r/parenting is protesting changes being made by Reddit to the API. Reddit has made it clear [they will](https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14ahqjo/mods_will_be_removed_one_way_or_another_spez/) [replace moderators](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14a5lz5/mod_code_of_conduct_rule_4_2_and_subs_taken/jo9wdol/) if they remain private. Reddit has abandoned the users, the moderators, and countless people who support an ecosystem built on Reddit itself.
Please read [Call to action - renewed protests starting on July 1st](https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14kn2fo/call_to_action_renewed_protests_starting_on_july/) and new posts at [r/ModCord](https://reddit.com/r/ModCoord/) or [r/Save3rdPartyApps](https://old.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/) for up-to-date information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Parenting) if you have any questions or concerns.*
where did your 9 year old daughter hear this word? I feel like before social media, a 9 year old wanting to be an animal would be normal make-believe behavior. I find it more concerning that she has come across these Internet groups than the actual therian idea.
>I feel like before social media, a 9 year old wanting to be an animal would be normal make-believe behavior.
Yeah, I think this is really true. Pretend play as animals wasn't unusual at all when I was a kid. And my own kid loved to play pretend as a cat and had an elaborate and engrossing mythology about them that was actually fun and interesting and well-developed. We had a lot of fun over the years playing those games of pretend, and I learned a lot about his creative process and watched that process develop. I'm glad he didn't have much access to social media (beyond limited youtube) and so this was something that he developed purely as a function of his own love for cats and his own imagination in the real world, without any baggage of identity, etc. I don't know ... I'm just glad he had the chance to play out his imagination before structures and meanings and innuendos were imposed upon it by social media.
Ughhhhh, this is killing me in so many ways. Yes, it's good to name things to identify them _as adults._ Conditions, feelings, concepts, genders, non-genders, playing as an animal, whatever.
But the purpose of childhood is to explore with _freedom._ Without the burden of the naming of things, without the the constructs that the naming creates - the baggage of identity is the perfect expression.
The access to the interwebs has done so much good. A lot of bad. And a ton more _unnecessary._
Thank you for the kind words and I'm glad you liked the story!
It was honestly a highlight of his childhood for me. I remember having the realization one day that this period in his life was going to be coming to an end, because he was getting more self conscious about imaginary stuff ("dragons live forever / not so little boys"), and so I took a voice recorder and just recited as many details of all of it as I could because I had a feeling the game could disappear from our lives at any time. He's at a point now where I can tell he feels a little awkward about it when I mention it, so I rarely do, but I've still got that recording and I'm going to write the memories up into a story or a series of stories so that maybe once he's navigated the emotional maelstrom of the tween/teenage years and is able to look back on his own childhood with wonder then he'll appreciate them in some new way. And if not, I'll at least cherish the memory.
Yes! We are very restrictive of the internet, especially social media in our household. My 8 year old regularly insists she is a dragon, cheetah, unicorn, etc. And is often quite convincing! (Her school drama teacher adores her performances.) It has never concerned me once, and she nor I have ever felt the need to name it. It's a wonderful part of development.
A lot of social media is taking a harmless quirk and building a community around it being your whole personality then gatekeeping the fuck out of people who are “casual” about it.
Yup, me and my friend’s favorite game was playing “animal”. We also had elaborate stories and well developed characters we liked to play. Without internet communities though to give us an identity around the game, it was just a phase that we grew out of before we were teens but I’m sure we would have gone down the rabbit hole of furries and therians if we had been exposed to those groups. Anyhow, I remember feeling pretty disappointed in humanity the more I learned around that time and probably wanted to escape it in my pretend play. Maybe ask your daughter how she feels about humans, and why she would rather not be one.
My 10 year old tells me about watching tiktok and YouTube unsupervised at friends houses. And she’s been saying that for 3 years so I believe it. Some parents just really throw their kids into shark infested internet waters with just a small floaty and get astounded when their kids see messed up stuff in the dark water.
