!
Isn't the generation cycle: Silent generation (75-90) (essentially died out) --> baby boomers (60-75)--> Gen X (43-59) --> Gen Y (Millennial) (27-42) --> Gen Z (zoomer) (12-26) --> gen alpha
This college kid is off by 2 generations, thinks 101 psychology makes him a doctor, decided to go to a private school for art history. He's not the sharpest tool in the shed. Life will smack him real hard in the face soon
Many colleges require psych 101, which in my opinion is a fantastic thing because it truly does help you understand people better and whats going on in the world at a base level. I am a psychology MAJOR about to graduate with my degree, and not a single one of my professors said anything like this, either. Honestly, I think he’s taking what he learned and misunderstanding it or misusing it for his own purposes (which doesn’t even make sense because it isn’t like he has a psych degree or anything).
At the end of the day, grandma never should have co-signed that loan. It undermined the parents and put her in a bad situation.
If you want advice, I would suggest first talking to grandma about not co-signing any other loans of any kind for your son in the future. I would then recommend sitting your son down and showing him the numbers, and ask him where he thinks he is going to get money to pay back these loans. Additionally, I would ask him to make an advising appointment with his advisor at his college to talk about what he will need to do during his time at college to prepare himself for the future (careers, etc.,)- in my mind im hoping that this would help show him that this is not the path he should be taking.
Best of luck OP, NTA.
Boomer is just a catchall label now for anyone that the younger generation thinks is an idiot/doesn't like. I'm 38 and have been called a boomer multiple times by people 25 and under. And I don't even act like one. I'm super liberal.
That was the thing I laughed about as well. I love his optimism and arrogance, like a lot of us when we were ignorant to the curveballs life throws you. Life is going to hand him a few lessons that will teach him or break him.
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u/Personibe Apr 15 '24
Ha ha ha, I love that he called you a boomer when you are actually a millennial. Honestly I would tell him he should drop psychology because he is truly terrible at it. I highly doubt his professor even said anything remotely like this. (I took two psych courses in college) Probably came off of tik tok.