What to say to your entitled brat offspring ...
... when they start lecturing about stuff they know NOTHING about.
Julie Bindel tweeted yesterday:
Julie is absolutely right, and I’d go further. Parents should never have got themselves into a situation where their entitled brat offspring imagine that their parents, or indeed anyone older than them, is in the slightest bit interested in their ideas about stuff they know nothing about.
Let me tell you a story. Some years ago, I became very involved with my local Labour Party. (I know, I know. That’s a whole other story, especially as the local MP has turned out to be a spectacularly, flamingly misogynistic TRA.) Via the Labour Party, I became friends with another woman, a single mother with a daughter in her late teens. Let’s call them Sue and Lily. Sue and I talked a lot about our lives, which necessarily meant talking about being women, and mothers, and during one of our conversations I happened to say to Sue, à propos of something or other - maybe Germaine Greer’s famous cocker spaniel statement - that humans can’t change sex.
Sue said “Oh, so you’re a TERF?”. She didn’t say it in a nasty way, more an intrigued way, as though she’d discovered that I was a member of an intriguingly rare minority group, like someone who was born on 29th February, or a Zoroastrian. She then told me that although she’d previously had very conventional ideas about sex and gender, Lily had educated her, opening her eyes to new ideas, and that she now had a completely different understanding of sex and gender.
It may also be germane to add that Lily had since her early teens suffered from mysterious and undiagnosable health issues which meant that Sue had felt that she had to be taken out of mainstream education. Fortunately for Sue’s peace of mind, her belief in Lily’s incredibly high intelligence and appetite for learning meant that she was able to see Lily’s regime of pyjama-clad lolling at home as the disciplined and solitary life of a voracious autodidact.
I thought at the time that Sue’s approach to mothering Lily was a little odd, but I reserved judgment. My own son was only ten or eleven at the time, and the idea of learning anything from him (apart from what things like what the Naruto Run was, and the names of the Gogos Crazy Bones) seemed absolutely absurd. However, I didn’t want to write off Sue’s “lived experience” as we would now call it - if she felt she had learned something valuable from her teenage daughter, who was I to pooh-pooh the idea?
Fast forward to the present day. My son is now almost out of his teens and I feel completely justified in pooh-poohing the idea of learning anything from your teenage children. My boy is a very sensible young man and these days does share ideas that are new to me, particularly ideas about diet and sleep and exercise, because he is, like many of his generation, an enthusiastic consumer of podcasts and these are the topics he is interested in. However, until fairly recently, I didn’t learn anything from him. I wasn’t expecting to. How could someone with so much less experience of life possibly have anything to teach me? This doesn’t, of course, mean that I didn’t take an interest in his mind and his developing ideas, it just means that the direction of the flow of information was clear and unambiguous. It was my job as his mother to use my experience to steer his mental development in the right way, not to sit at his feet marvelling at his every utterance. This is not to say that I didn’t learn a lot from the experience of being his mother - I did - but that isn’t the same as learning from him.
If you think you are going to learn something from your teenage children (apart from learning about the pop culture trivia that belongs to their generation), you set yourself up to learn something stupid - because the only things they can tell you that you don’t already know will be something trivial and unimportant, like their generation’s pop culture). If you genuinely imagine that you are going to learn some amazing new human truth from your children, then what’s going to happen is that you are going to end up nodding along like the Churchill dog to some utter gibberish like the belief that everyone has a “gender identity”.
The current phenomenon of apparently sensible, well-educated parents who believe they can learn some extraordinary new truths from their children reminds me of the 1990s notion of Indigo Children, a new generation of super-sensitive children sent to save us all (quite how super-sensitive children were going to save us was never explained by the proponents of the idea) but that really was a freaky fringe idea and ordinary parents didn’t subscribe to it. Now parents will tell you with a perfectly straight face that they’re learning SO MUCH from their children.
Please, fellow parents, find your self-respect. You should find your children amazing, but you should also maintain some balance. They’re not messengers from another realm, bringing us any extraordinary new truths. They’re just perfectly ordinary young people, just like we all were once. And if they’re really lucky, they’ll get to be perfectly ordinary older people, just like we all are now.
As a person who is online every single day and follows a lot of alternative media sources, I find it really interesting that I have never heard of the history of the trans movement or the perverts driving the bus. I'm horrified and shocked. I just decided to look this shit up today and I quickly lost the buzz from my hard seltzer. The world is even more far gone than I thought, and I believe a lot of conspiracy theories. I had no idea that there was an organized feminist and lesbian resistance to the trans movement, but I'm rooting for you. As for this article, so true. Kids are idiots.
yes unfortunately I would also by accident find myself in camp terf. not because i dont respect someones thoughts or ideas but because I somehow refuse to toss any semblance of a magical universe out the window by denying the nature of a thing. funny how extractible that is also tied to the naming of a thing as well.
and I feel blessed that although i love my son i never wanted to be his best friend. i really just am his mother.