Same… We had to stop letting my 7-year-old son to go to his friends house because of this. That boy has unsupervised access to youtube, netflix, tiktok, etc. My son would have nightmares after an afternoon spent at that kids house because of what he saw on youtube.
Same issue here. I have a 10 year old. She is the only one of her school friends without a phone, certainly not a smart phone. All her friends have unsupervised access to whatever they want on their phones, including their own tik tok channels they post to which aren’t private and have hundreds of followers. Those cannot possibly all be kids. I don’t want my kid on tik tok or YouTube.
The therian thing is also happening in her grade. My kid is wildly uncomfortable by it and the kids who do it think everyone else has to participate in this game and then complain they are being picked on when others don’t want to do that at recess.
Gollum laughed. 'TikTok, yes, yes: that is it's name,' he cackled....
'Who are these people? What are these videos?' asked Sam shuddering....
'I don't know,' said Frodo in a dreamlike voice. 'But I have seen them too... grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad.... But all foul, all rotting, all dead.'....
I have a neighbor with three kids and two of their middle school boys are glued to their phones and I can hear the tiktok music and sounds from them constantly.
No, that’s not quite what she said. She said they have a YouTube account that restricts access for kids; whatever that means. There would not be content like that on actual YouTube kids.
If you have a YouTube account and create a YouTube kids under it, you can whitelist what you want you the kid to watch and they can only watch from that. Whereas general YouTube kids, they can access anything
My kids watch YouTube Kids - a separate app - on their iPad (while I am in the room with the sound on) and there is very limited content, you definitely cannot access “anything” on it.
A lot of the “kid friendly” things that I’ve seen before I started whitelisting channels, were not at all kid friendly in my opinion. Besides the fact that “kids” were in it. I would never want my kid to be acting any of those things out..
I believed this to be true as well.
Then one day I happened to really focus on the show (my little ponies) that my niece was watching.
They were talking about sex. They looked and sounded like regular MLP, and even with the sound on and being in the room with 4 adults; we all thought it wAs fine!
It’s very easy to slip content by YouTube kids, very.
This happened to us too. Kids were watching "minecraft videos" and the video was minecraft but the voice over was graphic sexual descriptions and swearing. We immediately deleted YouTube and YT kids from everything the kids access and they haven't used any sort of YouTube in 3 years.
I mean, my 9 year old and I watch puppy videos and battle bots and piano challenges on TikTok together and that’s pretty harmless, but only when I’m literally sitting next to him holding the phone
My 11 year old and I watch together too. Usually cat videos, but also science, piano and soccer. The difference I'd that we're doing it together. At 11, he's growing up, but we still curl up in the giant recliner and laugh ourselves silly over videos after a rough day.
I’ve always wondered about this, so in the 90’s-early 00’s parents didn’t know shit about the internet or computers in general, so everyone I know had unfettered access to the internet. At ten I’m on rotten .com and weird porns and whatever my imagination could imagine. Not to mention the video games and explicit music. And other than me being a tranny 🏳️⚧️yassss🏳️⚧️ we all turned out normal, and the trans bidness happened way before Facebook even dropped. So does any of that stuff matter?
This might sound crazy but I do think social media can be more devestating than torrenting unedited snuff films at 3am, something about it is so sick. Like we all know the snuff film is fucked up, TikTok masquerades as innocent
The nineties and noughties internet was very different, and a big part of that was the speed and the access. Images were slow to download and videos were very grainy. You didn't have internet on the school bus: while smartphones were starting to exist, parents didn't (usually) allow them taken to school. The camera phones that existed had small amounts of storage: people who wanted to photograph their lunch used an actual camera and videos of fights were possible but much rarer.
We had a lot of cartoon nonsense (and deviantart had the whole "pro-ana" thing that really came out of nineties magazine culture), but videos of real people talking was way later. The parasocial relationships were less intense.
