" Slang . My mom keep enjoin ' body reckoning . ' She thinks it means how many friends you have , so she ’s like , ' I got 19 trunk . ' Like who gon na assure her 💀 . "
No matter what generation they’re a part of, parents will always be… parents. This means there’s a high probability that the parents of Gen Z are completely clueless about some current “common knowledge.”
So recently weaskedtheBuzzFeed Communityto share what common practices their parents just don’t understand. Here are some of their responses:
1.“Emoji use. We talk a lot about how they don’t get our use of popular emojis in unfamiliar contexts, but there are very important ones they don’t even realize exist like 🙃, 🥺, 😶🌫️, 🫠, 😶, and🫨.”
— sadie084
" My mom does n’t read the 💀 and 😭 emojis can be used when say something is funny . I tell her a singular story and she was so confused when I ended the report with 😭 😭 😭 . "
— emostar31
2.“Slang. My mom keeps saying ‘body count.’ She thinks it means how many friends you have, so she’s like, ‘I got 19 bodies.’ Like who gonna tell her 💀.”
— Gertha , 16
3.“How job hunting works. There’s no ‘pounding the pavement’ — it’s all done online and with usually tedious application systems. Sometimes there isn’t even an actual open position that they advertise. And there isn’t just one interview and you’re hired at the end of it. It’s actually several interviews and can take up to two months from when you fill in an application until you’re hired. And there’s plenty of ghosting that happens (no, hiring managers won’t tell you ‘wHaT yOu DiD wRoNg’ just that they went with another candidate). TL;DR the hiring process is a lot more complicated than parents realize.”
— 22 , California
4.“My mom really struggles to understand that if you’re just nice to the customer-service people at restaurants and shops, they’ll make your life a lot easier. She tends to just demand stuff or complain in a mean tone and expects that to get her what she wants. She wonders why I have much better luck getting upgrades or accomplishing fixing things faster, but it’s because I’m just nice to them, have patience, and understand that sometimes things just can’t be magically changed around.”
— 24 , Virginia
5.“Privacy, even for their grown-ass kid.”
— Sam , 27
6.“My parents aren’t even that old but one thing they don’t understand is that I can’t just turn off my phone for a whole day. Yes, it’s good to take breaks from your phone and go on a walk or something, but iPhones are just a necessity of life now. For example, my phone is where my work can contact me, my phone is where my calendar is, and my phone is where I get news and information. They also don’t understand that leaving a person on read and not answering calls for a day is rude.”
— Chloe , 21
7.“Using pronouns besides ‘she/her’ or ‘he/his.'”
— 18 , Ohio
8.“The very concept of modern-day fandom. They think going to a movie and coming home to rate it on IMDb is all there is to get out of the experience. They can’t grasp the idea that we can stay in that place for weeks on end, reflecting, discussing, and experiencing the same content from each other’s POVs and enjoying our diverse means of expressing that state (visual/auditory/literary art).”
9.“Doubting the government. My parents are self-described ‘bleeding heart liberals,’ but despite every insane dystopian thing that’s happened since 2016, they can’t seem to fathom that the political stability they grew up with as white, middle-class boomers is gone. Despite the overturning of Roe, children in cages at the border, and even the unchecked monopolies that make groceries so expensive now, my dad still doesn’t believe that Project 2025 is something that could happen. Maybe it’s that growing up in the ’60s made him unable to conceive of America as anything but the land of the free. But as a disabled Gen Z-er who is as poor, exhausted, and mentally ill as the rest of us, I know that political collapse can happen anywhere.”
— 23 , California
10.“Both of my parents just can’t understand how to use their phones in the simplest ways. For example, my dad doesn’t really type that fast or anything, so I taught him that you can do voice-to-text. Not sure if that was a good thing because now every time he has a question, he uses Google Assistant to ask a question.”
— 24 , Canada
11.“My dad passed not knowing how to use call waiting! He’d say ‘Ooh, I gotta go! Someone’s calling!’ Then hang up and wait for the phone to ring. He died in 2020 for heaven’s sake!”
— stephaniev23
12.And finally, “My dad’s text messages usually end with ‘okay Siri, send that. Send it Siri. Did you send it?'”
— jmacxjr
Some compliance have been edited for distance and/or clarity .
