roachpatrol:

the-real-seebs:

adigitalmagician:

creepycollector:

I just saw this on Reddit today and I wanted to share it here.

When you’re a parent, you have to realize that the child you brought into this world is going to be their own person and you’ll have to start getting into things you may not understand and have ZERO interest in.

However, you damn well better act like you are.

I can still remember the feeling as a kid getting Pokemon Red and it being something I loved so much, so I wanted to share that with my mom. I wanted to show her my team, tell her about the gym leaders I took down, and she just took a glance at the Game Boy color and went “mmhhhmm”.

She gave zero shits when I beat Banjo-Kazooie, a game which was INCREDIBLY hard for grade school me and you can make me have war flashbacks if you so much as say “Rusty Bucket Bay”.

My town in Animal Crossing? Catching rare fish? Who cares?

I liked a cartoon series so much that I wrote little stories about it? “No, I don’t want to read it.”

This type of stuff matters to kids so damn much and she’ll never realize how much it hurt our relationship. It might not seem like a big deal she never sat down and watched me play something like Luigi’s Mansion, but that’s how kids try and bond with their parents.

After constantly being shot down they’ll eventually stop talking to you entirely. 

My son is into Pokemon, and he’s got the enthusiasm for it that kids do. So while we both enjoy it, he can focus on it a lot longer than I can. And honestly: it’s not that hard to act interested when kids are excited. Nod in the right places, answer honestly when they ask questions (“i don’t know” is totally acceptable) and you go a long way to supporting them.

once we decided to just see how long my nephew could spend telling us about Bey Blades without further prompting. about two hours. it was sorta cool. actually ended up with some neat notions about how you could make a crossover with Homestuck, as I recall.

yeah i remember visiting a friend of my mom’s and her grandkid was over, some 12-13 year old boy, and he wanted to talk about yu-gi-oh cards. i don’t know much about yu-gi-oh but we had a pretty good discussion about which monsters were the coolest in terms of Usefulness In Game vs How Sick It’d Be If They Were Real and later both my mom and the kid’s grandma made sure to tell me that the kid was ‘a little autistic’ and i was a saint for humoring him. poor dude. like, fuck, it’s such a disservice to kids when you won’t take their passions seriously! 

and like no one thinks to try and connect what a kids’ interested in with what they themselves are interested so both participants can enjoy the conversation, they just shut the kid down when they’re bored and feel like they’ve taught some Important Social Skill Lesson because they’re the grownup who only cares about appropriate stuff the appropriate amount. 

adults spend most of kids’ early years dismissing and mocking them for having interests, then their later years moaning that the kids are uncommunicative, depressed and reclusive. fuck that shit. makes me really mad just thinking about it.