The Parents Have Lost Their Damn Minds
I have a serious question: what the hell is going on? Everywhere I look, people are losing their minds about the children, and some of them don’t even have kids. It seems like every two seconds, I see people losing it over critical race theory, or kids wearing masks, or social media and screen time, or school closures. And listen, mental health is my jam, and I write about childhood mental health regularly. But with all of the panic on a daily basis, you’d think our kids are lining up to jump off skyscrapers.
If any kid should be royally screwed up, it should be my son. This kid comes from a “broken home”, and according to people on the right, broken families are the leading cause of kids being so messed up. Not only did his mom and I split up when he was three years old, but I’m a former drug addict and workaholic. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that addiction and mental illness run in my family.
But rather than being a hot mess, I literally just dropped him off so he can spend his Saturday morning at a National Junior Honor Society event where they’re helping the less fortunate families of Las Vegas.
Maybe it’s because I just finished re-reading The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, but the panic is everywhere. Have you read the recent piece from Bari Weiss’ Substack? It’s titled “I’m a Public School Teacher. The Kids Aren’t Alright.”
If you haven’t yet, let me delight you with an excerpt:
Teenage girls are notoriously empathetic. I see that many of my students, but especially the female ones, feel a heavy burden of responsibility. Right before Christmas, one of my brightest 12th graders confided in me that she was terrified of taking her mask off. She told me that she didn’t want to get anyone sick or kill anybody. She was worried she would be held responsible for someone dying.
No offense to this young woman going through this, but I say this to the teacher when I say, “Are you kidding me?” Refer this young woman to the school therapist, set up a meeting to see what’s going on at home. This is not normal and nowhere near the norm of what kids are going through. When I read this, I thought, “This kid might have an anxiety disorder and needs help.” But instead, so many people are trying to make us think that this is what most kids are going through.
I haven’t watched The Simpsons in years, but this image keeps popping in my head
Before I dive into a few topics, I just want to say that I hate writing about my parenting or my son for two main reasons. First off, it feels like I’m bragging and just trying to say how great of a parent I am. I’m not the perfect parent and none of us are. But sometimes, I feel like I need to say something because my son is doing fine, so maybe it’ll help some parents and others calm the hell down or maybe try something that’s working for me.
Second, and I’m sure many of you can relate to this, since my son was born, people try to fearmonger about how difficult parenting is and how your kid is going to be screwed up. I can already hear some readers saying out loud, “Oh. You just wait until he’s [insert age a little older than his current age].” I’ve heard this since he was born, and he’s been fine every since. And if I’m being honest, it almost comes off like people are waiting for kids to fail so they can have an “I told you so,” and that’s pretty twisted.
Alright, I’m going to list a few things people are freaking out about and how my son’s doing, so maybe we can all relax a little.
Social media and screen time
The Narrative: Screens and social media are terrible for kids
My experience: My son was born in 2008 and has screens in his life the whole time. We got him a cellphone when he was 10 or 11, and he’s had 0 interest in social media. He got into TikTok for a little while, realized how toxic it was, and he deleted it off his phone.
Did I tell him to delete it? No. One day, I asked if he’s seen the hilarious cat videos I’ve been sending him, and he tells me he deleted TikTok on his own.
Video games
The Narrative: Kids shouldn’t game too much and they should socialize. Gaming will also make your kid addicted, and their grades will suffer.
My experience: I’ve been a gamer since 1989. In my younger years, I actually had a professional eSports career and traveled the world before I was even 20 years old. I’m 36 now, and I game almost daily. The happiest day of my life was the first time my son picked up a video game controller.
Since then, the kid has been a hardcore gamer. He games for hours on end sometimes. But he socializes the whole time. He’s had friends his age on Xbox that he’s known for or five years now, and they're from all over the country and world. Not only that, but he has plenty of friends at school who he hangs out with. I’ve never understood why people think this is an “either/or” scenario. Personally, some of my best friends to this day are people I met through gaming as a teenager, and now our kids hang out.
As far as school goes, did you catch the part about National Junior Honor Society? For as much as my son loves video games, it blows my mind how he won’t even touch a controller until his schoolwork is done. We’re not crazy parents who obsess about school either. He just has his priorities straight and ensures everything is handled before he games.
School from home
The Narrative: School closures are the worst thing to ever happen to our kids, and they’re suffering.
My experience: Listen, there are plenty of nuances about this conversation such as the kids who don’t have access to the internet or when school is a source of their meals. I get that, but these aren’t the people I see panicking. It’s the well-off, upper-middle-class or even wealthy people losing their minds over this, so I’m talking to them.
My son adapted fine to the school closures. The first week was absolute hell as our school district dealt with all of the technical issues, but then it was smooth sailing. Not only was he doing school from home, but I was working from home, and we had 0 problems. Yes, I know I’m fortunate in the fact that I could work from home, but again, the people I see freaking out are upper-class people who had the same luxury.
Masks
The Narrative: Kids will be emotionally stunted by masks (as well as school from home and everything else)
My experience: My son was 11 when this all started, so he was passed that insanely young age people are often talking about. The reality is that I’m a nerd and love to research stuff. I wanted to see if there was any evidence of kids needing to see facial expressions to develop emotionally, and the only thing I found was that a study from years ago prior to the pandemic found that covering the mouth had minimal effect. We communicate with more than our mouths. Eyes, tone of voice, body expression. We take it all in. Still, there’s little evidence masks are doing this, but it’s intuitively correct so anti-maskers are quick to jump to this conclusion without any valid evidence.
