There is a particular kind of family dynamic that has been quietly accumulating across most Western households in the last two decades, and the wider cultural register has not, on the available evidence, named it accurately. The dynamic involves parents who are now in their sixties and seventies, who raised their children with what they considered to be considerable substantive love, and adult children who are now in their thirties and forties, who experience their parents as having been emotionally absent across most of the childhood the parents were performing the love in.
The two parties are not, in most cases, lying about their experience. The parents did, on the available evidence of how they actually conducted the childhood, perform considerable substantive love. The adult children did, on the available evidence of their own interior reports, experience the parents as emotionally absent. Both reports are accurate. The gap between them is what the wider register has not adequately registered.
The gap is, on close examination, the structural consequence of two different generational frameworks for what love is supposed to look like, operating in the same household, without anyone in the household having registered that the frameworks were different. The parents were operating on one framework. The children were operating on a different framework. The frameworks did not match. The mismatch produced, across decades of childhood, a sustained and structurally invisible miscommunication about what was actually happening in the relationship.
What the older framework actually looked like
The framework the parents were operating on, on close examination, was calibrated to a particular set of cultural assumptions about how adults express love to their children. The assumptions were, in some real way, almost entirely about doing things.
The doing-things included the various forms of practical labor the parents performed across the childhood. The working long hours to produce the income that funded the household. The various small acts of household maintenance that constituted the daily texture of the home. The various sacrifices the parents made of their own preferences in favor of the children’s needs. The various forms of practical attention to the children’s structural conditions, including the food on the table, the clothes in the closet, the various items of equipment the children’s various activities required.
The doing was real. The doing was, by every available measure of how the parents were operating, the substantive expression of the love they felt for the children. The parents did not, in most cases, name the doing as love. The parents did not, in most cases, explicitly tell the children that the doing was love. The parents assumed, on the available cultural framework, that the children would register the doing as love by virtue of having received it across decades of childhood.
The assumption was not unreasonable. The framework the parents had themselves grown up inside had been calibrated to the same assumption. The parents had read their own parents’ doing as love, in some real way, without requiring the love to be explicitly named. The pattern had been operating across generations. The pattern had, on the available evidence of how the parents understood the world, worked.
What the newer framework looks like
The framework the children were operating on, by contrast, was calibrated to a different set of cultural assumptions that had been quietly emerging across the previous several decades. The assumptions involve, in some real way, the explicit verbal naming of emotional states.
The children grew up inside an environment that had been calibrated to recognize love primarily when it was said out loud. The recognition included the various small verbal performances that the wider environment had been gradually establishing as the markers of substantive emotional engagement. The “I love you” said at the end of phone calls. The verbal affirmations performed in response to the various features of the children’s lives. The various forms of explicit emotional naming that the wider therapeutic register had been quietly distributing across the wider population.
The wider environment did not, in most cases, explicitly tell the children that the verbal performances were the only acceptable form of love. The wider environment did, more accurately, surface the verbal performances at considerable frequency, in the various platforms and cultural products the children were absorbing, in ways that produced the implicit framing that the verbal performances were what love looked like.
The framing was implicit. The framing was, on close examination, the structural product of how the wider cultural environment had been evolving across the previous several decades. The framing was, in some real way, almost entirely invisible to the children operating on it, in the same way the older framework had been almost entirely invisible to the parents operating on it.
How the mismatch actually played out, in the household
The mismatch played out, across the decades of childhood, in a particular pattern that the wider register has not adequately documented.
The parent came home from work, having spent twelve hours producing the income that funded the household. The parent ate dinner with the family. The parent then sat down in the living room to watch television for an hour before going to bed. The parent did not, during the dinner or the television hour, explicitly tell the child that the parent loved them. The parent did not, in most cases, ask the child substantive questions about the child’s interior life. The parent was, by every available measure of how the parent understood the situation, performing love by being present in the household, having produced the income that funded the household, and having shared a meal with the family.
The child registered the parent’s presence. The child registered that the parent had been at work. The child registered that the parent had eaten dinner with the family. The child did not, on the available framework the child was operating on, register any of these as substantive expressions of love, because none of them involved the verbal performances that the child’s framework had been calibrated to recognize.
