Jake Rocketansky, Liv Agar, Spencer Barrows, and Julian Field investigate online communities where parents claim alienation by adult children, noting these forums often host abusive commiseration lacking specific conflict details. Referencing Isandai's "Down the Rabbit Hole" and Stefan Mollina, they examine groups like GrandsNet and anti-trans substacks, warning against contacting featured individuals before analyzing an Irish story of resentment over university lifestyles. Ultimately, the episode exposes how these digital spaces validate parental entitlement rather than addressing genuine estrangement, challenging listeners to distinguish abuse from ungratefulness. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, it looks like the only two people who are young enough to not be able to make babies are going to torture two fully grown men who've passed the age of making babies and have become infertile.
And in the process, expose us to parents who are extremely alienated online.
Is this about right, or am I misinterpreting because I don't have my reading glasses?
Pretty much dead on, pretty much.
Beautiful.
That's why we've got Spencer Barrows.
So glad to have you back after that incredible series that you did for Cursed Media, Science and Transition.
Thank you.
Well, I kind of see this as a little bit of a spiritual sequel, albeit a much funnier one, a more lighthearted one.
It's P for P and it's like two parents having a relationship.
So I pay attention to certain trends in the anti-trans spaces, as well as just the media in general, like the certain moral panics they like to glom onto.
And one that has been gaining a bit of steam, I think, recently is this fear over kids going no contact with their parents.
Oh, yeah.
Specifically, adult children going no contact with their parents and these articles that are trying to say, no, don't do that.
Don't do that.
You should work it out.
You should always work it out.
We actually have covered something like adjacent to this, which was Stefan Mollina, who basically was getting people to go no contact with their parents, but to turn them into like bizarre little freaks that like listened to him all day.
But this also was a guy who was like crawling through his own like air ducts like the fucking xenomorph.
So like, I don't know exactly how much we want to take this guy at his word.
His wife was a therapist and he was piping his voice through the vent, commenting on the therapy sessions that she was doing with a client.
Like in the middle of it, you just hear a disembodied goblin in the vent.
And it was Stefan.
Yeah.
So we're going to tie this into Science and Transition a little bit because Liv and I spent some time looking at the world of forums for alienated and aggrieved parents.
Now, one of these forums is a substack blog specifically for parents of trans kids and trans young adults that don't like their kids very much.
And it's pretty depressing, but there's kind of a through line here.
We also looked at ones where there's no transness involved.
The kids are not any type of gay.
And it's just relationships that have frayed and broken down.
And I was really interested in reading these because I am a huge fan of the seminal like blog series by Isandai called The Missing Missing Reasons or Down the Rabbit Hole.
It is a formative text by a blogger who spent years on alienated parents forums back when there were more forums on the internet.
And now it's just one app for child pornography and nothing else.
Isandai wrote about the phenomenon and like the psychological processes that go on there.
Now, I recommend reading the whole post.
Again, it's called Down the Rabbit Hole, and it's fantastic.
But the important thing to know here is that alienated parents, like genuinely alienated parents, do exist.
There are absolutely cases where a kid gets addicted to drugs, has a severe behavioral problem, or just acts abusively towards their parents when the child gets into adulthood and the kid is at fault.
That absolutely happens.
Those people don't go on alienated parents' forums, or if they do, they don't stick around because what they realize is, is that alienated parents' forums are not for alienated parents.
They are for abusive parents to commiserate about how ungrateful their kids are.
Yes.
Now, something's, you're going to notice some trends here.
You're going to notice that people on these forums, even if you're sympathetic to the parents involved, are maddeningly vague.
They offer as little details as possible.
They say almost nothing about what could have caused the alienation or what could have caused the break.
They don't really specify like what has gone wrong.
And there's a common thread through all of them that is also not discussed, but you'll be able to pick up on as we read some of these.
So Liv and I have chosen some of our favorite.
We went on a couple of forums.
The big ones are GrandsNet, which is vaguely related to the anti-trans forum Mumsnet, but GrandsNet seems a little bit more, shockingly seems a little bit more normal.
