in retrospect it's crazy how we just let parents turn to the media and blame their child's hobbies when their children commit suicide. I get why news outlets let it happen (if you can say "video games made my kid suicidal" or "my kid hung himself because uh... he was doing The TikTok Noose Challenge" then it justifies banning those things and enforcing stricter means of monitoring what kids do, on top of giving the parent an out for their culpability in the situation), but if your brain hasn't completely calcified with a boomerlike contempt for The Youth, you should immediately recognize this rhetoric as cope for a massive parenting fuckup. and generally if you examine a lot of these instances that make news, the sequence of events is normally the same; a kid is relatively isolated due to bullying or abuse, their parents don't know how to connect with them (or at worst view their lack of conformity as a burden), the child does not feel safe turning to their parent for comfort, the parent doesn't make any effort to aid the child in connecting with similar-minded peers (or don't bother until the issue is so apparent that they can't afford to ignore it), the child turns to outlets to sate their desire for interaction and belonging until they feel backed against a wall. parenting is hard, but the isolation that produces suicide is largely preventable in ways that a lot of parents gloss over because they do not consider the inner lives of their children to be real or meaningful. and going on TV to bleat to the world about how the one thing that your 14 year old strongly identified with is actually a corrupting influence just seems like a means of obliterating the remaining personhood of that child. you can call me callous, but to me these parents are looking at their child's suicide as another tantrum to be managed, and controlling their image post-mortem is their discipline of choice.
prguitarman
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
origamiaround
titsay
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
