Vox Meditantis

What’s the most Gen X parenting tactic you accidentally use on others?

The other day at the community centre, one of the newer volunteers – a lovely young woman in her twenties who’d just moved to Riverside from somewhere shinier – looked at me with genuine distress because the photocopier had jammed. Not broken, mind you. Just jammed. She stood there, hands hovering uselessly over the paper tray, and said, “What do I do?”

And before I could stop myself, the words came out: “Well, what have you tried?”

She blinked at me like I’d spoken Mandarin. “I… haven’t tried anything yet. I was going to ask you.”

That’s when I realised I’d done it again. I’d deployed the most Gen X parenting tactic in existence – the one where you refuse to solve a problem someone is perfectly capable of solving themselves. It’s the reflexive response I spent two decades using on my three children, and apparently, I now use it on everyone from college students to the poor bloke at the hardware shop who asked me where the WD-40 was whilst standing directly in front of it.​

The Origins of “Sort It Yourself”

I’m sixty-four years old, which means I came of age in New Corinth during the late seventies and early eighties, when this city was haemorrhaging jobs and the adults around us were too exhausted or too broken to micromanage our lives. My father worked at the New Corinth Iron Works until it closed in 1978 – one of those 1,200 jobs that vanished overnight – and after that, he cobbled together shift work at the docks and night security at the business park they’d built where the mill used to stand. My mum cleaned houses in Minerva Heights for families who’d stayed whilst everyone else fled to the townships.​

They didn’t have time to hover over my homework or drive me to activities or solve my minor inconveniences. When I got locked out after school, I learnt to climb through the basement window. When I couldn’t work out my maths homework, I walked to the library on Market Street – back when it was still open regular hours – and figured it out. When I had a falling-out with a friend, my mum’s advice was, “You’ll sort it,” and then she went back to darning socks because new ones cost money we didn’t have.​

That wasn’t neglect. That was survival. And somewhere along the way, it became my parenting philosophy.

Accidentally Weaponising Self-Reliance

I raised my kids – now aged forty-one, thirty-eight, and thirty-five – in this same city during the nineties, when New Corinth hit 127 murders and Market Street was nothing but check-cashing shops and the lingering smell of failure. We lived in a narrow row house near Minerva Creek, and I worked the front desk at what’s now Christiana Care New Corinth Medical Centre, back when it was still called County General and perpetually underfunded. My then-husband drove lorries for a logistics company out by the port, gone three or four days a week.​

I couldn’t afford to coddle. When my eldest came home complaining that a teacher had marked her project unfairly, I asked, “Did you talk to her about it?” When my middle one said he was bored, I handed him a broom and suggested he could make himself useful. When my youngest burst into tears because she’d forgotten her PE kit, I told her she’d remember it next time, and I did not drive it to school for her.​

I thought I was teaching resilience. I thought I was preparing them for a world that wouldn’t hold their hands. And maybe I was. But now I catch myself doing the same thing to people who aren’t my children, and I’m not entirely sure it’s kind.​

The Photocopier Incident and Others

After the photocopier encounter, I started noticing the pattern. A neighbour asked me how to reset her Wi-Fi router, and I said, “Have you tried unplugging it?” A colleague at the food bank where I volunteer asked what time the next delivery was coming, and I gestured at the schedule taped to the wall she was standing beside. A young man at church mentioned he didn’t know how to boil an egg, and I – God help me – said, “YouTube exists for a reason”.​

It’s not meanness, exactly. It’s that deeply ingrained belief that the best gift you can give someone is confidence in their own capability. The problem is, not everyone interprets it that way. The photocopier girl looked wounded. My neighbour muttered that she’d just wanted help, not a lecture. And the young man at church hasn’t asked me for advice since.​

I’ve started wondering if what worked for survival in 1982 Riverside, or for raising kids in 1995 New Corinth, doesn’t translate to a volunteer shift at a community centre in 2025. The city’s changed – there’s a university campus downtown now, new flats along the waterfront where warehouses used to rot, people moving in who didn’t grow up knowing that resourcefulness wasn’t optional. And maybe those of us who did grow up that way need to remember that “figure it out yourself” can sound less like encouragement and more like dismissal if you didn’t learn it as a life skill before you could tie your shoes.​

What I’m Trying to Learn

I’m working on it. When the photocopier jammed again last week – because of course it did – I walked the young volunteer through clearing it step by step, instead of just telling her to sort it. When my grandson asked me how to make gravy for Christmas dinner today, I stood next to him at the hob and talked him through it, rather than handing him my mum’s old, grease-stained recipe card and walking away. Small victories.​

But I’ll be honest: it doesn’t come naturally. Every instinct I have says that people learn best by doing, by failing, by trying again. That’s how I learnt to manage a household budget when my husband left. That’s how I learnt to advocate for my mum when she had her stroke eight years ago – calling doctors’ offices until someone actually listened, learning the language of insurance appeals, refusing to accept “that’s just how it is” as an answer. No one held my hand through any of it. I figured it out because I had to.​

Still, I’m trying to recognise that “figure it out” works best when people have the tools and the safety net to actually do so. The young woman at the photocopier isn’t me at sixteen, already hardened by a city in free fall. She’s allowed to ask for help without it being a referendum on her competence. And I’m allowed to offer it without feeling like I’m doing her a disservice.​

It’s Christmas Eve, and my kitchen smells like the ham I’ve been basting for the past three hours. My grown children will arrive soon with their own families, and I’ll watch them parent in ways that would’ve baffled me thirty years ago – endless patience, constant praise, an app for everything. Part of me still thinks they’re making it too easy. But they’re happy, and their kids are loved, and maybe that’s what matters.​

I’ll still probably tell my grandson to figure out how to carve the ham himself, though. Some habits die hard. And honestly? He’ll be better for it.

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.