This morning I came across a post saying, roughly, that it would be a good thing if “education through negation” ended with our generation. I caught myself wondering what “our generation” even means here. People nearing 40? People nearing 30? Maybe it was just a loose label. But the more I thought about it, the less convinced I was that this way of raising children is really disappearing.
I doubt it. Something that has been stamped into family life for so long does not simply vanish in one generation. If it has survived for centuries, then it is not just a random habit. It functions almost like an inherited reflex: the way people fear wild animals or salivate at the sight of food. Some patterns sink so deeply into us through repetition and adaptation that wiping them out completely, all at once, is far harder than people like to believe.
Those who are more optimistic usually make the same argument: our generation grew up as only children, and because we personally experienced this kind of denial, criticism, and emotional invalidation, we understand how damaging it is. So when we raise the next generation, we will reject that model. In that sense, they say, something really can end here.
But if you trace the pattern backward, the explanation for our parents is usually the same: they were raised that way too. What they called education was often just a reproduction of what had already been done to them.
In families with multiple children, conflict is almost inevitable. And when conflict appears, the fastest and most efficient way to settle it—or at least the easiest way to assign blame—is to affirm one child and negate the other. Once a household gets used to deciding things through this split between “right” and “wrong,” resentment between siblings quietly accumulates.
The logic is familiar. If the youngest child is especially favored, then whatever they do tends to be treated as correct, or at worst excusable. The older child is expected to yield: you’re older, you should let your brother or sister have it. Inside that invisible division of responsibility, the older child is constantly being overruled. Even when they were actually in the right, what they receive is still a denial of their feelings, behavior, or position.
If the one-child family model had continued for long enough, I can imagine this kind of upbringing gradually fading after a few generations. But that condition no longer holds. Once births increase and multi-child households return, this pattern is likely to return with them.
Only children are, in a sense, a discontinuous generation. Many of them have no lived experience of sibling dynamics, so they do not necessarily know how to manage a household with multiple children. And when pressure arrives, assigning right and wrong is still the simplest and most efficient method available. So the odds are high that they will fall back on the same methods their parents used. Not because they deliberately studied and adopted them, but because these responses have already been preserved inside the family and passed along almost automatically.
I have seen many examples of this around me. People openly resist their parents because they reject the way they were raised. But that resistance brings its own trap: they cannot actually find a better reference point.
They know, I must not become like my mother. But even that “must not” still uses the mother as the standard. The result of constant opposition is not freedom. It is a sharper understanding of the problems in the mother’s parenting and a deeper awareness of the injuries left behind. The more fiercely someone resists, the more clearly that original model stands in front of them, and the more intensely they continue to feel the pain it caused.
Over time, what many people call I must not become like my mother often still turns into repetition. She treated me this way, so when I face the same situation, I must not use her method. But whose method should I use instead? Very often, nobody knows. Every starting point still comes from the mother’s behavior and the wounds she left behind. Even rejection remains trapped inside the same frame.
I found myself thinking about family education again because recently I had to deal with difficult interpersonal tensions inside a company. Someone had been stirring conflict and making things worse, and my first instinct was to solve it by deciding who was right and who was wrong. That approach is fast. It also saves you the trouble of mediating, balancing, and patiently sorting through everyone’s position.
But a judgment made from one-sided statements can easily create bigger grudges later.
If you apply the logic many parents used, the assumptions are usually something like this:
- The person who is closer to you, or easier for you to trust, must be speaking more truthfully.
- The more distant the relationship, the more cautious you should be and the more you should hold something back.
- If a third party confirms your suspicion about someone, then their words feel even more convincing, as if they prove your own inference was already correct, so there is less need to investigate further.
At that moment, I suddenly realized that if I also chose this most direct route, then how would I be any different from the family pattern I never wanted to repeat? Trusting an outsider’s judgment about someone else, and letting that strengthen suspicions that should have been carefully examined firsthand—wasn’t that exactly the same mechanism?
Parents often call this kind of process “objective fairness.” In their eyes, they are not just listening to your side, and certainly not accepting what they think is your nonsense. They have a credible third party helping them confirm what you did. That, to them, is fairness.
But when we were children, weren’t we hurt by this kind of thing over and over—the kind of hurt where you had reasons but no way to make them understood? And isn’t this so-called objective fairness exactly the form of negation we most wanted to escape when we talked about breaking away from family patterns?
Will our generation really do better? I cannot say, and I do not think it is something that can be declared so easily. What I do see is that many people who spend years fighting their parents eventually reproduce the same injuries that shaped them.
That is the part that feels almost hereditary. From the moment a life begins, these family patterns are already waiting to settle into it. If there is any way to loosen their grip, it probably begins not with denying them, but with admitting that they are there.