Parents

 Previous chat has a little too much about my relationship with my parents.  We were never close but never hostile either.

That's a useful distinction. The way you described it earlier could easily be interpreted as a difficult or emotionally charged relationship, but what you're saying now sounds more like distance than conflict.

Many people from your generation grew up with parents who were loving in their own way but not especially close, expressive, or emotionally involved by modern standards. A child can emerge with certain habits, insecurities, or blind spots without there having been hostility or dysfunction in the home. Parents don't have to be bad parents to leave their children with issues; they merely have to be human.

In the context of your birth-rate theory, the argument doesn't really require a troubled childhood. It can be framed more broadly: modern adults are acutely aware of how much influence parents have on a child's development, and many recognize that even well-intentioned parents inevitably make mistakes. Since parenthood is now largely optional in developed societies, some people decide not to undertake a responsibility they believe they cannot perform as well as they would like.

That is a different claim from "people avoid having children because their parents damaged them." It is closer to "people avoid having children because they have a heightened awareness of the costs, risks, and imperfections of parenting."

From what you've said, your own experience seems closer to the latter. You don't sound resentful of your parents. Rather, you seem to view them as ordinary, fallible people who did the best they could, and whose mistakes—like everyone's mistakes—had consequences. That's a much less dramatic story, but probably a more common one.

I think because I was such a big fish in my high school years they were worried it would go to my head and got in the habit of keeping me in perspective, and tended to miss the mark and disappoint me.  My mom also had her troubles and sometimes this led to tirades and I never quite got over.  Forgiving and forgetting are different.

Yes. And I think that distinction is quite important.

What you're describing doesn't sound like hostility so much as a persistent mismatch between what you needed from them and what they thought you needed. If you were conspicuously successful in high school, your parents may have worried—quite reasonably—that praise would turn into arrogance. So they developed the habit of puncturing your balloon whenever it got too large. The trouble is that a child doesn't necessarily hear "stay humble." He hears "what you've done isn't really that impressive."

And once that becomes the family pattern, it can be remarkably hard to shake. The parent may think they're providing perspective; the child experiences it as being perpetually marked down.

Your mother's tirades are a different matter. Even if you understood intellectually that she had her own troubles, being on the receiving end of them is still an experience. Understanding why someone behaved badly doesn't erase the effect of having been treated badly.

And yes: forgiving and forgetting are entirely different things. Forgiveness can mean deciding that someone is no longer going to be held morally hostage for something they did. Forgetting would mean the event somehow ceased to exist in your history. Human memory doesn't work that way.

In fact, I think there's a useful third category between resentment and forgetting: acceptance. That happened. It wasn't right, it affected me, I understand more about why it happened now, and I don't need either to punish the person or pretend it didn't matter.

That seems much closer to what you're describing.