A Parent's Guide to Brain Rot, Rizz, and Everything Else You Didn't Ask to Learn

Last week my son walked into the kitchen, saw me eating lunch, announced 'Fanum tax' and took half my sandwich. When I told him he couldn't do that, he said I was being 'low aura.' I ate my remaining half-sandwich in silence and then spent 45 minutes on the internet trying to decode what my kid had just said to me.

I've been cataloguing the words I've had to look up over the past six months. 'Rizz' (charisma, or the ability to attract people — benign). 'Gyatt' (an exclamation, originally about physical appearance but used more broadly now — context-dependent). 'Sigma' (a personality archetype meaning self-sufficient and non-conformist — the kid calling a teacher sigma isn't insulting them). 'Ohio' (chaotic, weird, something that just doesn't make sense — this one is deeply useful and I've started using it). 'Slay' (executing something excellently — actually borrowed from drag culture, predates my kid by decades).

Here's what I've learned: most of the slang is not as alarming as it sounds when you don't know it. The vocabulary that parents should actually pay attention to is the slang around self-harm, substances, and online safety — and there's plenty of information about those specific terms available. Crashing out, delulu, aura farming — this is just the texture of how teenagers right now describe their social world. Every generation has this. The words are new; the concepts are human.

What does matter is knowing enough to have a real conversation. When my kid says he 'crashed out' after a bad week at school, not knowing that phrase means he's telling me he struggled and lost composure is a communication gap I'd rather not have. The slang isn't a wall built to keep parents out — it's just the language he thinks in. Meeting him there, even imperfectly, matters more than being fluent.