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Dear care and food,
I am a single mother of a 16 year old son, Mark. Mark is generally a well-behaved child and gets good grades. So I try not to get too caught up in his business, especially since so much of it seems like a man’s thing that I don’t understand.
His current interest is military. Some of his friends had veterans or active duty military members in their families, so I think that’s where he got interested. I remember when I was a teenager there were boys who had similar obsessions. But while most of them focused on cool vehicles, explosions, etc., Mark took his interest in mathematics and started applying it to his friends’ stories, and the way he did that stuck with me. was strange.
For example, his latest school newspaper was supposed to analyze what was happening in the news. I looked it up and it was about the Ukraine war. That’s what it is now, fair enough. But it’s not what I would consider a normal subtopic, like the horrors of war or whether governments like Putin’s are more aggressive. This is an extensive analysis of open-source photos of destroyed Russian vehicles, looking at what was destroyed over time, and found that Russia only replaced about a third of its losses with newly manufactured vehicles. The conclusion is that the remaining vehicles are being replaced by very old vehicles. Storage. Photos of Russian storage yards, some assumptions about how many 1960s vehicles would need to be cannibalized to create one working vehicle, and how many 1960s vehicles would need to be cannibalized to make one working vehicle, and if Russian vehicles will grow at the current pace by 2026. It is estimated that it will run out sometime in the summer.
Help! My sister foolishly bought a farm in order to “raise her children on the land.” Now she’s trying to drag me into the dirt. I’m very worried about my wife’s behavior when she’s looking at the baby.My wife, a stay-at-home mom, was supposed to go back to work. Rather, she is turning our family upside down. My sister-in-law asked us to adopt twins because she missed her old life. For some reason, we said yes.
It’s not even written in normal English. I had to get him to translate some of it, like what “operational tempo” means and why it’s good that Russian is clearly unsustainable. And this is just the latest example, he’s been doing this more and more over the past few months. I’ll admit I’m not the most knowledgeable expert on what teenage boys think, but I can’t keep track of them like I normally would. Should I be concerned about this? If so, what should I do?
— tired and confused
Dear, thank you for your hard work.
I don’t think you need to worry too much here. I’m concerned about whether your son worships a dictator or supports Russia’s campaign against Ukraine. Instead, he seems to have a geeky fascination with war vehicles. Be sure to talk to him about the human cost of this conflict and see if he has empathy for those who have lost their lives and way of life. If you have moral objections to war or the military in general, talk to him about your values so he can consider joining if he ever thinks about joining. If he seems interested, talk about the difficulties veterans face when returning from war: PTSD, loss of limbs, difficulty readjusting to society, etc. Note his interest in war. But at this point, there’s nothing to worry about too much.
–Jamila
