If you look through my texts with my parents, they are anything but dramatic. My mom sends me updates about her day and pictures of their golden retrievers acting the fool. My texts with my dad are probably less interesting than reading the phone book, and I don’t even think phone books exist anymore! He sends me New York Times articles, I send him security codes that, for some reason, go to my phone. It’s not an entertaining affair. If you looked at my texts with my parents from when I was a teenager, it might be a different story, but I know for a fact even at my most hormonal, we weren’t having full-tilt brawls over SMS. 

Unfortunately, some kids are in a position where they’re constantly having combative and uncomfortable conversations with their parents over texts. While some of those conversations are unspeakably upsetting, some are both harrowing and entertaining, and that’s where these cringey parenting texts come in.