When you got home from school, you already knew what was expected.
Defrost the chicken. Clean the house. Have it done before they walked through the door. No list on the refrigerator. No instructions. No reminder text because there were no texts. You just knew. And if you did not know, the long session of being told everything you did wrong was your lesson plan for next time.
Next time you got it right.
That was Gen X childhood for a lot of us. Raised by older Boomers and the Silent Generation – people who did not communicate so much as they transmitted expectations. Demands were clear. Explanations were not. Talking excessively was not on anyone’s agenda. You figured it out through critical thinking, trial, error, and the very specific motivation of not wanting to go through that correction session again.
There were no participation trophies.
You did it right or you did not. You met the expectation or you fell short of it. Nobody pulled you aside to say you did your best. Your best was the floor, not the ceiling.
My parents were Silent Generation. They did not hug excessively. They did not apologize. They did not sit down and ask how I was feeling about things. What they did was pay the bills, keep me in cute clothes, put me in private school, and make sure I had the latest things. I knew I was loved. I knew it in the way they showed up materially and structurally. Just not in the way kids today experience love – verbally, emotionally, with the volume turned all the way up.
They did not know how to do it differently. That is the truth I had to make peace with as an adult. They were raised the same way. Nobody taught them emotional language because nobody taught the people who raised them either. It goes back further than we want to look.
What it made us.
Self-sufficient. Resourceful. Excellent in our careers. Functioning members of society who do not need a manager to hold our hand through a basic task because we learned to figure things out alone before we were ten years old.
Gen X does not get enough credit for what that upbringing produced. We are the generation that adapted to every technological shift, raised kids while building careers, managed aging parents, and kept going without much fanfare because fanfare was never part of the deal.
We are good in a crisis. We are good alone. We are good at reading a room and adjusting without being told to.
And we are also, a lot of us, a little cracked.
Because there is a toll.
Emotionally unavailable parents produce emotionally triggered children – even when those children grow up, build successful lives, and present just fine from the outside. The lack of empathy, the absence of the repair conversation, the childhood spent performing competence to avoid correction – it leaves marks.
Some of us are a little cracked. Some of us are a lot. Some of us spent years in therapy unpacking why we cannot receive love without suspicion or ask for help without feeling like a failure. Some of us repeated the pattern before we recognized it. Some of us over-corrected so hard in the other direction that we produced a different problem entirely.
Which brings me to the Millennials and Gen Z.
Listen. I love them. Some of my favorite people are among them. But there is a version of the pendulum swinging too far that produced adults who are unfocused, emotionally fragile, and genuinely unprepared for the weight of responsibility. When every feeling gets validated and every effort gets celebrated regardless of outcome, you do not build resilience. You build someone who falls apart the first time the world does not clap for them.
That is not love either. That is a different kind of harm with better packaging.
So where does that leave us.
Gen X sits in the middle of this. Old enough to have been raised hard. Self-aware enough to know what that cost us. Determined enough to do it differently with our own kids.
We apologize. We have the conversations our parents never had with us. We go to therapy and then pay for our kids’ therapy too. We say I love you out loud because we know what it felt like to have to infer it.
My parents never apologized for how they raised me. And honestly- I never waited for it. What they gave me made me capable, independent, and equipped for real life in ways I am genuinely grateful for. The cracks I carried out of that childhood are mine to address. That is my work, not theirs to undo.
I thank them. I mean it. And I do it differently.
That is the most any generation can do – take what was handed to them, keep what worked, fix what did not, and try to leave the next one a little less cracked than you were.
Are you Gen X? Do you recognize this childhood? Drop it in the comments – I want to hear how you are carrying it and what you did differently.