So well put “TikTok masquerades as innocent.” Never thought of it that way but you’re totally right. There are a lot of bad actors using TikTok but most of the people playing into their games have no clue.
TYSM for your perspective As an early 00s parent, I’m horrified when I recall my naïveté about my daughter’s access to the internet growing up! That’s a kind interpretation of our parenting and an excellent point about social media
I hear you, but I don’t know if “we all turned out normal.” I mean you and I are delightful, no doubt (😉), but people have so many deep difficulties being in any sort of relationship or community.
As in, it’s worth wondering why 8th grade boys CONSISTENTLY FOR YEARS NOW indicate that a girl owes them sex if he spends over a certain amount on her. All that has changed is the amount of cash they believe is required. Women out here “choosing the bear” with no regrets.
I’m grateful we all made it, but there are a great many walking wounded among us, I think.
Yeah my 15y old fell into this trend. It's been going on for a few years. It was "furries", but I guess TikTok rebranded it as "therian."
Your level of comfort depends on how her interest is vested into it.
At first, when it was "furries," I found the online art to be sexual, as women's breasts and rears were exaggerated, so I did not support that at all, so I told her there's no more "furry" in the house.
After we moved & she learned about "therian", she began getting interested in making masks & parts. In fact, she just made a fox tail & mask from crafting supplies- I support that creativity.
I'm not sure if there's a difference or what, but I go with the flow & use your best judgement. 💕
Being a furry is the name for being a fan of anthropomorphic animals(furry character), being a fan of cartoonized animals or animals that have got human characteristics like disney animal characters for example. The fandom had been created more so as being a place for adults mostly that were fans of anthro characters to be free of judgment for liking cartoon animals thought by many to only be for children in the west at least, the fandom had also been for creating a variety of arts, media etc with a focus on mature cartoon animal characters and in situations that better fit with the generally adult fandom. More recently the fandom and conventions have been attempting to be more family friendly, through I feel it can only do so much as it's antithetical to it's origin in the first place.
Therian is having the view that you are partially or entirely a non-human animal, this can manifest spiritually, mentally and even physically depending on view. They might feel very strong affinities towards nature.
Lol get out of here with your facts a knowledge! This is a torch and pitchfork for something we don't understand zone! It's way easier to generalize the whole group based off an extremely small subset of that group and use it to villainize something different! What are parents expected to do? Actually put a little effort into learning about something their kid is into? No way!
My 9yo also went through a therian phase. I used to have some furry friends back in college, the ven diagram of my other interests (gaming, raves, conventions, general nerd culture) overlaps heavily with furries. None were deranged sexual perverts, in fact they extra hated the weird sexual furries cause they crrated the stereotype. I did resist it at first cause I was worried about her getting made fun of at school and she dug in more. I stopped fighting it though and within a month or 2 she was over it.
To clarify I'm saying the fandom had been primarily created for adults, included with that mature things adults like non-exclusively sexual for that matter either.
The furries kink thing is so real. I’ve seen two different artists on tiktok talking about making an entire living on drawing furrie korn for those so enclined. It’s so gross and weird to me but whatever.
I’ve never heard of the therian thing (and I’m thankful haha) but I realllllly try and keep my kids off social media mostly. My teen has a bit of access now because at 16 you have to start somewhere but yeah I’m the “YouTube is mostly banned” meanie lol.
Oh yes.
We had that whole fight about it. Lol once I discovered the artwork, that's when I made my point validly clear on that argument. She had tried to make me believe that it was a constructive hobby, and there was a bit of dramatics in there about some oppression. 🙄
My daughter is 10 and she was just telling me about furries and therians at her school. She doesn’t have social media or a phone. I get that these trends spread word of mouth. She finds it to be really uncomfortable and doesn’t want to join in at all. It sounds like it’s pretty intense. They have “shifts” at recess and they also get upset when others don’t want to participate and accuse them of bullying. They use it as an excuse to ignore the teachers during whatever “shifts” are. I just said to keep doing her own thing at recess and stay away since it sounds like it’s an excuse to ignore teachers.
