55 Moms do know best
In 1975, Robert Trivers (Chapter 33) wrote a classic paper on parent-offspring conflict. He argued that parents and offspring have different interests, which can drive inter-generational conflicts.
My family life growing up was remarkably peaceful, but one story does illustrate that parents and offspring can have different interests. In this case, the family conflict was resolved – in my Mom’s favor.
At an age of 17, I moved from my family home in Long Beach to Deep Springs College. I left behind a box or two of “stuff” that I had accumulated over the years. This included miscellaneous awards for athletics or scholarship, a Boy Scout backpack, and who knows what. When I returned to Long Beach on a visit, I’d sometimes add additional “stuff.”
Then in 1977, I got a potentially permanent job at the University of Washington. Now that I was reasonably settled, my Mom began encouraging me to take those boxes with me back to my new home in Seattle.
Here was parent-offspring conflict at its most trivial. My Mom wanted the boxes out of the garage, but she suspected that someday I would value their contents. I had no interest in the contents or in hauling the boxes to Seattle and thus cluttering my own garage. My response was something like, “Mom, I really don’t want that old junk from my childhood. I should just trash it.”
My Mom would invariably respond, “In that case, I’ll save it here for you – someday you will want those things.” The boxes remained in my parent’s garage.
This encounter iterated several times over the following decades. In exasperation, I finally suggested a compromise. I said that I’ll open the boxes, check the contents, and then throw it all away. My Mom thought this was fair and agreed.
I opened the first box and spotted a stack of merit-badge cards from the Boy Scouts. I shuffled through them and found one for ‘Cooking’ and another for ‘Citizenship in the Home.’ I thought, hey, I can tape the ‘Cooking’ one to the wall in our kitchen and the one for ‘Citizenship in the Home’ to our vacuum sweeper. Then I found one for ‘Nature’ – this ended up framed on a wall in my office at the University of Washington. I even founds one for ‘Camping’ and ’Hiking. There were many others (I was an Eagle Scout).
I found other treasures in those boxes. This was fun, much to my surprise. Suddenly I realized, “Moms do know best!”