Hear Me Out: It’s time to embrace our grumpy boomer dads this Father’s Day

SINGAPORE – I am not, nor have I ever been, a daddy’s girl. Quite the opposite, in fact, because my father and I have always had a spiky relationship.

Do not get me wrong – he loves me, and I love him. But loving someone and getting along with him or her are not the same thing, and our dynamic has been characterised by tension and disagreement more often than not. 

Figuring out the “why” could probably fuel years of therapy. But in some ways, it is a tale as old as time, one with the title of “Inter-generational Conflict”. He is a boomer, she is a millennial – can they overcome their differences and get along as father and daughter?

Generational conflict is deeply woven into human consciousness. In ancient Greek mythology, Zeus, the king of the gods, dethroned and imprisoned his father Kronos, the king of the Titans – who himself had castrated and killed his father, Uranus.  

These tales embody the fact that generational conflicts are inevitable in a society where new generations continuously pop up to replace the old. But the millennial-boomer gap is particularly fraught, and has been the topic of many a think piece this past decade.

Baby boomers were born in the years immediately following World War II, into a world that was full of hope and potential. They grew up amid the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s. Nation-building was the order of the day for many Asian countries that were now rid of colonial shackles, including not just Singapore but also India, where my father was born and raised before he immigrated here in the 1980s. 

This climate shaped him and his fellow boomer men into fathers who were stoic, frugal and stubborn. While their wives cooked, cleaned and reared children, my dad and his boomer colleagues worked long days at the office so they could rise above their stations and take advantage of the abundance of career opportunities available to them. 

In contrast, millennials like me grew up in the weird 1990s, obsessed with tie-dye and Beanie Babies plush toys. Life was comfortable, and the ravages of world wars were ancient history – I personally was much more interested in the World Wide Web, and how it brought me closer to the exciting and intriguing world of Western pop culture.

Together with my peers, I matured into an adult who wanted more out of life than to just eat, sleep and work.

Or in the eyes of boomer fathers everywhere: We became lazy, entitled and mercurial procrastinators who would rather spend money enjoying an avocado toast than saving it for our future mortgages. 

No wonder my dad and I have clashed so often – we approach life with two fundamentally incompatible philosophies and outlooks. Though it does not help, of course, that he is as stubborn as I am easily “triggered”, to cite two other stereotypes of our respective generations. 

But as I hit my late 30s, the millennial domination that I took for granted in my 20s and early 30s is fading. Gen Zs, who were born in the 2000s, and Gen Alphas, who were born in the 2010s, have become the cultural tastemakers or agenda-setters, in ways that make me feel old and weary. Skibidi? Gyat? It is all gibberish to me.

Adding insult to injury are the mocking memes of millennial cultural hallmarks by these Gen Z and Gen Alpha upstarts. Nothing is safe, from our penchant for ankle socks to the millennial pause, which is the brief pause that millennials tend to make at the start of our videos, just to confirm that recording has started. 

Allow me a brief moment of melodrama to ask: Was this how Kronos felt when he was overthrown by Zeus, not long after he himself overthrew Uranus?

I might just be starting to understand the grumpiness that my dad and his fellow boomers have directed towards my generation this last decade or so, and how they might have felt when we dismissed their gripes with our blunt retorts of “OK, boomer”. 

Especially because boomers are experiencing this same sea change too. And they are witnessing it through the same eyes that have also lived through the psychedelic 1960s, Y2K and everything in between. 

It is even more remarkable considering that my father grew up in a rural farm in India, playing in the dirt and as blissfully unaware of the wider world as his Singaporean counterparts in their kampungs. 

In the 1950s, artificial intelligence was the province of speculative fiction, and barely anyone had access to computers. But in 2025, people are using ChatGPT for everything from doing their homework to designing workout regimens. 

Considering the extreme societal shifts that have occurred in just a few decades, it is admirable how progressive my father is. He came of age when men were the strict, authoritarian figures of home and office, but he never expected his two daughters – my elder sister and me – to obediently fall into traditional gender roles. 

Even as I felt obliged to follow the “practical” path of a Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) vocation, it was my father who asked me why I was not instead pursuing journalism, a profession I had clearly been interested in since primary school. 

When I struggled through my 20s to forge any semblance of a career, he would have been well within his rights to ask me just what my life plans or goals were, given that I was still living in his household, consuming groceries and electricity he was paying for.

He never did. Instead, like many Asian fathers, his love language is acts of service. He drove me to and from appointments, even though I have had my own driving licence for over a decade; he woke up in the middle of the night on multiple occasions to help me dispose of lizard invaders; he sent me information about the latest savings interest rate promotions. 

But time is a punishing master, and the boomer fathers of Singapore – many of whom continued as their families’ de facto breadwinners, chauffeurs and handymen well after their prime years – are now in their 60s, 70s and 80s, and facing the reality of their mortality. 

My dad and his peers must now rely on their millennial children to fulfil these roles instead – a humbling experience given that they had been raised to be the protectors and providers of their households. 

As we become the grumpy elder statesmen of society to the rising Gen Z and Gen Alpha cohorts, maybe it is time for us millennials to extend some compassion and empathy to our fathers as they enter their twilight years.

Rather than being like the ancient Greek gods who summarily dismissed their patriarchs, maybe it is time to put away the eye rolls when Dad scoffs at overpriced things, and to graciously avoid muttering “OK, boomer” when he refuses to admit to his mistakes. 

Perhaps this Father’s Day, it is time to embrace him instead. Because I do know that while I may not be a daddy’s girl, for better or worse, I will always be my father’s daughter.