this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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Does everyone in this comment section have a horrible relationship with their father??
What the hell, am I the only one here NOT hating my parents??
I love my parents. We had great relationship growing up and still do. They are weirdos. I love them.
That said, parents fuck you up even the awesome ones lol. Being a parent fucks you up too. It's a crazy complicated relationship to have good or bad.
... this is the tame, fishbowl, lemmy version of 4chan community.
Yes, yes obviously most of the people here come from very fucked up families.
... do you think normal, well adjusted, happily raised children... tend to end up anywhere near 4chan?
There's a reason 4chan has been repeatedly targetted and 4channers have been repeadtedly weaponized by extreme right wing political groups.
4chan's demographic is primarily fucked up young men/boys.
Some of us aren't subscribed to the community, but just browse All
I think it's survivorship bias. People with functional relationships with their parents (myself included) probably don't feel much need to weigh in.
People's families are complicated, and sometimes they need to vent. I (generally) don't see a problem with giving them space to do so.
This is the exact reason I'm choosing to just scroll past some of these comments that are missing the bigger picture.
My own relationship with my family is incredibly complicated. But it's not really about the family. It's about the fact that somebody will miss you. But when you're that deep into depression, it's really hard to see.
Cherish that fact.
People rarely feel the need to talk about how good their relationship with their dad is. Well except for one friend of mine, but to be fair to her her dad sounds exceptionally good.
But yeah, my father and I haven't been on speaking terms in a decade.
I feel like there's no human relationship that doesn't experience strain and parental ones can be tough.
Even though my parents are wonderful people we still have our stresses, mistakes, a few scars, and our differences. They will never know I'm bisexual, they will never know I've done weed let alone hard(er) drugs, they don't share my sense of humor - so we're not "friends" - but we do love each other.
my folks my entire life thought I was gay. even though I had girlfriends my entire adult life... they just had such a stupidly narrow definition of straightness that things like reading books and liking school made them 'suspicious'.
and i still meet so called 'progressive', adult women, who think this way to this day... esp because i cook and clean. because in their mind, no 'really straight' man can do these things...
some folks are just so weirdly obsessed with gender stereotypes in their head, and just totally reject anyone who doesn't conform to them.
Have experienced similar. People love to speculate on this shit, for some reason. Ain't they own sex lives interesting enough?!
They are afraid of how it would 'reflect' on them. That's why they are so paranoid about it.
They are afraid of the shame and judgment of other people knowing their child is a sexual deviant.
I dunno, it don't think most folks are different. I have hung out with plenty of self-identified queer/sexual open people... who also viciously judge other people for what they perceive as non-conformity to their own sexual expectations. Like, queer couples who live in fear their child will be 'a straight' or see being 'cis' as a negative thing. Folks just want you to be what they want you to be, and they are mad when you are not.
People generally just feel the need to police other's sexual behaviors and gender identity, and a lot of people have hypocritical double standards around it.
Not me. Had a great dad who disappeared after my conception
Mine was not horrible, just exasperating. I warned him about every single thing that caused him issues, but he refused to listen, and that killed him.
Sometimes I wonder how many suicides are invisible, people start to skip medicines, they dont care about health etc
that isn't suicide. suicide is the active act of killing yourself.
dying from neglect, or self-neglect isn't suicide.
though both, are 'deaths of despair'. in the sense they are entirely preventable and due to a lack of emotional/social connections.
That's a semantic distinction that doesn't add to the conversation. Read the room, friend.
actually that's called "passive suicidal ideation" and is in fact exactly what it sounds like:
a kind of "if this happens to kill me, oh well, at least it's over." kind of mindset and it is an earlier stage in the process of suicide.
quick copy paste from the wiki:
On suicide risk scales, the range of suicidal ideation varies from fleeting thoughts to detailed planning. Passive suicidal ideation is thinking about not wanting to live or imagining being dead. Active suicidal ideation involves preparation to kill oneself or forming a plan to do so.
Or "PDW" when I've got 2 minutes to write down your life story before moving on to the next patient in handoff. It's not uncommon for me to scribble down something to the effect of:
...multiple times per assignment. Like out of a six-patient assignment for the night I'll probably write that at least twice.
If it's only one specific stressor or I'm not too pressed for time I may specify. Common specific stressors include:
...but yeah people be checking into the psych ward for passive death wishes that all the time. 9/10 times the stressor is homelessness and realistically many are exaggerating a little for 3 hots and a cot but I probably would too tbh and I also really don't wanna live in a world where we gotta question the validity of somebody's expressed suicidal ideation.
hey that's interesting, thanks for sharing!
TIL. I get this when I'm off my meds. Never knew there was a name for it.
You just love being wrong don't you
My close person died in very young age. Cancer. That person knew that was something going on because of trumor, but tried to postpone doctors visits as long as possible. When was diagnosed, it was in last stage.
On average a person will rather share negative things than positive things.
No one consents to being born. Love my parents, even if they are MAGA morons. Even if they kicked me out of their house when they could. Even if they give me massive shit for how I live my life almost every time I see them.
