If you grew up Gen X, you probably remember how aggressively we sorted each other. There were the jocks, the theater kids, the goth kids, the band kids, the kids who smoked behind the gym, the kids who somehow knew every word to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the girls who wore combat boots before combat boots were sold next to scented candles at the mall, the boys who were “too feminine,” the girls who were “too masculine,” and the kids everybody simply agreed were weird. We did not always know what the categories meant. We just knew there were categories, and the adults were participating too. A child could be too dramatic, too sensitive, too quiet, too loud, too obsessive, too much of a tomboy, not masculine enough, socially awkward, withdrawn, difficult, intense, or forever accused of “needing attention.” Sometimes those descriptions were observations. Sometimes they were warnings. Sometimes they were simply the language adults used when a child did not fit neatly into the version of normal they recognized.
Looking back, some of those kids eventually found words that gave their younger selves new context. Some were queer. Some were trans. Some were autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. Some were disabled. Some were artists, introverts, kids carrying trauma, or simply eccentric people who grew into eccentric adults and would now appreciate everyone leaving their eyeliner out of the diagnostic process. Hindsight should not turn every unusual teenager we remember into a clue we can retroactively solve. Human beings are too complicated for that. But hindsight can show us how often we mistook unfamiliarity for pathology, rebellion, attention-seeking, or failure. It was the vocabulary that changed, not that those people suddenly “appeared.”
Queer children did not materialize sometime around the invention of TikTok. Autistic adults did not arrive when schools started talking more openly about neurodivergence. Gender-nonconforming kids were not created by social media, and sensory needs did not suddenly emerge when noise-reducing headphones became available in pastels. Those people were already here. Sometimes we had useful language for what they were experiencing. Often we did not. Sometimes the word we used instead was “weird,” and sometimes the word was considerably crueler.
That is part of what makes Gen X such an interesting generation to parent from. We grew up inside a culture that worshiped individuality in theory while enforcing a surprisingly narrow definition of normal in practice. Our movies were full of teenagers rebelling against controlling adults, and then we went to schools where one unusual haircut could generate a weeklong civic emergency. We cheered for fictional misfits and sometimes made actual misfits eat lunch alone. We loved stories about kids refusing to conform as long as the kids were charming, funny, attractive, or were played by somebody who would eventually become famous. Real difference was harder. Real difference could be inconvenient. It could require patience, accommodation, new language, or the deeply uncomfortable possibility that the rules themselves were the problem.
A lot of us learned very quickly what kinds of difference were socially survivable. You could be eccentric if people found you entertaining. You could be rebellious if you were also cool. You could be dramatic if somebody gave you a stage. You could be strange if your strangeness was aesthetically pleasing. But if your difference confused people, slowed them down, challenged gender expectations, disrupted social rules, required accommodation, or refused to become charming on command, the reaction could change fast. Then the question became why you couldn’t “just be normal.”
Some kids responded by learning how to perform normalcy exceptionally well. Some became invisible. Some found other weird kids and built little ecosystems around themselves. Some found theater, music, goth culture, sports, books, church basements, online communities, or Rocky Horror at midnight and realized (sometimes long before they had language for it) that there were places where the thing that made them strange everywhere else became the thing that made sense.
That matters because the same child can look completely different depending on the room.
A kid who is “too loud” in math class may be exactly loud enough onstage. A child who cannot stop moving may suddenly have choreography. A kid who is “obsessed” with costumes may discover design. Someone who struggles with spontaneous conversation may thrive when there is a script. A teenager who seems withdrawn at home may become animated around the first group of people who do not require constant self-monitoring. The trait did not magically change. The environment did.
That’s one of the things hindsight can teach us if we let it. Sometimes the kid was not failing the room. Sometimes the room had an extremely limited imagination.
Parents have a chance to do something useful with that realization because the reflex to sort children did not disappear with cassette tapes and mall bangs. We still do it. The words have changed, but the impulse is familiar. Why are they dressed like that? Why are they so sensitive? Why do they need that accommodation? Why do they have to make everything a thing? Why can’t they just—
That last sentence has carried a tremendous amount of damage over the years.
Why can’t they just wear what everyone else wears? Why can’t they just make eye contact? Why can’t they just sit still? Why can’t they just eat what everyone else is eating? Why can’t they just ignore Grandpa? Why can’t they just use the bathroom everyone expects them to use?
Why can’t they just stop drawing attention to themselves?
Sometimes a child cannot “just” do the thing being asked. Sometimes they can, but the cost is much higher than the adult asking understands. And sometimes they are perfectly capable of doing it but are beginning to realize that they should not have to.
That last category can be especially uncomfortable for adults. There is something unsettling about watching a young person decline a rule we followed automatically, particularly if we paid a price earlier in our lives for NOT following it. We can feel an almost involuntary urge to explain that this is simply how the world works. Maybe it was how our world worked. Maybe we learned to keep our heads down, get through it, stop complaining, avoid attention, and tolerate discomfort because we had no other option. Those skills may have been useful. They may even have kept us safe.
But survival skills have a way of following us into places where survival is no longer the assignment.
Our children now have more language than we did when we were their age, and sometimes that abundance of language makes adults suspicious. It can look as though new identities are multiplying when what may actually be multiplying is recognition. Vocabulary gives people a way to describe an experience that already existed. Learning the word for something does not manufacture the thing.
