What Were the Parents Thinking?
By: Jim Shulman
Tags: Promotion, Management And Leadership, Parents, Social Media, Responsibility

Occasionally (though increasingly rarely these day) a magazine cover creates a national conversation — the Caitlin Jenner issue of Vanity Fair, the Time Magazine Person of the Year, the New Yorker Twin Towers shadow drawing — come to mind. The latest sensation is the cover of this month’s Esquire magazine, featuring 17 year old Ryan Morgan, an upper middle class Caucasian guy from Wisconsin and how he navigates the modern world of social media, societal expectations, and adolescent angst. From all indications he’s a fairly decent, unremarkable guy.

Should he be on this cover? A pointed question to his parents.

Thanks to his newfound fame he’s become a cause-celebe for any number of reasons that are almost exclusively Rorschach tests for contemporary culture — the patriarchy, white male privilege, teen disengagement, generational angst, or pick your own favorite. One commentator from the New York Times mentioned how his fame has already resulted in social media notoriety, something that won’t go away for, like, ever. He now will be known (and followed) as the young white teen guy from Esquire.

Frankly, I’m less concerned about the various contemporary culture issues than an otherwise unasked question:

What on earth were his parents thinking? Since he’s 17, they had to approve his participation in the article.

Are they from Pluto? Could they possibly have believed that anything positive would have outweighed the considerable negative consequences of their son’s fame/notoriety? From the time they receive their first computer access kids are taught, in school and by responsible parents, that a digital reputation lasts forever. Whether it’s sexting, slurs, or even moronic tweets anything shared winds up on today’s permanent record. To answer Ryan’s point on the cover, “I don’t know what I can do,” the answer should have been obvious to his parents: stay clear of somebody else’s agenda, here Esquire’s need to gin up controversy and sell magazines.

The Morgans shouldn’t be surprised in the least, since there’s ample precedent. A half-century ago PBS aired a revolutionary TV series, “An American Family”, which was a cinema-verite view of the upper middle-class Loud family. While the Louds thought the show would be another “Leave It To Beaver”, it turned out to be closer to “Death of a Salesman”. The Loud children were disengaged, the father philandered, the parents divorced, a son came out of the closet (in an era when that was incredibly shocking). The subsequent publicity made the family members heroes/pariahs for decades, leading to taunting and ostracism, and a dramatic decline in the father’s business. It was the progenitor of reality TV.

More recently, consider what happened to the Honey Boo Boos and Michael Sorrentinos after their national fame. They have to live with the aftermath of their programs.

The issue isn’t the guy in the teen bedroom — the problem’s in the master bedroom down the hall.

Jim Shulman is the founder of Elsinore Business Associates, a coaching firm that specializes in working with smart, successful, and dissatisfied entrepreneurs. For almost twenty years he has coached financial advisors, attorneys, CPAs, and other business owners, whose services range from auto restoration to personal care products for fundamentalist Christian women. Jim offers a complimentary fifteen minute discussion; contact him at jims@elsinoreba.com or Twitter @jim_shulman