Parents are clueless about status

Building a mental model of kids' social relationships

In my previous post, I wrote about the things parents can do to prevent their kids from surviving the kinds of teenage tragedies shown in the new Netflix show Adolescence:

One the main points of that post was that parents can prevent their sons from becoming violent extremists by helping them avoid being low status. More importantly though, with this solution they can kill many birds with one stone:

Low status and social rejection can lead to many other problems often faced by teenagers - anxiety, depression and suicide, and other more common and benign issues like early and/or excessive involvement in things like sex, drugs, alcohol and crime.

This solution is not evident for most parents - they either don’t care about their kids’ status, don’t understand how their kids’ status work or are deliberately clueless about kids’ status by focusing on the adult-centric ideas of status.

This post is basically parental advice. For convenience, I will assume that you, my dear reader, are a parent.

If you’re not a parent though, reading this can be a funny and/or useful exercise of retrospecting about how much (or how little) your parents did to help you avoid being low status when you were a kid - maybe you will consider this post as something you wish your parents read many years ago (I really with mine did).

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Recognizing status

There are several ways people recognize the importance of social status:

• Normies have a subconscious, implicit understanding of status.

• High functioning autists build mental models of how social relationships of normies work. They are able to maintain social relationships reasonably well by applying these models and acting accordingly.

• Low functioning autists are unable to build such mental models (it’s mentally taxing and requires high IQ to start with) and hence struggle with the idea of status and social relationships in general.

The subconscious, implicit understanding of status that normie people have typically serves them very well in their day-to-day lives. But I believe that it is also limited to the context of the normie’s specific social circle and lived experience.

Normie parents obviously care about their children’s social status. But instead of thinking about how their current status looks now (their position within their social circle of kids), they project their understanding of (adult) social status onto their children.

They understand what what codes as high status for adults now (i.e. a good job and lots of money), and then they focus on what they think are the leading indicators of it for their children (i.e. good grades and being nice and polite). They think that as long as their kids do everything they need to do now to stay on the path towards high status later in their adulthood, they should be fine.

Notably, the public school system is built around that premise - learning to earn good grades and being nice and polite. It allows parents to outsource the day-to-day efforts of keeping kids on the path towards high status to teachers, who are expected to handle the learning, good grades and being nice and polite parts. The school demands an intervention from the parents only in case of very poor grades or behavior. In any other case, parents (think they) can comfortably sit back and let teachers do their job.

Here is where I believe where the high functioning autists have an edge over the normies - if you’ve spent most of your life building, updating and operating a mental model of social relationships of normies your age, you know how to spin up another model to understand the social relationships in your kid’s social circle.

The good news is that high IQ normies can possibly build such models as well, but usually they won’t, unless specifically incentivized to do so.

And low IQ normies - well, I guess that they can work to improve their IQ somehow.

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Building your mental model

Every data scientist knows that in order to build a good, robust model, you need to have lots of high quality data.

However, the “data” most normie parents have is sparse and poor quality. Here’s how to get better data.

Your kid

In a high functioning family, little kids fully trust their parents. The parents are their mentors, their trusted advisors, their best friends and oracles of wisdom.

Then, at some point, things change. The kid goes back from school, they have a problem and ask parents for help. But the advice or response is either poor, ill-fitted or dismissive. The kid tries to explain, but without success. Eventually they conclude that the parents just “don’t get it” and shut them off.

- Hey, how’s school?
- Good.

That’s all the kid will ever tell his parents from that point on.

This seems so common that maybe this is inevitable and will happen someday no matter what. Even if so, I think it’s still worth to at least try to postpone this moment as late as possible, by being the parent who somehow “gets it”.

A proper mental model of social relationships of kids allows you to understand your kid. And if your kid knows you understand them and trusts you, they will open up and discuss their problems with you. This will you will get more high quality data to update your model. It’s a virtuous cycle.

Ironically though, there is an edge case where if a kid trusts their parents too much, it can hurt their status.

For example, when I was a kid, I did not eat any hard candy. My parents told me that it's bad for my teeth, and I believed them. They were right! Also, missing out on hard candy didn’t bother me much - I could still eat chocolate and other kinds of sweet treats.

However, when I went to school, and some other kids shared hard candies on their birthday, not only did I refuse to eat it - I would lecture other kids that hard candy is bad for their teeth.

