By the mid-1990s, somewhere between half and two-thirds of American kids in elementary and middle school were spending part of their afternoons unsupervised, depending on which study you trusted and what exactly you counted as supervision. The numbers fluctuated by region and by income bracket, but the general shape of the data was clear: a generation of children was being given an unprecedented amount of unstructured, unwatched time, partly because both parents were now working, partly because the cultural script of the era held that this was good for us. The phrase that came up in the parenting magazines of the period was “self-sufficiency.” The phrase that came up later, when we’d grown up and the older generation began describing us, was “low maintenance.”
I want to talk about that phrase, because I think it’s the most quietly damning piece of intergenerational vocabulary I’ve ever encountered, and most of the people deploying it have no idea what they’re describing. I grew up inside the trend the statistics describe. I was one of the latchkey kids the studies were counting. And the thing nobody warned me about — the thing the praise still obscures — is that what got measured as independence in childhood shows up, in adulthood, as something else entirely.
Here is what “low maintenance” meant, in practice, in the household I grew up in.
It meant that I let myself in after school with a key I’d been wearing on a string around my neck since I was eight. It meant I made my own snack. It meant I started my homework, or didn’t, with no one checking. It meant that when something went wrong at school—a friendship that had collapsed, a teacher who’d been cruel, a small heartbreak that I now recognize was an actual heartbreak—I sat with it alone in my bedroom until it dissolved into whatever it was going to dissolve into. It meant that the standard parental greeting at 6 p.m., when one of my parents got home from work, was “How was school?” and the standard answer was “Fine,” and the conversation, in the vast majority of cases, ended there.
My parents, by all the standards of their generation, were good parents. They worked hard. They put a roof over my head. They made sure the bills got paid and the fridge had food in it and there were Christmas presents under the tree. They were not, I want to stress, neglectful in any sense their generation would recognize.
What they didn’t do, because nobody had told them they were supposed to, was ask follow-up questions. The “how was school” was sincere. The “fine” was accepted at face value. The interior weather of an eleven-year-old was not, in the cultural script of 1995, a thing the parents were responsible for monitoring. The interior weather was the eleven-year-old’s job to manage himself.
What we were actually being trained in
I want to write about what this kind of upbringing actually trains a child for, because I think it’s been radically miscategorized.
The conventional narrative, told in the tone of mild admiration I mentioned earlier, is that 90s kids were trained in resilience. We bounced back from things. We didn’t make a fuss. We figured it out. We were, in some way that the helicopter-parented generation that came after us is allegedly not, capable.
I don’t think this is what we were being trained in. I think we were being trained in something more specific and, in its long-term effects, much less flattering.
We were being trained in the suppression of need.
The mechanism is straightforward. If a child experiences distress, and the adults around the child do not respond to the distress in any active way—do not ask about it, do not offer to help with it, do not even register that it is occurring—the child has two options. The first is to escalate. To produce louder, more visible signs of distress until the adults notice. The second is to internalize. To process the distress alone, without help, and to learn, over many small repetitions, that one’s own distress is not the kind of thing that produces a response from the world.
Most of the kids I grew up with took the second option. We learned, very early, that our internal states were not, in any practical sense, anyone else’s business. We learned to manage ourselves. We learned to expect nothing in the way of attentive emotional response from the adults around us. We learned, in a thousand small daily ways, that asking for help was either useless or, in some households, actively risky.
This learning was, in our childhoods, adaptive. We weren’t being abused. We weren’t being neglected in any obvious way. We were just being raised in a culture that believed children’s emotional lives were largely the children’s own concern, and we adapted, sensibly, to that culture.
The problem is that the learning didn’t stop at childhood. The learning calcified into a default operating mode, and the default operating mode came with us into our adult lives. We became, in our twenties and thirties, people who could not, in any reliable way, ask for help.
The cost of being low maintenance
I want to describe what this looks like in actual adult life, because I think the description is the most useful thing I can offer.
If you are a 90s kid trained in the suppression of need, you do not, when something is going wrong in your life, naturally reach for support. The reaching-for-support reflex was never installed. You have, instead, the reflex of internalization. You sit with the problem. You try to solve it alone. You produce, externally, the version of yourself that everyone has come to expect, which is the version that is fine, that is coping, that is figuring it out.
You do this even when you’re not figuring it out. You do this even when you are, in fact, drowning. The version of yourself that you produce externally has, by now, been produced for so long that it can be sustained almost indefinitely, on autopilot, even when the version of yourself that lives underneath it is in significant difficulty.
Your friends, who are also 90s kids, will not necessarily catch this. They are running the same protocol. They will believe you when you say you’re fine, partly because they have been trained to take “I’m fine” at face value, and partly because they need you to be fine in order to maintain their own version of the protocol. Mutual fine-ness is the default mode of friendship between people raised this way.
Your partner, if you have one, may catch it. They may notice that you don’t ever actually ask them for anything. They may notice that you produce, around them, the same surface-level version of yourself that you produce everywhere else. They may, if they’re paying close attention, register that you are emotionally somewhat unreachable, even by them. This will, over time, often produce difficulty in the relationship, which you will, in true 90s-kid form, attempt to manage by yourself, without telling anyone, including possibly the partner.
