A fundamental joy of my life as a parent is maximizing any opportunity to make my kids’ eyes roll.
There’s nothing as satisfying as watching your teenage child try to seem unaffected by your steak pun1, but then seeing the slightest hint of a smile pop through, despite their best efforts to suppress it. I don’t go out of my way to embarrass my kids in public (other than being their parent who exists), but I feel it’s my duty to regularly remind them that they are but the next link in a long line of ancestral doofuses.
When the kids were little, this would often take the form of forgetting how to do basic things, like brushing my teeth, and having my kids correct me. “No, Dad, you need to put on toothpaste! No, not on your finger, on the toothbrush! Not THAT side of the the toothbrush!” Taking things literally is my mind’s natural state, and that it could cause my children to giggle uncontrollably was a super power I’m glad I found.
As the kids got older, the repertoire expanded to include intentionally getting the names of things wrong. I know very well that Pokémon is an abbreviation of “Pocket Monsters” and can remember most of the original Pokérap, but if calling it “Pokey Mans” had the slightest chance of prompting an indignant correction from my kids, how could I not? The kids knew I was getting the names for Roblox and TikTok wrong on purpose, but part of the joy came from knowing that it annoyed them anyway. For bonus points, I’d attempt to chain them together into elaborate combos: “Did you learn about the new Pokey Mans mod for Robot Blocks on Ticker Tocker?”
As a parent, I learn about new youthful slang in the traditional way – by reading an article about it in The New York Times or The Atlantic. By definition, if there’s an article about current slang in The New York Times, it is no longer current, but that’s no reason not to start talking about how my corn on the cob has “rizz” during dinner. Yes, no one says that anymore. Yes, I’m using it completely wrong. But also, I made my kids shake their heads in mild to moderate embarrassment. Mission accomplished.
But recently something new has started happening. Without a trace of irony, without the slightest hint of it “being a bit,” I’ve started to get things wrong unintentionally. I’m no longer clueless in a fun, loosely-based-on-Jane-Austen-teen-comedy-with-a-young-Paul-Rudd-in-it kind of way, but clueless in a the-clock-on-my-VCR-is-always-blinking-12:00 kind of way.
I swear at one point in my life I was capable of using my phone to take a group selfie, but no longer. I’ve got the longest arms in the family; of course I should be the one to take the picture, but the family has come to learn that such an attempt will result in a comedy of errors. It’s going to take Dad a minute to get the camera app open. When he opens it, it’s going to be set to the back camera instead of the front camera. Even if you set it up for him and hand him the phone with the camera app open to the correct camera, when Dad holds it up, the camera will have switched to the wrong one. That shouldn’t even be possible. And okay, we’re finally ready to take the picture and…Dad hits the wrong button and turns off the phone. Time to get the camera app open again. Yes, it would be faster if someone else did it, but Dad is clearly trying so hard, and he really needs a win. Okay. All set? Dad’s thumb is in the picture. Maybe he should try using his other hand and … Dad turned off the phone again.
Nowhere is my cluelessness on greater display than in my lack of understanding of Instagram. I had an Instagram account when the platform first started, but it wasn’t really my thing. When my kids started using it, I tried to dip my toe back in to have a small portal into their digital world, but I was overwhelmed.
One of my kids’ favorite things is to attempt to describe Instagram to me and unlike the toothbrushing bit, I’m not feigning ignorance. Based on their tutelage, here’s what I’ve come to understand. There are the top circle movies (I think they’re called stories?) where people put little movies. Sometimes they are longer movies, which are really just short movies clipped all together. Sometimes they are longer movies from other people, but it’s only a short portion of that movie, and I have to tap it to see more of it, but that will make me leave the top circle movies section and take me to the portrait rectangle movies section which is “basically TikTok.” Sometimes, the top circle movies are just text. Sometimes they are screenshots of things people have posted to other websites. Sometimes people post their photographs into their top circle movies. Sometimes they’ll put the same pictures in their rectangle pictures section of Instagram, but that’s mostly a way to archive things because top circle movies disappear after a short period of time. Also, there are direct messages where my kids will send me embedded portrait rectangle movies about ADHD, Dungeons and Dragons, or cute kittens. Because of this, Instagram is now Rizzstagram for Dad.
As we age, we increasingly risk calcifying in our ways as we have less energy available to learn about new things. I hope I never stop being curious, but realize that the world will continue to evolve and change at a pace beyond my ability to keep up. I’m so grateful that my children are in my life as ambassadors to a generation I’m not a part of and as patient teachers to their earnest, but increasingly clueless dad.
1 It’s a rare medium, well done.