Obviously, all the other kids thought I’m a low status idiot. And from their perspective, I indeed was.

In my case, not eating hard candy was good for my physical health, but turned out bad for my social health. Parents need to thoroughly consider tradeoffs like these, especially regarding any non-standard parenting choices.

Other kids

What you can learn from your kid - even if they trust you and openly discuss theirs issues with you - may not be and probably will not be the full story. To get a complete picture, you might need to get data from different sources.

Ideally, you should be able to somehow witness the social interactions of your kid, during playdates, sleepovers, birthday parties, after school activities and when dropping off or picking up from school.

Either of these is an occasion to at least briefly talk with some of your kid’s friends. Ideally, you and your kid’s friends should form a very loose, casual social relationship¹.

Here, mind the survivorship bias - you have to see what you don’t see.

If your kid doesn’t have any playdates, sleepovers, birthday parties or after school activities with other kids, it’s a red flag.

It might be simply because none of these are happening in their social circle - maybe it’s because all of your kid’s friends are sitting at home and watching TV, social media or playing video games all day. But it might be also because all of these things are happening without your kid - they are socially excluded. You have to find out whether this is the case.

Also, if your kid is an introvert, it’s possible that the default dose of socialization they get at school is (more than) enough and they don’t need to socialize after school. And this is fine - they are allowed to have such preference.

But if after-school socialization is a norm in their social circle, they should still consider it as a tradeoff between what they want and the norms and expectations of their social circle (which, in turn, affect their social status and self esteem).

Other parents

You should build and maintain social relationships with parents of other kids. Even if you think you have enough friends, or consider some of them boring or stupid, you should still do it for the strategic purpose of getting data for building the model of your kid’s social relationships.

Ideally, parents of kids from one social circle (class/school/neighborhood) should form a community where they exchange valuable bits of information and collectively build their common model of their kids’ social relationships together.

Talking to other parents provides you glimpses of what the other kids’ lived experience looks like. It also provides good information about what happens in other kids’ homes².

Teachers

Teachers should have a general understanding of what happens at school: what do kids do during recess, who plays with whom, who talks to who, who is the jock/prom queen, who is socially excluded or bullied.

However, as mentioned before, teachers won’t usually want to talk to you about your kid unless either their grades or their behavior at school is really bad and the teachers are no longer able to handle it without parental intervention.

So, in order to learn something from your kid’s teachers, you simply need to interrogate them to extract the above information.

Culture

If you and your kids lived a generation ago, you would easily know what your kids were into. Their hits would blast on the radio. Their TV shows would run on your TV in your living room. And their room would be covered in centerfold posters of their favorite celebrities.

Some parts of the mainstream culture used to be cross-generational. As a kid, you might have liked Schwarzenegger, Stallone, or maybe your local sports ball team, but so did your father.

But now, the culture is atomized and age-segregated. What you hear on the radio is different from what your kids listen to on Spotify. It’s debatable whether anything like “mainstream culture” even exists.

Relatedly, movies and TV shows that you watch usually will not provide you an accurate picture of what your kid’s social life might look like - most likely it will show kids from a different time, country, area, ethnicity or social class.

Social media

In general, social media is a better and more up to date picture of what kids like. However, due to atomization and age-segregation, it’s not straightforward what social media content are kids nowadays into. It requires some effort, some digging.

Take Mr Beast. As an adult deliberately immersed in online culture I know who Mr Beast is. I don’t watch his content but I know he’s wildly popular among kids. But if I only sticked to millennial social media, legacy media outlets and Netflix, I would probably have never learned that Mr Beast exists.

Also, sometimes I watch the Spotify top 10 song reviews from Rick Beato - a boomer music influencer on Youtube. Most of the time, ~70% of it are songs that I’ve never heard before, from artists I’ve never heard about.

Relatedly, if you have an opportunity to follow what your kid and their friends post, like and share on social media, do it. It’s not creepy - it’s necessary.

What the kids may consider creepy is doing it in a visible way. Actually following with your account, liking and commenting on their posts. This is cringe. Do it in stealth mode by just looking at their accounts/feeds. You may also use a fake/anonymous account to follow them.

Most importantly, do not EVER comment on their social media activity, both online and in real life.

The only exception for when you can and should react is when you discover that your kid is actually just one step from doing something terrible like becoming a terrorist or selling their virginity online.