A person does not develop migraines because someone finally explains what a migraine is. Left-handed people were not invented when we stopped forcing children to write with their right hands. Queer people were not created by having more accurate words for sexual orientation and gender. Autistic people were not produced by better diagnostic frameworks. Language can increase visibility, but visibility and invention are not the same thing.
Sometimes getting a word for yourself is one of the most relieving experiences a person can have. “Oh. There are other people like me. That explains something.”
Those realizations can be profoundly stabilizing, especially for children who have spent years assuming everyone else experiences the world the same way they do and somehow handles it better. Imagine being autistic without knowing autism is part of your experience. Imagine being queer while believing every model of adulthood available to you excludes your future. Imagine experiencing gender dysphoria when the only gender-nonconforming people you have seen were treated as punchlines. Imagine having sensory needs while assuming everyone else is equally miserable and simply more disciplined about tolerating it.
A word does not solve everything. Sometimes it simply tells a child they are not the only one, which is a powerful place to begin.
And yes, kids experiment. They try on language, clothes, communities, identities, aesthetics, beliefs, haircuts, politics, terrible shoes, and entire personalities. This is not new either. Gen X did not exactly emerge from adolescence as a generation known for sober experimentation and restrained personal styling. Some of us spent six months dressed like Madonna. Some of us discovered punk and made it everyone’s problem. Some of us built our identities around bands whose members now qualify for Medicaid. Civilization endured.
The point is not that every label a child tries will become permanent. The point is that exploration is part of learning who you are, and humiliation is a terrible teaching method. Parents do not have to predict the ending. We are not placing bets on which haircut becomes a lifelong identity. We are trying to create a relationship in which our children can tell us what they are experiencing while they figure themselves out.
That is where our own memories can become useful instead of merely nostalgic.
Most Gen X adults remember a weird kid. Some of us WERE the weird kid. Some of us loved one. Some of us bullied one. Some of us watched somebody else get bullied and stayed quiet because being too close to weirdness could be socially contagious. Some of us became adults who now feel embarrassed by how narrow our understanding once was. Good. Embarrassment can be productive if it leads somewhere.
It can make us slower to laugh when a child presents differently. It can make us more curious before we decide something is attention-seeking. It can make us question whether “normal” is actually a meaningful standard or just shorthand for familiar to the people currently in charge. It can help us notice which children are being edged out of rooms and which environments demand an exhausting amount of performance before they offer belonging.
It can make us the adult who sees a cluster of weird kids laughing together and thinks, “Oh good. They found each other.” I love that possibility because one of the things age has changed for me is how I interpret the sight of kids who stand out. I do not automatically wonder why they cannot blend in. I wonder whether they have found someplace they do not have to. There is a difference.
Belonging changes the body. You can see it when somebody stops bracing. You can hear it in the volume of their voice. You can watch a child who seemed awkward somewhere else suddenly become funny, animated, competent, generous, or completely at ease. Sometimes the most useful question a parent can ask is not, “Why does my kid act like this?” It is, “Where do they stop having to manage themselves so carefully?” That question can tell you a lot about the child. It can tell you even more about the room.
We often talk about helping kids adapt to the world, and of course some adaptation is necessary. Everybody has to learn how to move through environments that were not designed specifically for them. But adaptation should not become a one-way contract in which the child is always the person expected to change. Families can adapt. Schools can adapt. Churches can adapt. Sports programs can adapt. Pride events can adapt. Workplaces can adapt. Grandparents can adapt. Adults who have spent decades insisting “this is just how it is” can, remarkably, adapt.
Gen X should understand this better than almost anyone. We were handed rotary phones and now carry tiny computers that argue with us about screen time. We recorded songs off the radio and now ask a machine to play whatever we want. We learned to drive with paper maps and somehow survived GPS. Adaptation is not exactly foreign territory for us.
The question is where we direct it. We can ask children to become more familiar to us. Or we can become more capable of recognizing them. That does not mean every difference needs a diagnosis, every eccentricity needs a label, or every unusual preference is a profound revelation. Sometimes weird is just weird. That is allowed too.
Kids should not have to turn their differences into exceptional talents before adults decide those differences deserve respect. A child does not need to become a brilliant artist, activist, engineer, performer, entrepreneur, or visionary to justify having been difficult to categorize at twelve. They are allowed to become a perfectly ordinary adult with a strange hobby, a job they mostly like, a few people they trust, and very strong opinions about the texture of socks. Your child should not have to be exceptional enough to earn protection.
That is one of the traps in the “weird kids become successful adults” story. It can accidentally turn acceptance into another performance requirement. We should love the strange kid because maybe someday the strange kid will invent something. No. We should make room because they are a person now.
So, when a child shows us something we do not immediately understand, perhaps the first question does not have to be how quickly we can return them to normal. We can get curious about what they are telling us. What makes them comfortable? What drains them? Where do they relax? Who do they become around their people? What happens when they stop performing? What do they know about themselves that the adults around them have not caught up to yet?
We spent a lot of our childhoods learning how to survive being sorted. Our kids may be giving us an opportunity to build something different. We do not have to understand every new word immediately. We do not have to recognize every version of childhood. We do not have to pretend change is never confusing or that parents arrive at every conversation perfectly prepared.
But we can remember that the adults from our childhood were often extremely confident about things they did not understand. We can choose a little more humility. We can remember that unfamiliar does not mean invented, dangerous, broken, or wrong. Sometimes the kid everybody called weird was telling the truth about themselves long before the rest of us had the vocabulary to hear it. We know more words now. I hope that means we can listen sooner.
Thank you for making room for this conversation.
