I let my thirteen-year-old pick the show.
That was my first mistake, though I didn't know it yet.
She'd heard about it at school, some new season everyone was whispering about, and she promised it wasn't that bad.
Three episodes in, she stopped asking me to watch with her.
She started watching alone, door closed, earbuds in, and I told myself that was just what teenagers do.
Then the fan pages showed up on her phone.
Then the inside jokes she wouldn't explain.
Then the vocabulary I didn't recognize—slang about the show's characters that sounded less like fandom and more like a second language.
She wasn't just watching something anymore.
Here's what unsettles me, and I don't think I'm alone.
We used to worry about what kids saw on screens.
Now the worry is what the screens build into them while they watch.
A season of television can now function like a small town—complete with its own rules, its own status hierarchy, its own way of deciding who belongs and who doesn't.
Half say I'm overreacting, that this is what every generation says about whatever's popular.
The other half quietly admit their kids have changed too—more withdrawn, more performative, more fluent in a culture the adults around them can't access.
We trade stories like people comparing notes after a storm.
Nobody wants to say the obvious thing out loud.
The obvious thing is that we handed our children a portal and then acted surprised when they walked through it.
One that teaches them the world is a spectacle to be consumed, that shock is a personality, that belonging means performing for strangers who will forget you by morning.
I'm writing because I sat at my own dinner table last week and realized I was the guest.
My daughter spoke in references I couldn't follow, laughed at jokes I couldn't hear, and looked at me the way you look at someone who used to matter.
Maybe every parent of a teenager feels like they've been quietly relocated to the periphery of their own child's life.
But normal and harmless aren't the same thing, and pretending otherwise has become our national pastime.
But the kid who watched it doesn't un-watch it, and the door she closed stays a little harder to open.
We keep outsourcing our children's inner lives to whatever is trending this month, then wondering why they come back speaking a language we can't translate.
Final Thoughts
Our silence about what it's doing to them is.