A viral post about a man who discovered his parents had withheld college recruitment letters from him has been prompting a new round of boomer backlash.
The conversation initially started with a separate musing on a frustrating trait people have noticed among some boomers.
“If you have transactional wounded boomers in your life who take no accountability but also feel victimized by their own choices I want you to know I’m praying for you today extra special,” wrote @luinalaska. “It’s a wonder any of them passed astronomy class as it defies physics that they’re all the center of the universe simultaneously.”
The tweet spawned a number of responses of how boomers—often parents—had lived up to exactly this. But there was one response in particular that had people feeling physically ill and angry.
An X user named @ravenousreader shared a photograph of the college recruitment letters her husband had received during high school—or rather, that he should have received. But he never got them, because the school athletics director who received them gave them directly to his parents, and his parents didn’t tell him about them until he was 24.
“You aren’t that smart anyway”: the excuse that broke the internet
Their reasoning, she said, was “because ‘we didn’t want to have [to] travel far to home meets, and you aren’t that smart anyway.’”
“I was there when they handed him these opened letters,” she added. “He was national champion in high school. He could’ve gone anywhere. Who does that to their kid?”
Viral post ignites broader conversation about boomer parenting and sabotage
Social media users were appalled with the idea that parents would sabotage their child’s future in such a cruel way—and that they would actually hold onto the evidence to tell him about it later.
Others share stories of dreams delayed or destroyed by parents
Unfortunately, plenty of other people had stories to share about the boomers and/or parents in their lives who had sabotaged their futures in similar ways.
As one X user wrote regarding the original story, “Wow, as a father, that is depressing to see. Your job is to set them up for success and support them to be the best they can be. They failed him.”
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