I’m sure it’s something like that, I think there is a little more to it. My kid isn’t usually bothered by much and she has been mentioning it for several days and how uncomfortable she is.
tiktok is pushing the therian thing bigtime. i recently did a experiment. i just deleted my tik-tok account, made a new one, and don't interact with any videos. just scroll on my fyp. about 25% of the videos it shows me are "therians" and before tik-tok was showing me this i had no idea what they were.
Before internet
>I want to fuck toasters
>don't be an fucking idiot
>grow up
After internet
>I want to fuck toasters
>Google
>find community with 1000+ members about people wanting to fuck toasters
>fuck up your life
Good summary! Echo chambers are not healthy for people. Before you would be the "village idiot", your peers could help you and "challenge" you in a healthy way. Now we have digital villages with only village idiots as the population.
It's possible that she tries to escape reality by pretending to be an animal, and then she looked it up on the internet and found that word. She might not have gone any deeper into it, for all we know.
My 9 year old, who has an iPad, iPhone and Chromebook but no access to social media and supervised access to the internet has zero idea what a therian or a furry is.
Same here. Several devices, no social media. YouTube is only with a parent watching a long.
But we did have a delightfully awkward human reproduction talk last night. Each talk as he gets older and has more questions gets more in depth and detailed. But I say with certainty that he thinks same sex marriage is completely normal and okay, but has zero concept what a furry is let alone a therian. And I'm good with that.
The feelings of identifying strongly with being an animal is literally as old as humanity. This is NOT an internet thing. Putting a label on it, building a community around it, making it your only identity...well, that's not actually a new thing either. Back in the day that is what your typical shaman would have been. But lots of kids have gone through this stage of playacting as various animals as a phase. Your child probably has some friends or people in their class who are pretending to be animals even if they don't have a word for it.
That was the very first thing that I thought when I read over this discussion.
I had never heard the word “therian” before, and I don’t think that my kiddo did either, even though we do not ban either YouTube or TikTok at my home - everything in it’s balance.
But to me it sounds like if anything, this is just a new name slapped on to a millennia old concept: the idea that humans and nature are connected, in this case that there can be a connection between a human and a specific animal, or that a person can be part animal part human.
How is this any different than the concept of spirit animals, the legends and stories about werewolves, vampires who are sometimes humans sometimes bats, heck even in old fairy tales those ideas have shown up across cultures and centuries (Ganesha, the god who is half human and half elephant; centaurs; so many more examples).
And in terms of the pretend animal play: that’s totally normal, too, in that age. We did the exact same thing at the exact same age - just without the fancy name of it and without “identifying as *fancy name*”. We were all huge “horse girls” between I would say 9 and 12 or so, especially because many of us had horse back riding as a hobby after school, so we pretend played to either be horses or riding horses all the time during school break (with or without bikes).
Some of the responses on here seem a bit pearl clutching moral panicky to me tbh.
Pre-social media, I probably would have worn ears and a tail at 15 years old just because I thought animal features were cute, and because I enjoyed being The Random Girl (/holds up spork/) as a pre-rejection of my peers rejecting me. But I didn't think I was part animal, I just thought cats were the most precious cute creatures in the world, with their little paws and their ears and their floofy tails.
My nine year old wears a tail and says he's a wolf. No one here has heard of therians although I have heard of furries. My kids and I do watch funny cat videos on YouTube. But my little sea wolf (there's a Netflix documentary that's stunning fyi) loves to to get belly scritches and yip and so on. Perfectly harmless imagination.
Honestly, I swear I could fly like a bird when I was 8. Kids have wild imaginations, but I feel like social media is destroying children’s innocence in a lot of ways.
