My parents and I have an extremely strained relationship, or did when I saw them regularly. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but that's a different post.

I have a theory about this, though -- generational gaps have been huge over the last ~100 years (when the concept of generations started to crop up, gen x, gen y, Boomers, etc). Part of this is technology -- my greatgrandparents were children before WW1, my grandparents were Boomers who listened to the radio for entertainment, my parents can remember the advent of color TV to an extent, and I, of course, have the internet. This makes it easy to trace the gaps in simple terms through time. Such differences in lifestyle make it extremely easy to dismiss an older (or younger) relative -- I might think my parents are naive about certain things, and they might thing I don't spend my time effectively. This comes down to not having a shared framework of past experience.

This is a problem exacerbated by technology -- but as the first generation to truly be "comfortable" with technology grows older and has children, perhaps the problem will vanish. (Or perhaps, of course, the technologies will grow with us and we will no longer have that shared experience platform to stand on with our children. Who knows.)

EDIT: mk summed up what I was trying to say.

So perhaps [previous generations] didn't adopt technological adaptation as a life-skill.

And hopefully we have. Or maybe we're just deluding ourselves.