It’s pithy, but I tend to see a broader materialist cycle at work. Folks who say “I’m not going to make the mistakes my parents made” tend to be class-mobile and dealing with conditions their parents didn’t necessarily face.

A classic instance is anti-vax hysterics. A population that has grown up in a society where diseases are generally mild and uncommon, but academic performance is life-defining and hyper-competitive will view the phantom menace of autism as more existential than the real-but-distant mortal peril of polio or diphtheria. Similarly, a population that is growing up under a government heavily invested in controlling the spread of deadly diseases will receive propaganda that is radically different from a government heavily invested in poisoning cultural attitudes against socialist health care policies.

In the same vein, Boomer parents telling their kids that they need a college education were responding to a blossoming economic demand for high end professional services. Meanwhile, Millennial/GenX parents skeptical of the benefit of college education are responding to an austere economic model that punishes long term debts and imports low-cost professional services from overseas.