"I like all the pics genuinely, but I think to myself, I know what you’re doing. And then I think and Godspeed,' because the odds are just as likely that if you try too hard to tip the scales of your kid’s coolness, it will backfire. You’ll be the liberal hippie parents on 'Family Ties' and your kid will resemble
Alex P. Keaton. It is utterly normal to want your kid to like what you like, just as it is normal to instill them with your values, sense of community, ethics, or flair for vintage Swatch watches. There are jokes about this in the culture, such as the still-shared Onion
headline, 'Cool Dad Raising Daughter on Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out of Touch With Her Generation.'"
I think the important point here is not what "cool" is or whether it matters or how to get there. It's not about coolness at all but vanity. Don't use your children for your purposes — to boost your pride, to make you feel right about everything. You can expose them to plenty of things that you think are good, but if they're only adopting your ideas and your tastes, something's missing. And it isn't coolness. It's independence of mind.
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I don't see anything in that piece that addresses the real elephant in the room: the child's right to digital privacy. I find the parental vanity of taking and publicly posting images of their children without consideration of their children's current and future consent to be unethical and imprudent. They do it because their first thoughts are convenience, vanity, and assumption that the children's right is sublimated to the parent's wishes until some amorphous age where, like magic, the child's wishes of what to do with such a library kicks in.
No, it doesn't. That child has a current and future right to digital privacy that you, dear parent, might be violating as you post away private images without consent on public forums that will keep them in the public sphere forever.
I take offense to this parental behavior, and I think it should change.
>After the Hollywood Bowl show, we (she and her kid) talked on the drive home about some of my favorite Cure songs and they told me theirs. Our most-loved tunes weren’t the same — or even from the same eras. But what we had was way better: unforced fun that allowed for two totally different paths to the same place. It’s hard to imagine anything cooler.<
Cooler than you and your kid referring to her as "they/their"? No way, hip Mom - it simply does not get cooler than that.
Plus, kids decide what's cool. Not parents.
The actual cool parents let their kids define their own cool; the parents who try to impose cool are inevitably objects of mockery.
Lake Woebegone, where all the Dudes are Cool, all the Babes are Hot, and no one in any of the 57 genders is below average.
RideSpaceMountain said...I find the parental vanity of taking and publicly posting images of their children without consideration of their children's current and future consent to be unethical and imprudent.
Current consent, perhaps, if the child is old enough to have an opinion. But I see no need to worry about future consent. The future won't care what you post today; it will be long forgotten about. Nothing I posted on Facebook 10 years ago is a topic for discussion today. I kept a blog of my daughter's early years. She's never visited it, no matter how many times I've suggested she check it out. She doesn't care. It's boring to her.
Pride and prejudice.
"But I see no need to worry about future consent. The future won't care what you post today; it will be long forgotten about."
You see no need to worry about future consent now. The future will care about what you post today; it is already happening. Nothing gets forgotten in panopticon. Nothing.
Don't use your children for your purposes
Are you saying kids don't demand to be clothed in BLM onesies?
And that you shouldn't turn your child into your personal billboard?
Meh. If you like this stuff your kids were going end up kind of fucked up anyways...
sixth-graders dressed up like Margot Tenenbaum from 'The Royal Tenenbaums.'
Um...you know what Margot did with her brother, right...?
'Cool Dad Raising Daughter on Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out of Touch With Her Generation.'
You say that like it's a bad thing.
The semi-incestuous relationship between Richie and Margot Tenenbaum (Luke Wilson and Gwyneth Paltrow) is perhaps the most memorable of the controversial love.
Adopted, huh. Another coupling disrespected by the "Respect for Marriage Act." #NoJudgment #NoLabels
Oh my god. She's using this article to brag about how her kid is organically "cool" unlike all those other "friend parents." lolololol.
My daughter likes the Rammstein shirt I got her when she was in high school, but I don't post pictures of her wearing it. She's also not obsessed with posting photos of herself on social media, which makes her pretty cool in my book.
but if they're only adopting your ideas and your tastes, something's missing. And it isn't coolness.
Now substitute "Facebook, TikTok, Google, and Instagram" for "parents" and sadly you'd describe most kids today.
It's independence of mind.
There is very little of that left. The kids (and an increasing number of adults) are phone zombies.
While I am not much of a fan of the pop culture of the past, what passes for “cool” now is even worse.
Royal Tannenbaums? (2001).
Ramones? 1970s.
Sounds like the parents are studk in the past.
WHy not Taylor Swift?
"Don't use your children for your purposes — to boost your pride, to make you feel right about everything."
But hacking off their genitals is still on the table, right? Having trans kids still makes you the cool mom, right?
Half of children are below average, and a good percentage are well below average. Further, the children who are above average are easily influenced to do stupid things. Is independence of mind a universal good? If everyone in every generation were independent of mind, there would be no culture. People with the capacity to be independent of mind simply are so.
Hmm when did the use of the term 'the culture' break out into the mainstream. It's a very rigid term.
Cutting your son's unit off is the end result of seeking coolness.
Make it stop
"Why not Taylor Swift?"
Because Taylor Swift isn't cool. Popular, yes, but not cool.
In fact, anyone consciously aspiring to be cool is NOT cool and their efforts to become cool are futile.
What everyone really means when they say "cool" is "fashionable" and/or "popular." Being stylish and popular is not the same as being "cool."
Individual "cool" is an aspect of a person's personality that is natural and rare. Being "cool" means one is genuinely not concerned with--or rejects--the prevailing styles, tastes, behavior, opinions and mores of the larger society. It means living and thinking by one's own reckoning. It is not an affectation. Related to this is the "cool" that has to do with self-formed secret societies, small insular communities of persons who have their own interests, behaviors, habits, slang, and haunts, generally invisible or inaccessible to the larger society. Once the fashions, lingo, and attitudes of a "cool" subculture becomes widely known and adopted, it is no longer "cool," but has been transformed into "style." What was cool has become merely fashionable.
Taylor Swift: Hot and rich but not cool.
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