Daily Deals from a Nerd Mom

There is a moment every nerd parent eventually hits, and nobody warns you about it. You spend years carefully (or not so carefully) exposing your kids to the things you love. You put on Doctor Who during a sick day and tell yourself it is fine. You start them on Naruto because you love it and you want to share it. You are, in your heart, passing the torch.

And then one day, the torch gets turned around and aimed directly at your face.

I have three kids, all adults now, and somewhere along the way the power dynamic shifted completely. I am no longer the one handing out the recommendations. I am the one getting the homework. I am the one being told “you HAVE to watch this” and “I cannot believe you have not seen that arc yet.” I have been assigned media. By my own children.

Take anime. I started them on that. Me. I sat them down and introduced them to Naruto like I was doing something generous, which I was, but I did not anticipate what would happen next. Because now they have watched more anime than I have, know more about the medium than I do, and are constantly several steps ahead of me in fandoms I technically introduced them to. I created this. I have no one to blame but myself, and honestly I am a little proud.

My oldest is the biggest culprit when it comes to assignments. They have genuinely excellent taste, which makes it worse, because I can never just dismiss the rec and move on. I have to actually engage with the thing. And nine times out of ten, I end up completely feral about it within a week, which they find extremely funny. Case in point: Fallout. I thought I knew what I was getting into. I did not know what I was getting into. My oldest introduced me to the franchise and now I have feelings about the lore and strong opinions about factions, and that is entirely their fault.

But my oldest is not the only one who has pulled this on me. My son would never, in a million years, call himself an Office fan. He would probably deny it to your face. And yet, whenever he was not feeling well growing up, he would quietly put it on and just… lay on the couch and binge it. No announcement. No acknowledgment that maybe he liked it a little. Just The Office, a blanket, and the vibe of a person who definitely is not watching their comfort show right now.

I found that both deeply relatable and extremely funny. Because that is exactly what a nerd does. They just have not accepted the title yet.

The thing is, I love all of this. Like, genuinely love it. There is something kind of magical about the fact that my kids and I swap recs now like we are in the same friend group. We argue about character decisions. We send each other clips. We have opinions about endings and which arc was the peak of the series.

When I was raising them, I always hoped they would be readers, be curious, be the kind of people who got genuinely invested in stories. I just did not fully think through what it would mean when they grew up and started curating mine.

I used to think of myself as the nerd of the family. The original. The one who set the tone. And I mean, that is still a little bit true. But these days I am also the student, and honestly? I do not hate it.

If anything, it is one of my favorite things about who my kids turned out to be. They take stories seriously. They care about craft and character and the way a good ending can completely reframe everything that came before it. They got that from somewhere, and I would like to think I had a little something to do with it.

But they are absolutely going to keep assigning me homework, and I have accepted my fate.

What about you? Are you the one handing out the recs in your house, or have you been out-nerded too? Tell me in the comments.