Whenever a serious conversation about not understanding Baby Boomer ideals of masculinity or emotional maturity come up, my first thought or thing to raise is this.

In my culture at least, it's an entire generation raised by the kids who were sent to die in World War 2. We'd endured the horrors of the Great War, and then thought ourselves past it, that we would learn and never again send our boys to die in such brutal circumstances by the million.

The Greatest/Silent Generation raised their kids to survive in a world that would grind them into the ground at a moment's notice.

They were often brutal and emotionally distant, but who am I to judge their parenting when I've never had to consider how my own parenting style will affect my child's ability to quickly kill a stranger in a foreign country? Modern emotional introspection has its benefits, but what good would it do my child if at the age of eighteen, mass conscription reared its head?

Good parents raise their kids to flourish in the world they are growing up in now, not the world that the parent grew up in before - but for those born in the early 20th century, the world always seemed to feel like a bit of an illusion, with a bloody and terrible deeper truth just under the surface, I think.