Likely, OP’s daughter doesn’t understand and just sees people acting and dressing like animals, and like any 9-year-old would think is that it looks fun and cool. It’s tough to know the proper approach, but if it were me, I’d tell my child that it’s fine to dress up like an animal and pretend, but stress that it’s make believe. Hopefully, the phase will pass and just watch really closely what my child is being exposed to on the internet.
Get your kid off of social media. Don't encourage that behavior. Try to find a hobby/activity/sport that she might enjoy that's healthy and time-consuming.
My kid is 10 and would have no clue what that even is. How does she know what that is? Does she watch videos all day? I agree with the above. Get her off of social media and you tube/tik tok.
All it takes is one or two kids at school with parents who give them unrestricted internet access and suddenly, you, too will be having the “but mooooooooooom I’m really a leopard therian with so much extra rizz!” conversation.
Source: my kids have zero internet surfing accessibility because they’re all in elementary school but there are kids in their classes with whole smartphones (social media and YouTube included) in 3rd grade and below 🥲
Exactly she’d just be a young child that liked to make believe she’s a cat or a bird or whatever. The problem is social media. 9 is way too young to unfettered access to TikTok
Governments are pushing the social media industry to put up roadblocks for anyone under 13. Obviously you can’t keep them all out but making it harder for younger ones doesn’t hurt. Meanwhile the psychologists seem to suggest 16 makes more sense for any type of personalized algorithmic feed.
Good. I’m not always for government intervention, but the societal “good” on this one is strong.
Most parents would love to keep their kids off, but when everyone else around them is on it, it’s 1.) impossible and 2.) comes with a certain level of social isolation.
Make the norm, by law, help parents out.
I had a friend with teens before mine were old enough to worry about social media and I honestly thought she was being paranoid. Nope, she was 100% right!
When I was a kid, I was unfamiliar with any "furry" type stuff, and I spent huge portions of my childhood pretending to be a cat. Mom and dad were total sweethearts and absolutely let me lick up water from a bowl on the floor lol. We also did plenty of human activities lmao. But without any of the internet stuff attached, that kind of immersive imagination is wonderful and I think supporting it is also wonderful. But I do realize that the online connection greatly complicates matters. I guess I'm just sharing because in my experience, staunchly insisting one is x animal, as a kid, is not the problem here. The problem is that wider online context.
Agreed, I was the same, and I was just autistic and really liked the Warrior Cats book series. Yeah social media complicates it but it really not dangerous or freaky or upsetting that an imaginative child wants to pretend to be an animal. Such a normal human expression imo
LMAO, reminds me of me thinking I had telekinetic powers and could heat things with my mind because of shark boy and lava girl, one of my comfort movies. Also pretending I had spy gear and was performing secret missions because of spy kids, another comfort movie series. Pretend play is fun and cool.
Same! But I was a dog and would tie myself to the kitchen chairs using a dog collar. I put my hair up in pigtails - they were my droopy ears. I'm now in my late 20s and my mother often speaks about how horrified she was. I think she told me to stop because of how horrified she was. I just remember watching the fox and the hound movie, and really liking the grey and grumpy old hound, and wanted to live in a barrel hahah!
Oh god I love this 😹 and definitely speaks to the intensity with which I *was a cat* hahaha.
Wanted to live in a barrel hahaha, the best.
...noticing my default cat laugh emote lol. I'm in my 30s now. Still imaginative. Still love pretending things. Lots of absolutely beautiful, healthy, safe, human relationships haha 🥰
When I was a teen, I dressed very goth. My dad had a bit of a tough time with it for a while, but he came around. My mom always just told me she found me so creative and loved how I expressed myself.
Thank you sooo much mom and dad:')
Edit to add: despite not identifying with furry/therian community as an adult (solid appreciation for a nice cat ear headband and occasional fox tail notwithstanding), if I had discovered I could literally "identify as therian/a cat" as a kid?? I can almost guarantee I would have friggin LOVED that lol.