Despite all that, I can see their intentions. My mom wanted a baby to love. My dad wanted me to be a wage slave master and not a wage slave.
While my relationship with father is bittersweet, I would by no means term it horrible. The man taught me most of the things I know when banks were crushing him.
yes.
people who don't hate their parents are rare.
even people who had wonderful parents... i know tons of them... hate their parents for not doing more for them.
a lot of children are infinitely resentful of their parents for not giving them more than they could. like, my favorite example is I dated a lady once who was enraged her parents only gave her $50,000 as a graduate gift, and spent every other date going on about how terrible and awful her parents were to her despite them giving her an objectively awesome life. She was an only child. Met sooo many people like that, and they are so weirdly arrogant, they would lecture me on how my parents being poor and abusive was 'more privileged' than them..
and it's also true, many of us had really bad parents. i think my parents tried they best, but their best was objectively shitty, and it was abusive. because well, all they knew was abuse themselves, they didn't know any better or how to break the cycle of abuse. so i had to do that. my own siblings actually, actively admit my parents were objectively shittier to me than they were to them... and they said they never really could figure out why my parents hated me so much, even though i was a really good kid who never did anything bad or wrong. for whatever reason, esp my dad, just hated me for not being what they wanted me to be, and even though I got into Harvard, they looked down on me for it. even at my college graduation they were not proud, they were resentful. what my dad wanted was for me to be a state uni football player douche bro, and what i was was a massive nerdy sensitive theater kid.
oh, and my graduation gift? Was $20, and a bill for my healthcare costs that was like $2,000, and my first student loan payment, which was $300.
As someone else pointed out above, people who have good relationships with their parents generally don't talk about it.
I think in the bubbles that we are in, including Lemmy, people with bad parents are overrepresented. Simply because of sexual minorities, progressive or radical ideas, or just plain old not conforming to the norm in terms of behaviour and character.
Plenty of people never had an issue with their parents, but also, plenty of people never had to tell their parents that they are homosexual, think their political beliefs are stupid, and have ADHD, for instance.
Plus, I would say that lonely people tend to flock together, likewise, people with no strong family ties probably end up using the internet more.
i dont know, i know plenty of 'normal' people who are all over the internet. True though, they don't really use reddit/lemmy sites, they use instragram, facebook, twitter. and IME their usage is actually way heavier than my own. but I'm only on here to kill time between tasks at work.
i think people here echo chamber themselves though a lot into beliefs that are not necessarily true. they don't kind of stand back and question their emotions towards their folks (or anyone else at all, really), or see their parents as flawed/limited people who perhaps, were just making mistakes or could never really be the parents they wished they were. my own parents were totally incapable of being the parents I needed as a child, and like, can i really be perpetually angry about that? i simple vastly exceeded them in every capacity, and sadly they resented that, rather than were proud of it. but it's who they were, they could be any different, and i'm kind of an asshole for wishing they were.
but then again, very few people ever do that. i def have met people who are grown 30 something adults, who idolized their folks and are still in a state of emotional and financial dependency on them... which you might say the danger of having 'too good parents'. and form where i stand it's just... i can't seriously imagine a parent financially or emotionally supporting me... since mine basically didn't.
That is a bit of a hen-egg question, isnt it? Do people in certain circles see their parents negatively because the circles echo such thoughts, or because such circles attract people like that? I have no definite answer, tbh.
Maybe it is because those circles make it easier to speak about such things?
Maybe because someone who experienced hardships themselves might turn to more "left" ideas to avoid this happening to others?
I personally am very grateful to my parents, they sacrificed a lot of potential happiness for their children. And yes, they are flawed human beings in a flawed world, who make mistakes, have some issues of themselves and so on. But psychology is messy, fuzzy, and hard to wrap in nice logical statements.
it's easy to talk about such things in therapy, but a good therapist isn't going to bias-confirm you, or engage you in escalation/exaggeration. online communities do that, inevitably.
your therapist also isn't going to flip out at you and call you a ungrateful piece of shit when you complain about your parents. people online and irl will definitely do that.
there is a cultural default where you are not supposed to be critical or resentful towards your parents for sure, which I think forces almost all of us to internalize this stuff. personally i've never had a partner who i could talk to about my parental issues without serious blowback and judgement for what a shitty person i was for daring to say such things about my folks... but my siblings? yeah they are more than happy to be critical about my parents esp def to how difficult they were about elder care, which made us all angry and frustrated with them. and i had to keep point out to my siblings... my parents were like this their entire lives... they weren't magically like more difficult as they got older, they had always been inflexible, stubborn, and refused to be proactive... so we basically had to do all that for them as they aged.
Obviously, people online and even good irl friends cannot replace professional therapy.
I've seen both, the "social default" of having a somewhat ok relationship with one's parents, and people in certain circles who tend to assume that there must be at least some difficulties.
true, some folks relationships, parental or otherwise, are just... boring and staid and uneventful and they are fine with that. some folks want something deeper, or more dramatic.
I like my parents well enough