Intergenerational Expectations Quotes

In your standard-issue family, of which few remain, but on which our expectations are still based, there are parents and there are children. The way you know which are which, aside from certain size and age differences and despite any behavior similarities, is that the parents are the bossy ones.

My dad is a Ghanaian immigrant, and he wanted a son who was an engineer.

When a child becomes an adult . . . the elders are fearful. And for good reason . . . not we but they are the germinators of future generations. Will they leave us behind as we did our parents? Consign us to neatly paved retirement villages? Trample us in the dust as they go flying out to their new galaxies? We had better tie them down, flagellate them, isolate them in the family cocoon, . . . indoctrinate them into the tribal laws and make sure they kneel before the power of the elders.

Because of the generation in which I came into the world, there were expectations. Of course there were expectations. It was something having to do with being a respectable Negro woman who would make the people in Baltimore proud.

At this level, the individual perceives the maintenance of the expectations of his family, group, or nation as valuable in its own right, regardless of immediate and obvious consequences.

The purity of Jewish upbringing - the restrictions that one carries through life being a 'nice Jewish girl' - what a burden.

When I was young, it was difficult to imagine entering a world where my parents succeeded so much and I could have risked failing. It would have felt much harder.

'First Gen' is kind of the ode to my parents and to really all immigrant children who come here with kind of a preemptive expectation placed on them, and then they get there, and they realize the American dream is bigger than, sometimes, what our parents dreamt.

The millennial generation in the US is the first that has reduced expectations from those of their parents. And I think there is something decadent and declinist about that.