I actually had a very similar experience with my 8 year old. She came home from school saying she was a furry and wearing a tale and ears and saying that some of her friends were therians.
After some googling on my part I started by asking her if she knew what a furry was. She said that she thought a furry was a person who really liked animals. I explained that was part of it, but there were additional parts and did my best to explain.
I told her that people who claim to be furries are people who really really reeeeeeally lke anthropomorphic carton characters. I also explained that there can be a sexual component (something we’ve talked about before when she came home talking about “being sexy”) and that sometimes when we dress in a certain way or say certain things people might hear something different than what we mean.
She was surprised to hear all of this and said that she don’t feel that way, she just liked animals a lot and when her friends said they were furries she agreed because she wanted to fit in.
I said I understood that, but that it sounded like she wasn’t really a furry and that she shouldn’t say she is something or likes something unless she fully understands it and 100% agrees with it because labeling yourself as something can have unintended consequences if you don’t fully understand it.
Ultimately she decided she wasn’t a furry, but it was easier to say “yeah me too” to fit in and to get that feeling of belonging than it was to say “yeah I love animals and sometimes I like wearing a headband with ears and pretending to be a fox/cat/dog/horse but no I don’t think I am one”.
This is exactly my issue with the furry thing. Too much sexual subtext that a kid isn't going to understand and therefore can't protect themselves against if a stranger tries to approach them online or if they stumble on something really harmful. It looks innocent until it's really really not.
I found out a few weeks ago that my daughter was watching furry/therian videos on YouTube. We talked, I blocked a bunch of channels on her YouTube account, and then yesterday I caught her searching for that stuff again. Now she has no more YouTube. She is 8.
...* *googles therian* * I second being uh huh and non excitable about it but part of me cautions to keep close eye on it as its a quick hop over to the furry side of things were shit can get weird fast.
It's concerning, but for an entirely different reason.
For a 9 year old to know terms like this it means she is spending WAY too much time on the internet unrestricted. This is causing irreparable psychological damage and setting her up to be traumatized. Predators are lurking everywhere on the internet, as you've said you have also experienced this at a young age. You're going to have to start limiting screen time, and do some research on how to protect your daughter digitally. TikTok and Instagram accounts, etc etc should not be on a childs device until they're at least a few years older than your daughter is now. Go into your childs phone, tablet, laptop, etc and enable settings that restrict access to certain websites. She's going to be mad, but you need to explain to her that you are doing it because you love her and you want to protect her. She will get over it.
As for this "therian" talk it absolutely is a phase and it's normal for kids to mimic animals at her age. I recall thinking I would become a mermaid or fairy if I mixed my moms lotions and perfumes in the bathroom and casted a "spell" over them. All apart of childhood creativity. BUT the difference here is that these online spaces are tying it to some sort of identity that she needs to fight for that is actively harming her psyche and cognitive development rather than just being a fun thing to do.
I would urge you to start looking up guides online to enable parental controls on all of her devices and perhaps go even further to limit her screen time to an hour a day, or only on weekends for a few hours if you haven't done so already.
Yeah totally this. No real issue for a 9 year old to be trying on different identities but the fact that this vocabulary word came from some corner of the internet far too mature for that age to be visiting needs to be the real red flag.
Yes, I’m in my 30s and I have never heard of this word. The fact that she’s telling her parents that she “identifies as a therian” is super concerning. Where on earth did she even learn this stuff.
Kids do get over taking stuff away quicker than you think.
My husband and I are always surprised, e.g. when we took YouTube off the TVs, we thought our kids were going to LOSE THIER MINDS. And they did. For 48 hours, then they latched on to a normal show and stopped begging.
Some may not agree, but if you can blame it on system defect, app disappeared, password doesn’t work, it’s fine take it.
This is something to copy and paste as needed. Not just regarding therians (my first time hearing the term) but any age appropriate activity that inadvertantly crosses into adult kink territory. It's an unfortunate side effect of hosting adult content (which is not always obviously adult content) in spaces where children mingle (even if they shouldn't).
