Embracing boomerness

Let the children teach you

I will always be a boomer to my kids. Technically I’m Gen X, but in my teens’ eyes I’m the quintessential boomer - old, clueless, and embarrassing. My attempts to speak their language make them cringe so hard— including my use of the word ‘cringe’— that I now do it for comic effect. It’s a position of great humility, and it afflicts even the coolest among us (I see you, Kim Kardashian).

You can fight the boomer label but you will never win (believe me, I’ve tried). Was there anything your parents could do in your teens to seem cool? Exactly. Better to ask, can parents gain anything from their innate boomerness? My research suggests that they can. Children and teens hold a wealth of generational knowledge and social savviness. If we listen, they can teach us a lot.

My research focused on how we learn about gender and sexuality. Sociology, psychology, and common wisdom tell us that knowledge and values flow from adults to children but I had a hunch that this wasn’t the whole story, that we continue to learn about this stuff in adulthood, and that kids can teach us. In fact, I knew so from experience.

In 2021, my daughter returned from the pandemic to in-person fourth grade, and within two months half the kids in her friend group had come out as nonbinary. We learned about it in a series of offhand comments over dinner, about kids changing their names and pronouns. Us parents huddled at pick-up, trying to understand what on earth was going on, fumbling “they” pronouns and struggling to remember new names for children we’d known for years.

To make sense of all of this, we turned to our home-grown tutors. At 10, my daughter didn’t mix up the pronouns; she corrected us when we did and (mostly) patiently answered our questions: how do the teachers address newly transitioned students? How do the kids talk about it? Our children schooled us, sometimes scolded us, but ultimately helped us get through this transition. We made our biggest mistakes and asked our most burning questions in the safety of home rather than in the public sphere, with possibly public consequences.

To determine whether my experience was unique, I interviewed mothers raising teens in a progressive region of the US. Lo and behold, a third of my sample told me their children taught them about gender diversity, just like ours. This was true of my oldest participant, 74 years old at the time of our interview, and my youngest, who was 34. One misgendered a colleague at work, and so turned to her three sons for advice on how to talk. Another told me “my son had to teach me the terminology of what nonbinary means. My kids know more of it because they’re going to school every day with kids who don’t identify as a gender, whereas I never knew anyone like that.”

It makes total sense. Children are primed for the future, their malleable brains soaking up social information like sponges. When you learn in elementary school that you can’t guess someone’s pronouns from their appearance, you get used to asking their pronouns. When your friends come out as nonbinary, you stop thinking of the gender binary as fate. Children also had help: schools often responded to children coming out as trans or nonbinary by explaining gender fluidity to their classmates and sometimes incorporating it into health classes. Mothers received no such help.

Is it fun to be schooled by your kids? Absolutely not. I've lost count of the many eyerolls I’d received from mine. One participant, 56, told me that after one of her son’s friends came out as trans, she would get yelled at every time she got the pronouns wrong. That’s just the price of tuition; the learning can still be worth it.

Children teach their parents about more than gender norms. Judges with daughters vote in more feminist ways, and legislators with daughters lean more liberal on gender issues (yes, that particular cliche is true). When children in Kansas studied a civics program focused on voting during the 1996 election, their parents were more likely to vote, which the researchers called a “trickle-up” effect. When you live with someone, you learn from them— even if you had to potty train them first.

So let the children teach you. They are a great resource, and we ignore them at our peril. You don’t have to be a parent to tap into it, either: one of my study participants learned from her nephew. Another learned from a younger colleague. I learn from my students all the time. If there are children, teens, and young adults in your life, strike up a conversation; open your ears and mind, and you may find your horizons expanding.