There is a casual dismissal that most parents perform without noticing: the wave of the hand at whatever cultural object their child is consuming. The video game is "just a game." The YouTuber is "some idiot." The platform is "a waste of time." The music is "noise." The performance of dismissal feels like a form of wisdom, like the parent is too discerning to be impressed by whatever new thing has captured the young. It is not wisdom. It is, almost always, refusal to do the work.
Reading your child's generation's culture seriously means treating the artifacts they care about as objects of inquiry, not objects of disdain. The TikTok they keep showing you, the streamer they watch for hours, the genre of music that scores their life, the slang that has migrated into their texts: all of it is data about the world they actually live in. To dismiss the data is to choose ignorance about your own child's environment. Ignorance is a strange choice for a parent who wants to remain useful.
Taking the culture seriously does not mean liking it. You can read a novel seriously and conclude it is bad. You can watch your child's favorite show and find it derivative. The seriousness lies in actually reading, actually watching, actually paying attention long enough to form a real judgment rather than a reflexive rejection. A real judgment your child can engage with. A reflexive rejection your child will, correctly, ignore.
The practice has three layers. The first is exposure: actually consuming the cultural objects your child is consuming. Not all of them, not constantly, but enough to know what you are talking about. The second is interpretation: trying to understand what the object is doing for the people who love it, what need it meets, what pleasure it delivers, what worldview it assumes. The third is conversation: being able to talk with your child about the culture in terms they recognize as serious engagement rather than parental performance.
What you usually discover, when you do this work, is that the culture is neither as bad as the panic suggests nor as innocent as your child claims. The video game has genuine craft in some places and is genuinely manipulative in others. The streamer says some things worth saying and some things worth pushing back on. The platform is built on attention extraction and also hosts real friendships. Holding the complexity is the parental contribution. Your child often cannot hold the complexity yet, because they are inside the culture; you are outside it enough to see the structure.
There is a tempting failure mode in the other direction: the parent who studies the culture too eagerly, who tries to be fluent in their child's references, who deploys their child's slang. This usually does not work. The child does not want you to be them. They want you to be a competent adult who has bothered to understand their world. The line is between informed and intrusive. You can know what BeReal is without posting on BeReal. You can recognize the streamer your child watches without watching the streamer yourself for entertainment. The seriousness is in the comprehension, not the mimicry.
What you gain from this work is the capacity to be a real interlocutor. Your child has a hundred peers who share their cultural frame and almost no adults who do. If you can become one of the adults who actually understands, even partially, you become someone they can think out loud with. They will bring you the questions they cannot bring to their peers (because the peers are inside it) and cannot bring to most adults (because the adults are dismissive). You become a useful asymmetric resource: an adult who can metabolize the culture without being captive to it.
The deeper move is that reading their culture seriously is also reading them seriously. The cultural artifacts they love are not separate from who they are; they are partial expressions of it. To dismiss the culture is to dismiss a layer of the child. To engage with it is to engage with a layer of the child. You do not have to agree with their taste. You have to take it as evidence of a person who is working out who they are in the materials available to them, which is what every generation has done, including yours, even if your materials were different and now look more respectable in retrospect because time has sanded them down.