I’ve found that with my “pre gen x” (born in the 60s, does that make her a boomer?) mother, she seems to have really bought in to all the old “computers make everything easy!” marketing, so when whatever she wants to do isn’t she just kind of gives up. Also ties into her not understanding the value of my career (sysadmin).

To her, computers aren’t complex tools that may take some skills and training to utilize properly, they’re “press the button to make it do exactly what I want” and when that doesn’t work she gets very frustrated.

That, plus she has had just enough exposure to computers in the 90s that she still on some level sees them as very easy to irreperably break expensive luxury items, so when she is rarely willing to work for it then she’s afraid to poke around in menus because she thinks she could break it permanently.

And to be fair, if you don’t set up your laptop using “cattle, not pets” strategies, it can be easy to get four levels deep in a menu and tweak some shit that fucks up an entire program. Then your option is to remember what you did to revert it, or just blow the damn thing out and reinstall (if it actually clears settings on uninstall, not a given).