You’re scrolling through Facebook when you see it: your mom has posted another blurry selfie taken from below, commented “LOL SO TRUE!!!” on a clearly fake news article, and sent you a friend request for the third time this month because she forgot you’re already connected.
Your chest tightens. You love her, but watching your parents navigate social media feels like watching someone use chopsticks with oven mitts on.
Here’s the thing about generational social media habits: they reveal how differently we’ve learned to perform our identities online. When I worked in media, we tracked these patterns obsessively. The way someone posts tells you everything about when they came online and what rules they think apply.
Our parents didn’t grow up curating themselves for public consumption. They joined Facebook to see grandkid photos, not to manage their personal brand. But now they’re operating in spaces where every post becomes part of their permanent record, using rules from a world where photos lived in albums and opinions stayed at dinner tables.
The disconnect creates this specific flavor of secondhand embarrassment that millions of us share but rarely discuss. Because how do you tell your dad that his LinkedIn posts read like a robot learned English from motivational posters?
You don’t. You just quietly suffer through another caps-lock comment on your Instagram story.
1) They treat Facebook like it’s still 2008
Remember when Facebook was just for college kids sharing party photos? Your parents do too, except they think it still works that way.
They post seventeen photos from the same angle. They share every memory Facebook surfaces. They write “Happy Birthday!” on your wall when they could just text you.
The platform evolved into something more curated, more performative. We learned to post highlights, not documentation. One good photo, not the whole camera roll. But boomers are still operating like Facebook is a digital scrapbook rather than a public stage.
I helped a friend’s mom recently clean up her profile. She had 847 photos from one cruise. Not albums. Individual uploads. Each one captioned “Cruise 2023!” The repetition alone made my teeth hurt.
They’re not trying to overwhelm your feed. They just never got the memo that social media became about curation, not documentation.
2) The all-caps epidemic
WHY DO THEY TYPE LIKE THIS?
Every text, every comment, every single Facebook post. It reads like they’re constantly yelling at you through the screen. You’ve tried explaining that caps lock means shouting online. They nod, say they understand, then immediately send you another message: “THANKS FOR EXPLAINING HONEY.”
The weird part? They’re not angry. They genuinely think it’s easier to read. One dad told me he uses caps because “the letters are bigger.” I didn’t have the heart to explain zoom functions.
This habit alone has probably damaged more parent-child digital relationships than any privacy setting mishap. Nothing makes you want to ignore a message faster than seeing it arrive in aggressive capital letters.
“Did you see that article Mom shared about bananas being extinct by 2025?”
No, but I saw the part where it came from FreedomEaglePatriotNews.net.
The share-first, think-later approach makes every scroll through their timeline feel like fact-checking duty. They’ll post warnings about hackers that are themselves hacking attempts. They’ll share heartwarming stories about celebrities that those celebrities have publicly denied.
When I worked in media, we called this “source blindness.” They treat all information equally because they came from an era when published meant vetted. If it looked official, it probably was.
Now they’re swimming in an ocean of content where anyone can make anything look legitimate. They haven’t developed the reflexive skepticism we learned through years of being fooled online.
4) They comment like they’re writing letters
“Hello Susan! What a lovely photo. Harold had surgery last week but he’s recovering well. Did you hear about Martha’s grandson? He’s studying computers. Hope you’re staying warm. Love, Carol.”
Every comment becomes a full correspondence. They sign their names on platforms that already show their names. They include updates nobody asked for. They write complete paragraphs under posts that just needed a thumbs up.
This isn’t random. They’re applying letter-writing etiquette to instant communication. The formality, the updates, the signatures, they all come from a world where written communication was an event, not a reflex.
Meanwhile, we’ve learned that online brevity signals confidence. The more you write, the more you seem to need from the interaction.
5) They don’t understand privacy settings (but think they do)
Your mom thinks her posts are private because she set her profile to “Friends Only” in 2015. She doesn’t realize she’s been sharing to “Public” for three years because Facebook updated something and reset her preferences.
Your dad sends private information in public comments. Social security numbers in birthday wishes. Full addresses in event responses.
They’ll argue they’re being careful while simultaneously giving a stranger on Marketplace their entire life story before meeting them to buy a lamp.
The confidence-to-competence gap here is staggering. They’ve heard enough about internet safety to feel protected but haven’t internalized how exposed they actually are. It’s like watching someone wear a seatbelt incorrectly while insisting they’re a safe driver.
6) They use the wrong emoji reactions
Nothing says “I don’t understand this platform” like laughing-reacting to a death announcement.
They think the crying emoji means crying from laughter. They use the anger reaction for posts that make them sad. They heart-react their own posts.
You’ve watched them accidentally declare love for their dentist’s vacation photos and give a thumbs up to someone’s divorce announcement. The secondhand embarrassment is physically painful.
These aren’t just mistakes. They reveal how differently generations interpret digital symbols. We grew up learning these meanings collectively, in real-time. They’re trying to decode a language that evolved without them.
Someone posts about their coffee. Your dad comments about his colonoscopy.
The complete inability to read the room online creates these jarring moments where personal medical information appears under someone’s brunch photo. They treat every post like an invitation to share whatever’s on their mind.
“Looks delicious! Speaking of food, my doctor says I need to cut back on sodium. My blood pressure has been acting up lately. Remember when Uncle Phil had that heart thing?”
They’re not trying to hijack conversations. They just never learned that online spaces have invisible boundaries. Every comment box looks like an opportunity to connect, so they fill it with whatever feels relevant to them.
8) They friend request like it’s LinkedIn
Your mom sends friend requests to your boss, your ex, that person you matched with on Tinder once. She thinks she’s being supportive. She’s actually creating social chaos.
They don’t understand that online connections aren’t neutral. That friending your kid’s coworkers crosses invisible professional boundaries. That some relationships exist specifically because they don’t overlap.
I once watched a friend’s dad try to add everyone from her company after meeting them once at a work event. He thought he was being friendly. She spent weeks doing damage control.
The rules about who connects with whom online are completely invisible to them. They see social media as actually social, not as the carefully managed performance space we know it to be.
Final thoughts
These habits aren’t really about social media incompetence. They’re about two different worlds colliding online.
Our parents learned to communicate when words were scarce and photos were precious. When you had to mean something to say it publicly. Their habits reflect those values, just applied to the wrong context.
We grew up performing ourselves online, learning through brutal trial and error what works and what doesn’t. We know the unspoken rules because we helped write them.
The cringe we feel isn’t really about their posts. It’s about watching them navigate a space where the rules we take for granted are completely invisible to them. They’re playing soccer with basketball rules, wondering why everyone keeps blowing the whistle.
Maybe the kindest thing we can do is accept that they’ll never quite get it. Not because they can’t learn, but because they’re solving for different problems than we are. They want connection. We want control over our image.
Both are valid. Even if one involves a lot more caps lock than necessary.
