The Grand Ancestrals probably just acted that way because of all of their own unhealed traumas, as you know.

"At the end of a long argument among four men over who had the toughest childhood, one tops the others by claiming, 'I had to get up in the morning at 10 o’clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work 29 hours a day down mill, and pay (the) mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing ‘Hallelujah.’” 

~ Mark Bushnell

"Then Again: Child labor was a fact of Vermont life"

https://vtdigger.org/2021/09/05/then-again-child-labor-was-a-fact-of-vermont-life-in-the-1800s/