Why it’s time to give up on trying to be a cool parent

Aside from death and taxes, one thing is certain: Lenny Kravitz will always be the epitome of quintessential cool. A career that spans decades, a music style uniquely his own and a symbol of artistic authenticity that just feels effortlessly cool. Unless you ask his daughter Zoe Kravitz, that is.

During a speech for Kravitz’s induction to the Hollywood Walk of Fame this year, Zoe joked that her father’s predilection for shirtless looks might have earned him points as a global sex symbol, but it made for a deeply awkward school pick-up experience.

Even Kim Kardashian has been deemed embarrassing by her four kids. Credit: AP

“According to my dad, if it doesn’t expose your nipples, it’s not a shirt. And … it used to embarrass me,” she said.

While I appreciate her embarrassment (parents wearing shirts in public is always a good idea), it does pose an important question. If Lenny Kravitz wasn’t considered “cool” by his child, what does a cool parent actually look like?

The short answer is that it doesn’t look like anything. And that’s because the “cool parent” myth is just that; it doesn’t exist. At least not in our children’s eyes.

Take Kim Kardashian. With a self-made net worth of $US1.7 billion ($2.5 billion), a reality television and business empire, and over 360 million followers on Instagram alone, like Kravitz, Kardashian is considered the epitome of cool by millions of people around the world. She can – and often does – provide her kids with experiences normal kids can only dream of, like setting up a play date between her daughter North and her music idol at the time, JoJo Siwa. Or taking her son, Saint, and his soccer friends on an international football tour. Her children also enjoy wearing designer clothes, flying on private jets and having personal chefs on call.

You’d be forgiven for thinking all this might earn her “cool parent” status, then. But in an episode of The Kardashians, the mogul revealed her four kids have dubbed her “cringey”, “annoying” and “embarrassing”.

I was first anointed “uncool” after rapping along to Sir Mix-a Lot’s Baby Got Back in the car and am regularly reminded of this status via alternative terms through name-calling (like Kardashian, I too am embarrassing) or through desperate pleas of, “Don’t do that when my friends are over!”

But, as one of my daughter’s explained to me recently, there is a way for uncool parents to change their ways. All you have to do, she says, is “be a friend with no rules for you to follow”. In other words, we need to be our child’s personal version of Amy Poehler’s character (Regina George’s mum) in Mean Girls, who immortalised the phrase, “I’m not like a regular mum. I’m a cool mum!”

But even as her mother saunters around in a velour sweatsuit and offers her teenage daughter’s friends condoms and cocktails, Regina is embarrassed by her, in one scene telling her, “Please stop talking.”

So what hope do the rest of us have? Based on my personal experience and what every celebrity has to say on the matter, not much.

But as parenting expert Dr Justin Coulson points out, good parents aren’t friends with their children. Nor should they aspire to be; it’s not part of the job description. Instead, he says, “they walk alongside them as their supporters, as people that they can trust. A good parent is one whose child knows they have their back, that’s the most important thing.”

In other words, kids need parents who are dependable – an asset that is, in many ways, inherently uncool.

Derek McCormack, director of the Raising Children Network, agrees, saying the differentiation between a “cool parent” and a “good parent” isn’t necessarily what constitutes the other.

While uncool, a good parent will be a source of care, emotional support, security, and safety for their children in their early years, and grow to offer practical and financial help as kids get older.

“Teens still want parents to be involved in their life, even though their attitude or behaviour might sometimes send a different message – like calling them cringe,” McCormack says.

Like all myths, there is a lesson to be learned here. Probably that being a cool parent is a long game because one day, your kids will be old enough to recognise that having a parent that was good is the coolest thing they could have had all along. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

Shona Hendley is a freelance writer based in Victoria.

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