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It is not time for me to make an effort post on this, so I offer instead some fragmented thoughts.
Or in general, they do not know how to ask, and we don't know how to answer.
This is how 100% of the young men I know operate (though it's not how I've seen boys operate, so naturally there's some hope left). It's universal. Where are all the women [effectively] flashing their tits at young men who take risks, anyway? (I am not a woman so I can't be part of the solution; men actually can't do this outside of very specific circumstances.)
This is a Boomer-parent-specific problem in general. We're 40 years into our society-wide 100-year Prohibition/Panic cycle on the kid-snatching thing so this is going to continue being a problem for the next 50 years.
It is society's allergy to risk that destroyed them. Scared their kids will touch a needle in the ballpit (wtf?), scared they'll get sick or hurt, scared of the inevitable lawsuit, scared of the judge that will find in the plaintiff's favor with financially ruinous results.
Yeah, but the men who really do this all converge on women's clothing these days. I prefer looser pants, and always have (there are a few things I'm not willing to compromise my otherwise high agreeableness on; this is one of them, not that I really need to do it these days), partially because of high sensitivity in relevant areas (mainly around the waist), but long skirts (and tights, when applicable; it's literally just long underwear lol) are warmer (they trap air, like a wetsuit does) and are easier to move around in than jeans are. They're softer and available in a wider variety of materials, too. If they fit better I wouldn't wear anything else. This happens with undergarments too; the male ones are bulky and relatively uncomfortable, but the female ones that still function when applied to male anatomy are actually the exact thing I want [provided I can hide that I'm doing it perfectly; this isn't actually a sex thing, but most people will take it as one, obviously]. While certain manufacturers have tried to make this for men, they put a stupid seam at the bottom length-wise, which defeats the entire purpose.
And this ultimately bleeds into their children. They stop asking. The "kids are naturally rebellious" meme is something Boomers have exposure to but not something that naturally happens if you're a half-competent parent (to the point that I believe the rebellious ones simply had incompetent parents, or ones that would fail to be consistent because 'it was convenient for my kid to take risks in childhood when they were small, now they're teen-aged and want to take larger ones and I'm big mad about that').
This is why, if they make the mistake of appearing before me, I tend to address them directly, because they aren't going to do that themselves. My goal when I meet one is, ultimately, to encourage the expression of... uh, expression in an environment of "everyone you know hates you, wishes you were dead/wishes you'd just go back to the iPad, and your co-ethnics won't help because they have internalized the exact same message, it's For Your Safety".
It's not exactly rocket science to figure out why teenagers are shunning drugs and having less sex. They have internalized "not an adult" (it's like that thing the kids do in IT, but in reverse, where not being an adult is the thing that gives you protection from the invisible clown that lives in the sewers) and they'll stay that way until they die- their kids will probably be all right, though, shame it'll cost them all their good years before they figure that out.
The first step to fixing a problem is making sure those affected are even acknowledging there's a problem with it in the first place.
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