They only have beef with each other where Mumsnet is weirder than GrandsNet.
Yeah, Mumsnet is insane.
Which shows something about like where the moral rot in the United Kingdom is.
Yeah.
Like generationally.
Yeah, it's like Gen X.
It's all Gen X.
It's like Gen X moms.
And the boomers are like, all right, how do I rescue my grandson?
Pensioners, just ranting.
Yeah, pensioners.
Yeah, no, where the Gen X ones, it's like people, like women who are 15 years away from retirement and are like acting crazy about it.
They fully lost their minds.
But anyways, so Liv and I have chosen a couple of these.
We're going to start with GrandsNet.
We might read some from a gardening forum, which actually had some of the most insane story.
It was so bad that we had to stop reading it.
We had to stop reading it.
And it was like, again, a forum for like backyard gardening.
And it was some of the most disturbing things we've ever read.
Yeah, it was just like a sub-forum where it was like, you know, family problems or something.
Yeah, and it's appalling.
And then we will turn to Pitt, which is for, it's called Parents with Inconvenient Truths About Trans.
It's a terrible title.
And Pitt was formed by two like anti-trans psychotherapists in like Oregon and Seattle.
For some reason in the Pacific Northwest, there just seem to be like 100,000 evil psychotherapists who are like, all right, I have a cure for transness.
It's called a needle.
And the other half of that, it's those people and skinheads are the only people in the PNW.
It seems to me.
And then puppy girl polycules.
Yeah, so you can cause transness and cure it with a needle.
Yeah.
Perfect.
Which one should we start with?
I think maybe the Ren story.
That's like a kind of classic.
Psychoanalyzing Expensive Student Trends00:03:06
This one's great.
Now, I really want to specify before we go in, please do not go and like track these people down.
We considered like using like AI to anonymize the stories a bit.
We decided against it since you really do need some of the exact phrasing.
That said, we're leaving out usernames.
And please, for the love of God, don't like tap the glass.
Don't bother these people.
This is their own thing.
We are inadvertently putting them on the couch and psychoanalyzing it because I think that it's worth looking at these trends and understanding how these people think.
That said, don't look.
Don't look.
We did that for you.
We are very used to cursed online communities.
I think our listeners are a no-lol cow, just as a baseline.
So we're going to present this one.
Liv can start reading it.
We're going to present this one as something is almost like a mystery.
I want you all to kind of figure, like, as it goes on, Jake and Julian, try and like guess about like what's going on here.
What's the real story here?
It's very Rashiman-esque.
All right, it starts.
Have two children, age 20, boy, and 22, girl, per university students in Ireland.
The oldest finishes university at the end of April.
In Ireland, unless you are very poor, parents have to pay for university.
I moved to the UK 18 months ago to get a better job to be able to support my children through university.
Irish defector detected.
The children live in a house that I own in Dublin.
I bought it when I was 23.
They pay no rent as their students.
I pay all the utility bills and maintain and insure the house.
They have a very expensive lifestyle as students.
Lots of foreign holidays, designer clothes, no drinking several nights a week, eat only at the best restaurants and cafes, have sushi delivered to the door when they feel like it, and take taxis whenever they wake up late and can't get to work in our university on time.
This is so good.
There's so much resentment here already.
Oh, you just.
Just the description itself.
It's like, they're ungrateful brats.
They work full time and go to university to be able to pay for their expensive lifestyles.
They still get good grades.
So they're paying for all of this.
They get sushi delivered, but they're paying for it.
The only thing they're not paying for is their rent, apparently.
Yeah.
Well, they give you good grades in exchange, so be grateful.
This is where the story takes a turn.
You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast.
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Travis, why is that such a good deal?
Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month.
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Travis, for once, I agree with you.
And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com/slash QAA.
Well, that's not an opinion, it's a fact.
You're so right, Jake.
We love and appreciate all of our listeners.
Yes, we do.
Travis is actually crying right now, I think.
Out of gratitude, maybe?
That's not true.
the part about me crying not not me being grateful i'm very