Time to embrace our grumpy boomer dads this Father's Day

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.

- Yamini Chinnuswamy

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.