The jury is still out on my parenting. I am not a parent who has triumphed against all odds to raise feminist boys. Our two adolescent home-learners can make omelettes, roll chapatis and bake cakes. They know how to set a table, and they do laundry, clean toilets and make their beds with some nagging. They are made to live in artificial poverty, expected to share and take public transport. They don’t yet have personal devices and make do with a landline and our smartphones. They are friends with several septuagenarians and service providers in the colony. Sometimes, I feel as if we have cracked the code and tamed the fire-breathing dragon, but on most days, I struggle, slip and fall, rage, make mistakes, and ask myself in despair — can any of this truly guarantee that these boys become sensitive and socially responsible adults? The hard truth is no, it won’t.
Why do I think so? As parents we are tasked with raising a generation of digital citizens — an undertaking which most of us neither accounted for nor are prepared for. It keeps us in the throes of “not-enoughness”. Parenting strategies such as boys learning by osmosis with the same-sex parent setting an example, having older female relatives draw boundaries, and having queer and female friends are all great but not enough. It can be said that previous generations had similar parenting challenges, say, with the coming of television and video games. But digital culture is different. Here parents and children are equally and simultaneously involved. Parents use screens for personal stuff, work, and for parenting (to pacify, soothe, distract, and feed kids). The challenges of this technology are not limited to a segment of population but shaping the social experience of all. It informs the way we do relationships now — ghosting, phubbing, cyberstalking, flaming, sexting, having FOMO/ JOMO, and scrolling people in and out of our lives.
What triggered my deep dive into the world of male locker-room chats, incel culture and age-inappropriate exposure to online porn was when I heard a therapist present a case of a 10-year-old porn addict, to discuss how to work with socially-withdrawn clients. The fact that this digital content is highly persuasive and comes coded in a language unavailable to parents took me by surprise. I began to ask other parents what they were doing about it. Most pleaded ignorance or told me not to make too much of it, “it’s a passing phase”, “it’s not a big deal” or “we also saw porn”. According to some, the problem was with liberal parenting and absence of religious guardrails. The parental dismissal was equally alarming.
But here is how digital culture is shaping today’s adolescents: It can make them believe sex is about domination. It runs the risk of dissolving social taboos where all women around them, mothers included, may be seen as sexual objects. It informs their body image — the need to have a ripped torso. And it is aggressively shaping their language – what cannot be done physically can be done through their mouths and words. Combine this with caste, class, neurotypical, able-bodied, gender conforming privileges or the lack of them, and the all-round hypermasculine political discourse they are immersed in. In all, the adolescents’ social context is surreptitiously normalising misogynist drivel and social-disconnectedness. The plea is that everyone is doing it and therefore it is okay. Here I am not making a call to eliminate devices, although we can certainly limit them, or to ban porn, as any kind of censorship controverts the feminist anti-censorship stance. Rather, I am asking, how do I respond as a parent?
A few weeks ago, we had a difficult conversation about this with the boys. They alternated between deflecting, deeply listening and being defensive. We talked about how sex is about mutual pleasure and respect; masturbation is natural; how they are free to watch porn but that they need to remember it’s staged and “not real”; how easily I and other women could become sexual objects for them; how language, the words that we use, reflect how we unconsciously perceive reality; and that they were free to make choices different from those made by their friends. As we talked, I could see that the boys had not accounted for any of this — my having this conversation with them, for my knowing about this, or for how it could possibly shape them. My younger one sat with his mouth open, and the older one had his head tucked in his chest. At the end of the conversation, we all agreed that we needed to trust each other and have a working alliance. The next day, I asked them how they were feeling about our conversation. The younger one said: “I need to remember not to break my connection with you”. I found myself catching my breath. It was a reassuring moment where I felt enough as a parent. Mutual trust is really the assurance that we can keep having these much-needed hard conversations without losing connection with each other.
The writer is a historian and a therapist
