Re: Looksmaxing/Jawline Hitting – Please Help
Oy vey, where do I even begin.
First of all, refuah shleimah to your son’s face.
Listen, I hear you, and I want you to know you are NOT alone in this parsha. Every generation has its nisyonos and this generation’s nisayon apparently involves hitting themselves in the face with hardware tools. The Ribono Shel Olam is really testing us.
Now let’s be real here. Fidget spinners – fine. Aura farming – whatever that means, also fine (I still don’t know what it means and b’ezras Hashem I never will). But a hammer is where we draw the line as a klal. This is no longer a “phase,” this is a safety issue, and your parental instincts – which are essentially the kol d’mama daka of parenting – are 100% correct.
A few eitzos:
1. Don’t panic, but do confiscate the hammer. Immediately. No psak sheila needed on this one.
2. “Everybody is doing it” is the oldest line in the sefer. Did everybody jump off the Williamsburg Bridge? The correct response to “everybody is doing it” has been the same since Avraham Avinu – be the one who doesn’t.
3. Get a Rav involved. Not because this is a shaila per se, but because sometimes bochurim listen to their Rav when they won’t listen to their father. It’s a painful emes but an emes nonetheless.
4. Have a calm conversation about what’s actually driving this. Looksmaxing, from what I understand (my own son BH only told me about it after I found his Reddit history, long story), comes from a very dark corner of the internet that tells boys they are not good enough as they are. That’s the ikar problem. The hammer is just the symptom. A boy hitting himself in the face is a boy who needs to hear that he has tzelem Elokim and that no jawline is going to change that.
5. Limud zchus on the boy. He’s in 11th grade. This is a hard age. The yetzer hara is very creative and now apparently has a TikTok account.
Hatzlacha rabbah, and again – please take the hammer. really.
