Me, My Son, and Our ‘Star Wars’ Obsession

On Friday night, for the third consecutive December, my son and I will be planted in front of the opening of a newStar Warsmovie.

My son’s aStar Warsfan like I was aStar Warsfan, like 40 years’ worth of fathers and sons areStar Warsfans. When he was younger, we played with my old action figures; now, we quiz each other on such important topics as bounty hunter names. We make fun of plot holes and Hayden Christensen, we binge-watchStar Wars Rebels, we discuss why no one in eight movies has ever built a walkway with a handrail. I tell myself he’s picking up all the messages about internal conflict and fathers and sons, but he’s basically in it for the jokes and exploding spaceships, like I was.

As it happens,Star Warsis hardly the only interest we share: Like me, he’s into Springsteen, he memorizes Weird Al lyrics, follows the Cubs, and … well, you see where this is going. We don’t share every interest, of course — I visibly recoil when forced to endureVenturianTale,the illogically popular YouTube series in which two of Earth’s most bothersome juveniles record themselves playing Minecraft for something like nine hours at a time. But we have much in common, he and I, and the comfort of sharing so many interests has lately bumped up against a second and more insistent thought: Wait, am I sharing these interests, or creating them?

我们信奉个人独立思考和奖discovery and remind our children that just because we’re intoDarkness on the Edge of Townand have certain opinions aboutpolitics, God,vacation destinations, and free agency, they’re under no obligation to follow suit and will, in all likelihood, one day impulsively decide to take the opposite stance just to gauge our reaction/be jerks.

But with my kid turning out enough like his father that Apple’s photo-face-scan algorithm thinks we’re each other, I’m left to wonder: Am I not doing that enough? Is it pure luck that his interests are turning out to mirror my own? Do I just have really good tastes? Or am I somehow directing him only to watch, listen to, and appreciate things that I also watch, listen to, and appreciate? I’m not arguing that self-worth derives from one’s level of interest inStar TalkandSherlock Holmes, but how much is he developing into his own person, and how much is he emulating me?

Whether you’re a music dad, or a football dad, or an astrophysics dad, or an accountant dad, there exists some blurry, bubbly space between sharing your interests with your children and shoving your music/college football team/politics at them, constantly, all the time. (This also goes for adults, but generally speaking we can unfollow you, leave the room, or invent reasons to blow off your Christmas parties.) Like us, our kids are sentient and spongy collections of all the stuff the world puts in front of them. Like us, our kids will develop their own drives and obsessions. But our kids, in their sticky formative years, generally don’t know anything exists until someone tells them about it, and — with luck and for a short spell anyway — that’s the domain of parents. (It is for this reason that my children were unaware of Kidz Bop until this spring, when the daycare got an Alexa and all hell broke loose.)

For some reason, there aren’t a lot of academic studies about the effect of repeated exposure toBorn to Runon the adolescent male mind. (I’d have to guess they’d all be positive, except for how it influences feelings about your back-breaking death-trap hometown.)

But we’re not exactly short on research on how parental involvement impacts career choice and general happiness.A studyby the National Career Development Associationfound that parental interest in a kid’s activities is one of the primary ways they influence that kid’s eventual career choice, according to the Journal of Stuff You Have Probably Figured Out Already. If you attend, post videos of, and gush over your kid’s piano recitals, your kid will likely wish to continue taking lessons. For a while at least.Teens, because they’re humans, regard involvement as acceptance.

Researchers at Southern Methodist University wrote about the myriad waysparents initiate, sustain, mediate, and react totheir kids’ career interests. So although science has yet to apply this theory to the shared appreciation of “Weird Al” polka medleys (specifically the one fromMandatory Fun) I’ll go ahead and assume the foundation is essentially the same: “Dad thinks this is funny, so I’ll see what else this Yankovic character has done and possibly learn to play the accordion.”

当然,这一切的反面就是在那里are few more efficient ways to ensure your children rejects something than jamming it down their throats. Passion drives interest, not pressure. To help arrive at some form of an answer, I did the only scientifically appropriate thing I could think of: I asked my son about all this. “Uh,” he responded thoughtfully, “I think I just like them because I like them?”

This was not helpful. None of this was helpful. So what I’m taking away is this: This world is reasonably large, and I should show him more of it.TheLast Jedishowing is at 8 p.m., so we should get there around 7, to make sure our tickets work. And, as all of us follow in footsteps and stand on shoulders in pursuit of finding who and what we’re supposed to be, and for this tiny stretch of time I’m lucky to have things I share with my son, things I can hold onto as he careens off into adolescence, detaches from me, and starts spending his own time in some galaxy far, far away.