“A Pop Culture Connection Is a Human Connection”
How Big Mouth helps me talk to my kid (while making puberty less cringe)
When I published the piece about how the beloved Gary Stewart connected people through content and how meaningful that was to me, one commenter on LinkedIn summed it up better than I did by writing: “A pop culture connection is a human connection.” I’ve been thinking about that ever since.
I never put a name on it, but I realized it’s been a tactic I’ve been using in my own home while raising teenagers. Getting information out of them is hard! And while I definitely don’t have this all figured out, I have found that connecting with them over pop culture is a way to keep them talking. (“Just keep them talking” is a bit of advice a parent recently gave me at a party when discussing navigating these times. Something else I’ve been thinking a lot about…)
One show in particular has made for great fodder for getting my eighth grader to open up: Big Mouth. Big Mouth is a brilliant cartoon about puberty starring Nick Kroll, John Mulaney and Maya Rudolph. Before watching Big Mouth, puberty was an awkward thing to discuss in our house. It still is, but now it’s a little less cringe. Even better? The show makes us laugh about things that might otherwise evoke tears.
Beyond illuminating the facts of life, Big Mouth anthropomorphizes difficult emotions via characters like the Shame Wizard and Tito the Anxiety Mosquito. By talking about these things as creatures, Big Mouth gives me a non-threatening way to name the emotion when I see it, honor it, and diffuse it with humor when possible.
Big Mouth also gave me a key question to ask about school — one that always gives me insights into dynamics I otherwise wouldn’t know about. “So, how was school like Big Mouth today?” I occasionally ask. I can’t repeat the stories here, but suffice to say they’re entertaining, sweet and sometimes mortifying.
Even though I’m a grown-ass woman, Big Mouth is educational for me too. I learned about the rice purity test from one episode, and then we promptly took the test as a family (eek). While we didn’t share specifics, it was handy to have a baseline on how quickly each kiddo is maturing. This is information I wouldn’t have without pop culture, people!
In sum, Big Mouth gives me a language, a cast of characters and, most crucially, humor to help me connect to my children during these years. There’s no shame (wizard) in that.
