A Love Letter From Big Brother Mommy & Daddy

Dearest Youthful Fruit of Our Loins—Our love for you is so rapacious and all-consuming, we even stalk you with GPS tracker apps!

John Allen Wooden / Epostasy / ©2025

Dearest Youthful Fruit of Our Loins,

Mommy and Daddy love you. We love you so obsessively, it reduces our entire identities to one-dimensional human podcasts who eat, breathe, and yammer nothing but parenting. In fact, our love is so rapacious and all-consuming, it even compels us to stalk you with GPS tracker apps; we’ve been doing it your whole life! Because privacy, schmivacy.

Now you may have heard on TikTok that “stalking” is bad—the kind of thing only a socially lobotomized incel does before livestreaming his rampage on Twitch—but that’s just not true. Search it up! You’ll see that stalking just means “following someone or something very closely and watching its every move”—exactly like Mommy and Daddy have done since your very first ultrasound. How else could we have already amassed 74,000 photos of you? (During potty training alone!) And so each and every day, we pore over our phone screens, fixating on a little blue dot that tells us exactly where you are. You’re welcome—because if we didn’t stalk you, you’d be dead faster than Grandma drains her White Claw while screaming at cable news!

Of course, your virtually guaranteed slaying isn’t the only reason we stalk you. Mommy and Daddy have four more very good ones:

1. PARANOIA: Despite our daily charade of brave adulting, Mommy and Daddy are actually quivering l’il fraidy-cats who view the entire world through a deranged lens of catastrophizing dread. We know full well that crime levels are at historic all-time lows, but because we grew up drowning our Count Chocula in milk from “MISSING CHILD” cartons, we still fret that if you stray even an inch past our Eye of Sauron gaze, you will be promptly butchered by an entire legion of cannibal terrorist child molesters.

2. ADDICTION: For all our tut-tut’ing about your generation being a pathetic pack of hopeless screen junkies, Mommy and Daddy are just as hooked on their phones as you are. And when we track you, it gives us yet another excuse to fire up our gadgets—ostensibly to engage in an act of responsible parenting—but really just to mainline another sweet, sweet hit of dopamine crack.

3. HYPOCRISY: When we were kids, if our parents had tried to strap a tracking device on us, we’d have either “accidentally” dropped it down a sewer drain, or deviously stashed it somewhere boringly safe before riding our bikes four miles to 7-Eleven to steal Twizzlers and JOLT! cola. But that was then, and this is now. Do as we say, not as we did.

4. DISAPPOINTMENT: Although we constantly shower you with effusive praise, the truth is that we are secretly so disappointed in you, we have zero faith whatsoever in you or your ability to navigate the world unless tethered to our digital apron strings. We don’t even think you’re capable of walking to school or speaking coherently with a human check-out clerk – let alone crossing a street where some dangerously quiet electric Hummer could instantly liquefy you into a crimson mist!

Why are we only telling you now? Not out of guilt, obviously, but because after all these years witnessing your generation’s glassy-eyed Internet stupor, we’re so confident in your bland conformist obedience, we know you’ll almost certainly just… shrug. Rebellion is for cringe beta olds, right? So keep those gadgets charged, kids. That way Mommy and Daddy will always be watching. Forever, and ever, and ever….

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