• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

Spoiler alert: Kid loves teaching Twitter to Dad

September 16, 2014 By Anne Leave a Comment

I never do movie reviews. But Chef is totally on-topic for NetFamilyNews, and not because some families have foodies in them. It’s because there’s a scene that illustrates better than anything I’ve seen on film how sweetly and respectfully social media can be folded into parenting. Sure, as in this scene, it can be a little bumpy and awkward at times (like parenting, like being a kid), but when done with honesty and love, we can’t really go wrong, and we need to remember that.

Photo from the film Chef
A less than meaningful father-son moment for Percy: Chef teaching kid about the merits of fruit (photo from the film Chef)

The scene is about 30 min. into the film. And the story leading up to it is about Carl Casper, a divorced, devoted dad and master chef whose parenting is distracted and career threatened by a risk-averse restaurant owner. One night, a foodie blogger’s brutal review of his food, his menu and him goes viral on Twitter. Chef Carl – played by Jon Favreau, who is also the film’s writer and director – doesn’t understand what happened or what going “viral” means, so he turns to his 10-year-old son Percy the social media expert for help in what’s portrayed as the first undistracted, meaningful exchange Percy’s had with his dad since Dad “left home.”

The text can’t possibly do justice to the actors’ treatment of father and son (Emjay Anthony) roles, but here it is anyway, a perfect example of the sweetness that can come from turning the tables and letting our kids school us in the social media apps and services they love:

Dad: You know about Twitter?
Kid: Yeah, I have an account.
Dad: How does it work?
Kid: It’s cool.
Dad: It’s cool? That’s how it works, ‘it’s cool’?
Kid: You tweet on it.
Dad: Is that like texting?
Kids: Nah.
Dad: Well, sign me up.
Kid: What do you want your user name to be?
Dad: Carl.
Kid: You can’t just put Carl, unless you add something.
Dad: Then, CarlCasper
Kid: Taken.
Dad: Someone took my name?
Kid: @ChefCarlCasper – is that cool?
Dad: Yeah, that’s good. [Kid spells it out while looking at screen, while Dad, worried and reflecting what he’s heard from his sous chef about social media, asks:] Is this for sex?
Kid: Eeew! Is that what you’re doing this for?
Dad: No, I’m not doing this for that. Someone wrote something bad, and I wanna see what they wrote.
Kid: Good…. $%@&!
Dad: Hey, you can’t talk like that. I don’t care if Mommie’s not around. I don’t want you cursing around here.
Kid: That review went viral.
Dad: What does that mean?
Kid: It means it got picked up and retweeted everywhere.
Dad: So all these ppl have read the review?
Kid: Yeah
Dad: $%@&!

Here’s where we find out how much this conversation means to Percy:

Kid: I think it’s kinda cool.
Dad: I don’t.
Kid: No, I mean us doing this.
Dad: Doing what?
Kid: You know, just hangin’ out.
Dad: We hang out all the time.
Kid: No, I mean, like, hanging out and doing something.
Dad: We do things.
Kid: No, I mean mot just watching something and doing something [they’d done plenty of things that Dad thought was fun for a kid but without any input from Percy]. Like, hangin’ out and talking – learning things from each other.
Dad: Well, I figured that with you living at Mom’s house and me working all the time, that you like to do fun things.
Kid: I think this is kinda fun, you know, just figuring stuff out, like when you lived at home.
Dad: I miss that too…. Hey, listen, could we twitter each other when we’re not in the same place?
Kid: Yeah…. Ok, so first you click here, and you have to enter your user name. You can also log in on your iPhone. You click this button here and you post so your followers can read it….

You can see what’s going on here, right? All the “fun” father-son weekend outings in the world that Dad can think up can’t, for Percy, measure up to really “doing something” – being able to share his expertise and meet a real need of his dad’s. Now that is love. And over the course of the film, the kid support expands from extremely effective social media marketing on this 10-year-old’s part (which is completely plausible) to serious cooking support in his dad’s food truck. But don’t take it from me, see the film. I think you’ll like it as much as I did.

Related links

  • “Why limiting our kids to 1-2 hours of screen time is ridiculous” at ABC News
  • In The Guardian, a refreshing headline: “Relax. You are not the perfect parent, and it’s OK to let Johnny use the iPad”
  • About a great project at an Australian university involving teens teaching parents social media (other teens’ parents)
  • “For our kids and ourselves: Presence in a digital age”
  • “The real goal of unplugging” and lots more on digitally related parenting
Share Button

Filed Under: kids, Parenting, Social Media, teens, Youth Tagged With: Chef, Emjay Anthony, film, Jon Favreau, parents, Social Media

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

NFN in your in-box:

Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

Connect with me on LinkedIn
Follow me on MASTODON
Friend me on Facebook
See me on YouTube

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

Categories

Recent Posts

  • Safety by co-design: How we can take youth online safety to the next level
  • Much-less-social media on Facebook’s 20th birthday
  • What child online safety really needs, senators
  • Welcome to 2024!
  • Supporting the youngest witnesses of this humanitarian crisis
  • Should our kids learn how to use generative AI? Well…
  • The missing piece in US child online safety law
  • Generative AI: July 2023 freeze frame

Footer

Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for toots on Mastodon or posts on our Facebook page, LinkedIn and Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

Categories

  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research

ABOUT

  • About NFN
  • Supporters
  • Anne Collier’s Bio
  • Copyright
  • Privacy

Search

Subscribe



THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Copyright © 2025 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.