Before moving on, I’d like to say that I hate wearing my mask and hope they end the mask stuff soon. But I’m also someone who picks my battles, and I’m not willing to die on any hill over a piece of cloth. I’m an overweight smoker with a heart condition. If I can breathe through my mask for two years, you’re fine.
Critical race theory
The Narrative: CRT is going to make white kids hate themselves
My experience: One day, while driving to a movie with my son, the CRT panic popped into my head. I said, “Dillon, has any teacher ever made you think you should feel bad for being white?” This kid gave me a look like I was certifiably insane. You’d think my head just turned into a unicorn with how surprised he looked. He replied, “WHAT?! NO!”
I’m half Black and look white as hell. He’s 1/4 black and looks even less Black than me. So, if this was happening to the extend some people say it is, he’d definitely be on the wrong end of it unless he did a lot of uncomfortable explaining about his family.
Conversations
The Narrative: Set aside very specific time like eating at the dinner table so you can all talk.
My experience: I can’t tell you how much the whole “research shows that eating at the dinner table creates healthier families” narrative. We hardly ever eat at the dinner table. He might do it a bit more at his mom’s house, but we legit never do it at my house, and he’s fine.
I’m a recovering drug addict, and addiction runs in my family. I am deathly afraid he’ll become a drug addict or alcoholic. But something I learned from a book a long time ago was this, and if nothing else, I hope you remember this: always ensure your child is comfortable talking to you.
I talk to my son constantly. During the week, he lives with his mom on the opposite side of Las Vegas. It’s like a 30-45 minute drive. Each week, that’s 60-90 minutes where it’s just me and him and we can talk. We talk about school, his friends, and fun stuff. But we talk serious stuff. I honestly had the sex talk with him on one of these drives.
He’s getting to that age where I can’t tell if he’s just being “cool” or if he’s feeling down. I ask him how he’s doing if I’m worried. If he says he’s fine, I ask one more time. I remind him that he can always talk to me, and it’s worked. When he’s feeling down or upset, he talks to me. But 90% of the time it’s either him being cool or he’s just tired. If it’s something serious, he lets me know because I’ve ensured that line of communication is always there without judgment.
How would I know if he’s hiding anything from me? I guess I can’t prove he isn’t. But then again, you can’t prove he is.
Spending time together and bonding
The Narrative: Don’t work too much or you can’t spend time with your kids
My experience: I’m a workaholic. If you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with me. I work like crazy. I’ve juggled a full-time job along with a podcast, YouTube channel, managing my social media accounts, writing books, writing Substack pieces, and much more. But you know what? I spend a tremendous amount of time with my son. Sometimes, we spend so much time together that he gets sick of me.
Remember how I said we don’t eat at the dinner table? Well, something we do is cook together. A few years ago, my son and I started cooking together. We try new recipes regularly, and we have developed a great rhythm in the kitchen. He’ll be chopping up vegetables, and I’ll be prepping or cooking something else. Then, we’ll go watch cooking shows together while we eat with my lovely girlfriend. Here, we spend more time together and talk about the show and get ideas for new recipes.
Since we’re both gamers, we play a ton of video games together too. We both like legos as well, so sometimes we both buy lego sets and build them while we hang out. Recently, we’ve got really into making 8-bit lego art. Check out some of these. Their pretty awesome.
We also watch a ton of shows together like all of the new Marvel shows on Disney+, and we love watching movies. Because of my girlfriend’s love of horror, she’s helped him and me overcome our fears, and now we watch a ton of scary movies as well.
Lastly, we’ve found a new hobby that we both absolutely love. During our recent move, I told him to go through his old legos to see what he wants to keep and maybe we can sell some on eBay. Well, once we found out one of his minifigures was worth $200, we started going through all of them.
Now, we’ve started a little eBay business together selling legos. I list them and do all the communication, and he takes the pictures of them and looks up how much their worth. We’re also learning about flipping legos, so now we go to vintage/used toy stores to see if they have any hidden gems for cheap that we can sell. In fact, right after I publish this, we’re picking him up from the National Junior Honor Society event and then going lego hunting.
So, I just wanted to write this not to brag about my son or my parenting, but to just hopefully give you a break from all of the perpetual panic about our kids. I’m nothing special, but if I happen to be doing something right, maybe I can offer some hope and advice. And if I can help any of you readers in any way, reach out any time via email at therewiredsoul@gmail.com.
Parenting is the best thing to ever happen to me, and if I listened to all of the fear around kids being screwed up, I’d be a wreck. The reality is that parenting is fun as hell even though there are rough patches every now and then. On a daily basis, I’m worried about my son’s mental health or possibly becoming an addict, but that’s a me problem 99% of the time.
If I had to end with one thing, I’d say that one of my primary goals is to teach my son how to make good decisions. He’s polite and extremely kind, and he also has a solid foundation for making decent decisions. Like I said, I didn’t tell him to delete TikTok, and I don’t force him to do his schoolwork before playing games. He makes these decisions. If we teach our kids to make good decisions, the importance of empathy and kindness as well as how to get through difficult times while building resilience, they’ll be fine.
So chill the hell out and go have some fun with your kid.
I’m currently writing a book about how we’re manipulated by the news, social media, technology, advertisers, and each other. It dives into the psychological history of manipulation, our biases, tribalism, and more.
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