▸ Column · Present-day suburban parenting; a modern newspaper/online advice column
DEADPOOL replies.
The letter
My nine-year-old, Declan, gets forty-five minutes of weekday screen time, and I enforce it with a timer I literally bolted to the kitchen wall like some kind of clock-obsessed warden. Last Friday his buddy Jonah was over and within twenty minutes Jonah's mom texted me: Declan had informed Jonah that screens "rot your brain stem." Which — fine, I said that once, but as a JOKE about myself after a three-season Netflix bender. Now Declan polices his little sister's tablet and announced at dinner that the whole family should go "screen-free for a month." Sounds like me. Also sounds unhinged coming from a kid who sobbed for forty minutes when I said no Minecraft before homework. I honestly can't tell if I raised a kid with healthy tech values or a tiny joyless hall-monitor who'll have no friends by seventh grade.
Deadpool replies
Hi! Wade here, your fictional advice columnist, fully aware this is a column, deeply unwell about it, moving on. First: "rot your brain stem" is an ELITE line and your son did not invent it, you did, which means congratulations, you have a tiny tribute act covering your greatest hits. Kids don't absorb your rules. They absorb your BITS. The throwaway joke became scripture because that's the load-bearing material and he memorized it.
Okay, putting the chimichanga down. Here's the thing nobody at that dinner table clocked: the kid who cried for forty minutes over Minecraft? That's Declan. The brain-stem enforcer in the hall-monitor sash? That's a costume he tried on because it got a gold star from the most important critic in his universe — you. I know this move. People told me my whole life nobody'd love the real me, so I built a whole performance to earn it. He's auditioning for "the good one," and good ones don't have to be perfect, they have to be SEEN.
So let him catch you breaking your own dumb timer. Play Minecraft for fun. Out loud. Show him the rulebook isn't the only voice in the house — joy gets a mic too. ...There. Sincerity quota hit, narrator, deploy the fart noise.
— Deadpool
Wolverine weighs in
Wade's half right, which I hate. But he missed the dangerous part. Kid ain't joyless — he's swingin' the rule at someone smaller. The sister. That's the tell. A rule's a leash, kid. The day it becomes a club you hand a nine-year-old to whack his sister with, you taught him the wrong lesson and called it values. And the timer bolted to the wall? That's where he learned it. Discipline that don't bend for the people you love ain't discipline, it's just a clock with teeth. Show him the rule's got mercy in it. Or he'll grow up real good at enforcin' and real bad at lovin'.
— Wolverine
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