Dear, Kay: my 12-year-old just came home from his public school insisting that we now use the pronoun “zhir” to address them. Not only do I have no idea what this means, but I have no idea what to do about it. Am I a bad parent? — Sincerely, My Pronoun Is Tired Parent.
Hey Tired Parent,
Here’s the great news: your child’s pronoun literally doesn’t mean anything. This generation of kids go through a pronoun phase, just like how all Millennials had a mild goth phase, the 80s had big hair, and the 70s had LSD. Thankfully, pronouns aren’t here to stay; they’ll go out of fashion just like goths, big hair, and… well I guess LSD is still around, but you get my point.
Depending on your style of parenting, there are various avenues you can take to quell your kid’s pronoun phase sooner rather than later. A tried and tested classic is the over-the-top embracing of not just your kid’s pronouns but every other one. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the more cringe a parent can be, the shorter the adolescent dumbass phase.
Remember, children are inherently stupid and embarrassing between the ages of around nine or 10 until they mature, hopefully by the time they hit their 20s. Don’t get me wrong, I know plenty of people in their early 20s who are still pretty damn stupid, but that’s what happens when you leave schools, television, and the internet to raise your kids instead of yourself.
Some parents are misled in the notion that their children attend school to learn about life from such teachers. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Your child is in school to pass exams the state has decided are relevant and to be indoctrinated into this failed idea of society we’ve pushed for just over 100 years.
It certainly doesn’t help that many teachers reinforce the use of pronouns at school instead of say, manners, or a broader worldview.
You are who they should be learning from. Perhaps their pronoun is a cry for attention because you’re more content letting the internet, TV, and teachers raise your child. If you can’t be bothered to raise them yourself, then this pronoun phase might last, in which case you have only yourself to blame.
Dear Kay: I’m A Liberal Woman Who Is Deeply Attracted To Conservative Men. Why?https://t.co/5tP4L8PjEZ
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 10, 2022
When was the last time your child feared for his life? Or just went a day without access to the internet? Most modern children don’t face any real struggles so have taken to inventing them. My father, who was born in the 50s, once noted that I had never experienced hunger like he and those he grew up with. While he was grateful for this, I realized that the generation after my own (Gen Z) had never been without cell phones, internet, and were rarely put in positions of fear, boredom, and stress that forces them to grow up into tolerable human beings.
Understanding one’s mortality is the fastest way to rationalize the things we decide to worry about. I highly recommend taking your child out of school and enrolling them in a long-term survival course. They might hate you in the short term, but society won’t hate them in the long-term once they’re forced to rationalize their own mortality and the insignificance of their pronouns.
You’re only a truly bad parent if you don’t use this opportunity to grind the scars of psychological cringe trauma into your child’s soul. The most important thing you can do right now is ensure you document everything your son is doing so you can mock him later in life. (RELATED: Help Kay! I Met My Boyfriend’s Parents And There Was A MAGA Hat In The Living Room)
A sure-fire way to up the cringe and humor factor of the pronoun phase is to play videos from LibsofTikTok on repeat. Be sure to remind your child that everyone featured in the footage is probably highly disliked by a majority of their social network, has limited their employability, and will only be remembered by their loved ones as “the weirdo who made up a gender because they weren’t smart enough to do anything of note for the world.”