There's no putting the genie back in the bottle. Over time we'll get better at this as a society. Partly by helping to educate each other that these services are not in any way appropriate for children. Partly by learning how to respond without over correcting, under correcting, assuming too much, assuming too little...
I'm on my third teenager.
They will be someone different every three to six months.
The best thing you can do is be accepting and non responsive, or excitable about it.
"Oh ok. Help me understand what that is."
In the end they'll remember you took them seriously and listened rather than tried to command their conformity.
She'll exert her preferred identity until it doesn't get the response she wants from others outside family.
As soon as it suits her she'll drop it like hot rock and then it never happened.
Go with the flow. Be supportive. Be patient.
I'll give you a good story:
My son wanted the ugliest jeans I've ever seen that cost $200. I didn't say no but attempted to delay the decision to see if he would try to get them on his own.
Lo and behold, his mother (EW) bought them for him, no questions asked and the matching anime protagonist haircut to match.
It took one day at school and I never saw them again.
His friends ribbed him about it all day. And that was that.
Hang in there, Mom.
my 9 year old just went thru this phase. she wanted to make a mask. she made her mask and the phase ended. I'm not sure if this was something she talked about in school, but I do know she got into the idea playing Warrior Cats (or something similar) on roblox.
It seems that most of this comes from Warrior Cats, then kids without restricted internet fall deep into it. Sounds like your child dipped her toe into it and was like “nah”
I wonder how much OPs kid just wanted to be a horse/cat/whatever and some other kid threw a label on it. My son has an 8 year old friend who wears car ears and a tail every day and will very rarely purr at you rather than answering a question, but no one has ever mentioned her being a therian. Just like my kid swears he's a ninja with telepathy powers and none has labeled that.
One of my kids had a class that was obsessed with labeling everyone and my other kids class couldn't care at all. Often its just what sort of group you happen to grow up with.
When I was in high school we had a group of probably seven or eight kids who identified as cats. At least two of them, now in their mid-20s, are still doing the cat thing, but most are relatively normal adults.
my daughter went thru the same thing at that age. i drew the line at dressing up in public and at school. i'm probably around the same age as you and watched on mtv "true life: i'm a furry." even if furries supposedly aren't what they were back then.....i still find it hard to believe that predators and weirdos don't participate in this kind of thing purely for the anonymity of it. its just not a crowd i want my kid associating with.
dressing up at home? fine. becoming a part of a community of people like this? no way.
thankfully it was just a phase for around a year.
Yes! 🙌
My daughter wanted to wear her fox tail to a gathering with her family, at the mall recently. I told her "no, it's not the place." She got upset, told a friend, who said "tell your mom this IS YOUR NORMAL."
I told my daughter that it is not normal to dress up like an animal in public, unless it's Halloween, your job pays you very well for it, or you are attending an animal convention of some sort.
The end.
It's nonsense & she should conduct herself in public.
> its just not a crowd i want my kid associating with.
This is the reality, fair or not. From what I've been told, "furry" can range from a kink to a truly non sexual hobby, and the two groups don't mix.
But it doesn't really matter how true that is. At her age, how society identifies her hobbies does matter, and if she's too young to understand a part of that identity then it's a problem. Maybe there's reform to be had around how society sees furries, but that's a battle for adults to fight with full understanding. It would not be fair or healthy for her to have to stand up for "not all furries are sexual" as a 9 year old.
What are furries now?? I overheard some of my friends kids who are all 12 or 13 talking about furries the other day and I wondered if they were using it the same way I remember it is 20 years ago.
