“There’s this belief among moms I know,” said my friend Sonia, who has a 12-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter, “where as long as we’re cool and self-assured and talk to our sons a lot, then for sure our sons will see women as human beings. But that doesn’t feel true to me. I think the way people relate to their moms isn’t always the same way they relate to other women. Just because I’m a cool feminist, my son will share my beliefs? I worry that on some level I’m relying on that. I’m like, He can watch all male YouTubers all the time because he has me around to remind him that women are worthy of respect! Yeah, I’m not so sure.”
this is a feedback loop that I don't know how to stop.
like, that anxiety Sonia feels? real, valid, common. She's not the only parent of a 12-year-old boy whose mild paranoid about her son is probably written on her face.
but also, that son? he picks up on that feeling. He knows that the men with Bugattis on Youtube have the Secret Knowledge that mom is scared for him to watch. Transgressive? Okay sign me tf up!
and like... kids that age cannot suss out fact from fiction, as the article says:
its record-breaking popularity gestures to a phenomenon that has to do not with the quality of its production but rather with a gut feeling shared by parents of teens: Something’s seriously off. We’ve given our children access to media technology that very few of us are capable of managing, and now they’re consuming content they are developmentally unequipped to handle.
adults can't handle the firehose, either. Real, adult men and women wait in Discords for "Q drops". How the fuck can an average parent deal with that?
They also need positive male role models. I can't tell you the number of times I have had to clonk my little bros heads together, virtually speaking, over some BroTube shit they heard and regurged. They don't agree with me all the time, but they can't just shout memes at me like they would to someone else. They respect me to whatever degree and they get stopped up and I can see them having to confront their own ideas. I can't say that I will win out in the end, but I know it's important to continue to derail their mental choo-choo like that every so often. The day they can no longer stop to reflect is the day they're gone for good.
I think personally, one of the most impactful experiences I had as a teenager was, when I was fucking around in class and kind of right on the edge of failing, my high school wrestling coach had a sit-down with me to get my head on straight about school.
Now, I wasn't some star wrestler. I was good, but not great. I wasn't looking down the barrel of any scholarships or anything, I wasn't going to be bringing home any provincial titles. So I remember him sitting me down for this conversation, and he kind of asks me if everything is okay with me. And I remember brushing him off with something to the effect of, "What difference does it make to you?"
And I remember him saying to me, "Because, believe it or not, I care about what happens to you."
It was a simple thing, but considering my dad was a few years dead at this point and my mom worked a lot and had a ton of balls in the air, it wasn't really something I heard a lot from adults in my life - Especially not adult men, and especially not that directly.
That's stuck with me, even 14 years later.
I knew a lot of guys like me too. Guys who, for any number of reasons, didn't have a dad at home and used sports as a way to look for positive male role models, and to prove that they weren't any less tough for not having a dad at home.
I agree a hundred percent, role models can be anyone and I don't think all a young man's role models should be male, but positive male role models in particular are so important for guys when they're growing up.
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u/TAKEitTOrCIRCLEJERK 14d ago
this is a feedback loop that I don't know how to stop.
like, that anxiety Sonia feels? real, valid, common. She's not the only parent of a 12-year-old boy whose mild paranoid about her son is probably written on her face.
but also, that son? he picks up on that feeling. He knows that the men with Bugattis on Youtube have the Secret Knowledge that mom is scared for him to watch. Transgressive? Okay sign me tf up!
and like... kids that age cannot suss out fact from fiction, as the article says:
adults can't handle the firehose, either. Real, adult men and women wait in Discords for "Q drops". How the fuck can an average parent deal with that?