looksmaxing

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.

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.

i am 16 years old in the uk. that is not normal(especially the hammer part). it is also not good for your body. try to get them to stop, but i would recoommend to start with monetary rewards. e.g. dont looksmax for a week and get £20. the next week to a bit less. etc.
otherwise, ask your rav. but im just saying that it is not healthy. i have friends who looksmax and ive NEVER heard of them using a hammer.
also, maybe learn with them the sefer on kibbud av veam from reb zecharia wallerstien (https://www.artscroll.com/Books/9781422625538.html?srsltid=AfmBOopn9EDzRXNafhnD4jdPxnOOLWOh84Ynxj8yI645T41YdzTWgCiQ) and after they start to get an appreciation for you, and follow halachos, you can tell them not to looksmax anymore.
hatzlocha rabba!!

mostly Latino cultural influence in origin.

Re: Looksmaxing/Jawline Hitting – Please Help

I’ll be honest with you.
When I saw this thread I thought it was a joke post. Then I read it again and realized it was real, which is somehow worse.
A hammer.
He used a hammer.
I have been on this forum for eleven years. I have seen threads about Alexa in the kitchen, I have seen threads about a sheitel that looked too good, I have seen the great kugel wars of 2019. I have seen a thread that was ostensibly about a leaky eruv but was actually about a parking space dispute that had been going on since 2003. And yet somehow “my son is hitting his face with a hammer for the jawline” is a new one even for me.
Now. Let’s discuss.
The boy wants a better jawline. Fine. This is the goal. The jaw is a legitimate area of the face, nobody is disputing this. The question — the only question — is the methodology. And the methodology here is a hammer, which, as a methodology, has some issues. Not the least of which being that it does not work. I looked this up. A doctor was consulted. The bones do not respond to this the way the internet claims. What the bones DO respond to is being left alone, which is free, requires no equipment, and has the added benefit of not landing anyone in an emergency room trying to explain to a non-Jewish doctor what a “looksmaxxing bochur” is.
I want to point out something that nobody in this thread has mentioned yet.
This boy did research. He found a community. He developed a vocabulary — and what a vocabulary it is: “mogging,” “looksmaxxing,” “bonesmashing,” terms that I have now been forced to learn against my will and will carry with me to my grave. He created a regimen and stuck to it consistently enough that his father eventually found him mid-session. That is not a bochur without ambition or follow-through. That is a bochur with tremendous kochos who has been catastrophically, historically, almost impressively misadvised regarding where to point them.
The same discipline, applied literally anywhere else, produces results. Applied to the face with a hammer, it produces this forum post.
To the father. You asked what to do. Here is what you do.
Step one — non-negotiable, no qualifications, no asterisks — you take the hammer. You don’t discuss the hammer. You don’t negotiate about the hammer. You don’t convene a family meeting to process everyone’s feelings about the hammer and its role in the household. The hammer is gone. It goes to the toolbox, the toolbox goes to the garage, the garage gets a lock, and the key goes somewhere that a bochur with ambition and too much free time cannot locate it. This step happens before all other steps. There is no version of this situation where it doesn’t.
Step two — you don’t make this into a production. The more you treat this as a five alarm emergency requiring every available adult and several consultations, the more interesting it becomes. You take the hammer, you say very little, you make a face that communicates that you have seen things in this life and this is now one of them, and you move on. The yetzer hara feeds on drama. He has been producing it since Gan Eden and he is very good at it by now. Do not give him material.
Step three — and this is the step that actually matters — you find out what this boy is really looking for. Because it is not a jawline. Nobody searches the internet for a hammer because they need a jawline. They search because something else is going on, and the internet, which has an answer for everything and a correct answer for almost nothing, handed them a hammer and said this will fix it. It will not fix it. It never fixed anything. But something was being asked, and that question deserves a real response from a real person who knows this boy — not a username on a forum that probably also sells protein powder.
The websites also go. Not specifically because of the jawline content, but because any corner of the internet whose logical conclusion is a bochur hitting himself in the face has disqualified itself from his time and attention and does not deserve either.
Hatzlacha rabbah to the mishpacha.

P.S. I looked up what “mogging” means so you don’t have to. I wish I hadn’t. We’ll leave it at that.
P.P.S. I also looked up “bonesmashing,” which is apparently the technical term for what occurred in this child’s bedroom. Bonesmashing. As a wellness practice. As something a person chooses to do on purpose. We should all bentch gomel that we grew up before the internet and that our own adolescent mistakes required no tools heavier than a gel pen.