There’s a certain type of boomer who treats unsolicited opinions as a love language — about your weight, your job, your spouse, your house, your parenting — and is genuinely confused when their adult children seem distant, because in their generation criticism was care, and nobody has told them clearly that the rules of love changed about thirty years ago.
When people talk about the gulf between adult children and their boomer parents, they usually frame it as a story about cruelty, or coldness, or some failure of empathy on one side or the other. I don’t think that’s what’s going on, mostly. I think it’s a translation problem that…