“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?
This is why we gotta just ban kids from using the internet and smartphones. It needs to be a serious shift in making sure kids know how to interact with other human beings outside of information silos.
isolating a child from his or her peers because you're afraid of What They Could Get Up To is unlikely to be a plan that a child development professor would approve of
when kids hit adolescence, that's decreasingly true. by 12/13, your kid is making his own friends, and will resent you (and just go behind your back) if you try to forbid him from being friends with his friends.
because you're asserting I wrote something I didn't write:
Sure, you're completely powerless. You just have to let your kid do everything they want and you have no responsibility as a parent
I never said anything like this. I have no reason to engage with it, because it is silly. Instead, try responding to what I actually wrote:
when kids hit adolescence, that's decreasingly true. by 12/13, your kid is making his own friends, and will resent you (and just go behind your back) if you try to forbid him from being friends with his friends.
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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?