If you make a fuss about something they posted online that you think is stupid or wrong, your kid will find ways to cut you off. They will create another account or move to a different platform (in general, kids tend to leave platforms infested with parents and boomers), and at least for some time you will be unable to monitor their social media activity.

Subcultures

Your cultural awareness should include knowing whether and which youth subcultures are currently available.

Subcultures are fads - they come and go, but from what I see, there were decades in our recent cultural history that were more pro-subculture (there were many popular subcultures available and it was normal to be a part of one) and anti-subculture (almost everyone are normies who like the mainstream stuff):

• The 70’s and 80’s were mostly pro-subculture.

• The 90’s were anti-subculture.

• The 2000’s were very pro-subculture.

• The 2010’s were a slow transition from pro- to anti-subculture.

• The 2020’s are anti-subculture.

A specific case of subculture is the nerd culture, which, like feminism, comes and goes in waves. The first wave of nerd culture was probably the late 1800’s, with early sci-fi and fantasy from Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley. The second wave was probably the Golden Age of Comic Books in the 1930’s. The third one spanned from the late 60’s to early 80’s (from the Star Trek original series to the Star Wars original trilogy). And the fourth one spanned from early 2000’s to late 2010’s, bookended by Star Wars prequel and sequel trilogies and with all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in between.

In this recent fourth wave, the nerd culture hit mainstream. During this time, we were all nerds - the only choice was between being a casual nerd or hardcore nerd.

The modern nerd culture peaked with Big Bang Theory - a show were nerds were no longer funny low status minions or sidekicks but actual main characters. For the first time, the nerds were not forced to align with the normies - the normies (i.e. Penny) had to learn and embrace the ways of the nerds.

Compare this with another sitcom from the anti-nerd 90’s: in Friends, Ross is immediately cucked by his first wive who leaves him for a lesbian (wouldn’t happen to a high status man), then for most of the series he’s simping for Rachel. And his Friends endlessly mock him for being a “dinosaur guy” and “not a real doctor”.

The fourth wave of nerd culture was foreshadowed by the very popular kids’ oriented TV/movie format of “nerd hero’s journey”. It goes as follows: there is a nerd/some nerds who are low status, possibly bullied and socially rejected. Then, fantasy happens - some aliens, monsters, magic or similar stuff. The normies freak out, but thankfully, the nerds are already prepared to handle the fantasy - they are already experts in the fantasy department. They step in as main characters, bravely engage with the fantasy, save the day and are celebrated as heroes.

This format started in the 80’s with movies like ET and possibly peaked with Stranger Things, but another prominent and more interesting example is the entire Harry Potter franchise, which demonstrates what happens when a nerd subculture is popular and available at scale.

Harry was initially bullied and socially rejected by normies (the Dursleys). Then, he found out that he can join a big and popular subculture of wizards. At first, he was still rejected and bullied by normies, but it didn’t matter anymore, since he spent most time hanging out with the wizards and had established status among them. Eventually though, the normies recognized how the wizard subculture made Harry powerful and slowly started to respect him (I think the real life equivalent of this is the story of low status nerd ugly duckling transforming into a high status software engineer swan).

All of this is to say that if your kid is different from the normies (and with all the data you gathered for your mental model, you should already know what normie kids are like), it either means that they are part of the subculture of kids who are different from normies in a similar way, or that they are just weird and there is no subculture for them.

If your kid is the only goth or nerd in their class, school or town, they will be low status, socially rejected and/or bullied for it. In that case, you should help your kid either find other goths/nerds in your local area, or align themselves with the normies.

But if there are other goths or nerds that your kid is friends with, they can disengage from the normies and just do their goth or nerd stuff together. The status among normies doesn’t matter if the goth or nerd subculture is your kid’s actual in-group. Here, you should not force your kid to become a normie and instead, support them in their goth/nerd activities.

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In my next post, I will follow up with things that parents do which inadvertently hurt their kids’ status.

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1. I believe that sometimes it’s possible to form a deeper connection and relationship with your kid’s friends - a sort of aunt/uncle or mentor kind of thing. However, there are only some conditions where this is acceptable and not weird or creepy.

I think this works best with older teens, same sex as you, and preferably with the kid’s parents consent and approval (best if you and the other kid’s parents are friends).

2. The good parts of it at least.