The child accordingly registered the evening as a piece of the parent’s emotional absence. The parent, by contrast, registered the evening as a piece of the parent’s substantive love being expressed through the various forms of doing the framework was calibrated to. Both parties were operating in good faith. Both parties were producing what their framework had told them was the appropriate behavior. Neither party had any available way to register that the other party was operating on a different framework that produced a different reading of the same events.
The pattern repeated, across thousands of evenings, across the entire span of the childhood. The accumulated mismatch produced, in the child, the structural impression that the parent had been emotionally absent across the childhood. The accumulated mismatch produced, in the parent, the structural impression that the substantive love the parent had been performing had been received by the child. Both impressions were, on the available evidence of how each party was actually operating, accurate to that party’s framework. Neither impression was accurate to what had actually been happening across the relationship.
What the discovery, when it occurs, looks like
The discovery, when it occurs, tends to arrive in adult conversations between the now-adult child and the now-aging parent. The conversation occurs at some point in the child’s thirties or forties, often prompted by some event that requires the two parties to actually engage with what their relationship has been across the previous decades.
The conversation tends to start with the adult child articulating, in some real way, that the parent had been emotionally absent across the childhood. The parent receives the articulation with a particular kind of bewildered hurt that the wider register has not adequately characterized. The parent did not, on the available evidence of how the parent had been operating, register the absence the child is describing. The parent registers, instead, the considerable substantive love the parent had been performing across the decades, in the framework the parent had been operating on.
The parent attempts to articulate the doing that the parent had been performing as love. The doing includes the working long hours, the various sacrifices, the various forms of practical attention to the household’s needs. The articulation is real. The articulation is, on the available evidence of the parent’s framework, the structural truth of what the parent had been doing.
The adult child receives the articulation with a particular kind of internal difficulty. The child can register, on close examination, that the parent had in fact been doing all of the things the parent is describing. The child cannot, on the framework the child has been operating on, easily translate the doing into the substantive love the child is asking the parent to demonstrate. The doing remains, in the child’s framework, the doing rather than the love.
The conversation, in most cases, does not resolve at this point. The two parties leave the conversation each feeling that the other party has not understood what they are trying to say. The not-understanding is real on both sides. The not-understanding is, on close examination, the structural consequence of the two frameworks operating on each other without either party having the available vocabulary to translate between them.
What the translation actually requires
The translation requires both parties to do something that the wider register has not adequately surfaced as the available work. The work involves each party developing the capacity to recognize the other party’s framework as a legitimate framework for expressing love, even when it does not match their own.
For the adult child, the work involves the small ongoing recognition that the parent’s doing was, in some real way, substantively love, even though it did not include the verbal performances the child’s framework had been calibrated to. The recognition does not require the child to pretend the verbal performances were happening. The recognition requires, more modestly, the willingness to register the doing as the structural expression of love it was, in the framework the parent had been operating on.
For the parent, the work involves the small ongoing willingness to actually produce some version of the verbal performances the child’s framework has been calibrated to register. The willingness is hard. The willingness requires the parent to do something the parent’s own framework has not been calibrated to produce, in late life, after decades of operating on a different framework. The performance is, in some real way, structurally difficult for the parent in the same way the recognition is difficult for the child.
Both parties have to do work the other party may not adequately register as work. The work is small. The work is, accumulated across the months and years following the initial conversation, what the actual repair of the relationship is going to require, regardless of what the wider register has been treating it as.
The acknowledgment this article wants to leave
The reason older parents are being read as emotionally absent by their adult children is not, in most cases, that the parents did not love the children. The parents loved the children considerably, and performed the love through the doing the older framework had been calibrated to. The reason is, more accurately, that the children grew up inside a different framework that had been calibrated to recognize love primarily when it was said out loud, and the children’s framework did not, by structural design, register the doing as the love the doing was, in some real way, the structural expression of.
The mismatch produced, across decades of childhood, a sustained miscommunication that neither party was in a position to register at the time. The miscommunication is now being registered, in the adult conversations the two parties are having about what the relationship was. The registering is uncomfortable. The registering is also, on close examination, the structural precondition for the actual repair that the relationship can still, in some real way, accommodate.
The wider register would benefit, on the available evidence, from absorbing the structural fact that a generation of quiet caretakers is currently being read as emotionally absent in their own families, on the basis of a framework mismatch that neither party produced and neither party, on close examination, deserves to be the only one paying the cost of.
