Mansfield mother sharing skills to get teenagers talking
Rachel Parker has been using social media to encourage other parents to engage in critical thinking with their children
A Mansfield mother has been taking to social media to encourage other parents to start talking with their children and build a relationship.
Rachel Parker decided to use the skills she's acquired around critical thinking to teach others how to talk to their teenagers.
It all began after she watched the Netflix series Adolescence - which has already sparked conversations around radical content in relation to women and girls.
It's something that Rachel says is hard to manage for any parent:
"I think the idea of losing my son to this red pill movement made me realise that there are going to be plenty of other parents out there that are worried having seen this for the first time and they'll also not want to lose their child to it. I think the most important thing really is to start the conversation, I think one of the hardest things that we have to do as parents is tackle this kind of information being spread online that is often difficult to understand, let alone explain to a youngster.
"You know, they always say the teenage years are the hardest, and I think this is why, there are so many influences out there now, and like I say in my videos I just want to give people a starting point. A suggestion of how they can engage with their child and breakdown the information that's coming in."
Rachel told us of the moment a few years ago that she felt her son had been influenced by rhetoric's being spread online:
"We were basically just having a normal conversation and he said to me, "well, all women are gold diggers anyway" and I was thinking, that's not something he would say or even think at 11 years old. So I didn't know where this had come from, and I asked him where he'd heard it, and if he actually believed it, and from there we had a full conversation about it. Since then we've been very open and honest with each other about the content we're seeing and just simple things too like how our days have been. I think it's vital having a close relationship with youngsters nowadays, because of all that content that's just out there online."