Your therapist, if you finally end up with one, will be the first person who will not let you get away with the “I’m fine” answer. The therapist will, gently, persistently, refuse to accept the surface version. The therapist will keep asking. They will ask in a way that, in the early sessions, you will find genuinely confusing, because nobody has asked you like this before. You will find that the answers are not, immediately, available to you. You will discover that the apparatus for accessing your own internal states has, through years of disuse, gone offline. You will spend the first six months of therapy mostly trying to remember how to feel things at full volume.
This is, I want to be clear, a very specific form of damage. It is not the dramatic damage of obvious neglect or abuse. It is something quieter and more pervasive. It is the slow erosion of the capacity to be a person who can communicate what’s happening inside them.
The compliment that isn’t
I want to come back to the original phrase, because it’s the most insidious part of all of this.
When someone of my parents’ generation tells me that 90s kids are “low maintenance,” they mean it as a compliment. They are praising us for being, in their cultural framework, virtuous. We don’t make a fuss. We don’t demand attention. We don’t, in the phrase that has become a kind of slur in their generation, “have feelings about everything.”
What they are actually describing, without realizing it, is the symptom set of a generation of children who were trained, in some cases inadvertently and in some cases very much advertently, to keep their interior lives to themselves. The “low maintenance” they’re praising is the absence of help-seeking behavior. The absence of help-seeking behavior is not a virtue. It’s an injury. It’s the visible evidence of a generation that was taught, very young, that asking for help was not an available option.
The fact that we have grown into adults who are still, mostly, low maintenance, is not a triumph of our character. It’s a sign that the training took. We are, in our thirties and forties, the very specific kind of people who don’t tell our partners when we’re struggling, don’t tell our friends when we’re scared, don’t tell our doctors when something is wrong, don’t tell our therapists when something has shifted. We are the kind of people who get diagnosed with serious illnesses late, because we waited too long to mention the symptom. We are the kind of people who lose marriages without ever having said clearly that we were unhappy. We are the kind of people whose friends are, at our funerals, surprised to learn things about us that we never said out loud.
The praise is the diagnosis. It just doesn’t sound like one.
What I’ve been trying to do
I want to be honest about what I’ve been trying to do, in the last few years, to retrain myself out of this. The work has been slow and embarrassing and not, I want to stress, complete.
The first thing was simply naming the protocol. Once I understood that the “I’m fine” reflex was a trained response rather than an accurate report, I could start, in small ways, intercepting it. I would catch myself, in mid-sentence, about to deploy the surface version. I would, occasionally, override it. I would say something more accurate. The first few times I did this, with friends and with the woman I was seeing at the time, I felt as though I was doing something inappropriate. The act of saying out loud that something was actually hard for me felt, in my body, like a transgression. I had to repeat the act dozens of times before it started to feel even slightly normal.
The second thing was recognizing that the people in my life were, in many cases, willing to receive a more honest version of me. I had been operating under the implicit assumption that nobody wanted to hear what was actually going on—that the protocol existed because people preferred the surface version. This turned out to be, in most cases, wrong. When I said something more honest, the response was almost always warmer than I expected. People were not repelled by the actual me. They were, in many cases, relieved. They had, on some level, been waiting for me to drop the act.
The third thing, and this is the one I’m still working on, was learning to ask for things. Not just to admit, when asked, that something was hard. To proactively ask for help, attention, support, a phone call, a hug, the small ongoing acts of care that other people seem to know how to request. This is, for me, the hardest part. The “I’m fine” reflex is a defensive reflex. The asking-for-help reflex is something more active, and the apparatus for it was never installed in me to begin with. I’m trying to install it in middle age, and the installation is, like all late installations, awkward and partial.
What I’d say to anyone who recognizes this
If you’re a child of the 80s or 90s, and you’ve grown into an adult who can’t, in any reliable way, ask for help, I want you to know that this is not a personal failing. It’s a generational training. The training was applied to most of us. The training worked. The fact that we are now, as adults, struggling to undo it is not evidence that we are weak. It’s evidence that the training was effective.
Whether the training can be fully undone, I genuinely don’t know. I suspect, on my more honest days, that it can’t — not entirely, not in the way you’d want. What I think is possible is a kind of partial interruption. You try saying something honest. You see what happens. You try asking for something. You see what happens. Sometimes the world responds with more warmth than you expected. Sometimes the old reflex wins anyway, and you find yourself, three days later, realizing you produced the surface version again without even noticing.
I am, at thirty-eight, somewhere in the middle of this. I don’t want to overstate the progress. There are weeks when I think I’m getting somewhere, and weeks when I catch myself telling a close friend I’m fine when I’m very obviously not, and the lie comes out of my mouth before I’ve even consulted myself about whether to say it. The protocol is older than most of my conscious decisions. It will probably outlast a lot of them too.
What I can say is that the praise has stopped sounding like praise. When someone tells me, now, that I’m low maintenance, I hear what’s underneath it, and I don’t quite know what to do with the hearing. I haven’t figured out a graceful response. I usually just nod. Then, sometimes, hours later, I try to say one true thing to someone. Sometimes I manage it. Sometimes I don’t. That’s where I am.
About this article
This article is for general information and reflection. It is not professional advice. For your specific situation, consult a qualified professional. Editorial policy →