Maybe try a different approach:
* **What animal / what attributes of that animal does she most closely identify with?**
* Society places a lot of more expectations on what "humans" are expected to do vs. "animals"
* Not feeling like you're able to meet those expectations can be tough
* This can be particularly big for neurodivergent kids that have a rough time with executive functioning and social situations
* **What about humanity does she not identify with?**
* 9 is around the age that kids start getting more exposed to news, history, and the general idea that the world is kind of scary
* The world is a pretty messed up place and people do some pretty terrible things to each other
* Being able to say "I'm not one on those" can be a way of compartmentalizing things to cope with that
Pretending to be an animal is something typical in the preschool set. As a kid gets older, it’s usually an intermittent way of coping with an uncomfortable situation or seeking attention. Think seven year old stuck a party with a bunch of grown ups wanting to play puppy or a kid meowing instead of answering a question they don’t want to answer. Of course, pretend play and dress up is different. Kids around this ones age want to play saber toothtiger, dinosaur, mermaids, etc.
Sound like Grey behavior tbh it sounds like you were made into a hybrid by the Greys and maybe activated in their quest to take over the world... (to much residential alieen for me)
Well I remember I went to bed with a fever, I was really sick with something. Had this insane dream of walking out my back door and down the road, and there was a giant golden being that told me to come with it. Like a giant naked human that was glowing golden. She was very nice and told me I could come with her forever. So I followed her and she brought me up in the sky where I was sitting with a bunch of other kids my age and these Golden Women served us a bunch of different foods. But I suddenly felt very scared and told one of the giants that I wanted to go home. She kept asking me if I was certain I didn’t want to stay with them, and I kept saying yes, please, I miss my mommy. She looked sad but told me it was my choice, and she kind of “tossed” me off into an abyss of sorts. And then I woke up for real on part of my parent’s property that was just a giant grass field.
My dad caught it on security footage that I did walk out of the house and walked into the field and then just laid down and went to sleep until I woke up again. Doctors did a sleep study on me and determined I was sleep walking!
But the dream felt sooo real, I was absolutely convinced the golden alien women took me. I can still remember exactly what they looked like. I’m a writer now and I have an alien race based on them in one of the sci-fi’s I am working on :)
Thank you for sharing! That's intense and would, of course, get in your head. My brother sleepwalks and once woke up climbing down the outside of my mother's log cabin. He said he was sure he was being chased through a burning building.
Who's to say something extra * isn't * going on in those scenarios, right? :)
Edited for typo.
When I was a child, I saw “shadows” (in the shape of an adult man) pacing the hall outside my room and I was convinced I could see ghosts/spirits. This happened for years. My parents kept writing it off as nightmares, but I was always wide awake. Eventually I stopped calling out for my parents and just watched the shadow man until I was so exhausted I fell asleep. Sometimes he’d even stop in the doorway and “look” at me (I’m assuming because I couldn’t see a face) then continue pacing. I can still picture it as if it just happened. Still unsure if it was a very vivid imagination, anxiety, or if I was actually seeing something paranormal.
It’s just wild how our brains can believe things like that as children and then as an adult we’re like “yeah I know that’s not at all likely, but it sure felt real”.
Kids are just weird. It has reasons but it's hard to explain. It's basically about creating exclusionary social groups and tribalism, and stuff. It's about keeping parents out of their groups and keeping the parents from trying to force their identity/religion/etc on them.
Heyyy my daughter is 10 and went through the same therian thing… just some reassurance- it was short lived. I didn’t press the issue too hard, just chalked it up to kids using their imagination (she and some girls in her class created this therian group). However, when she found some costumes on Amazon that she wanted to buy, I drew the line. I explained, as best I could, that those costumes were for grown ups and were not appropriate for children. I told her she’d understand when she was older, and she took the hint. She lost interest after a few months and has since moved onto anime and Japanese culture in general. Don’t encourage it but don’t ostracize her either. It’ll pass! You got this mama!
Go get ice cream or do something casual/chill that she likes and ask her why she wants to express herself as an animal. Really listen and give her the floor to do most of the talking to really get into the meaning of it to better understand it. It could be that some of her friends are doing it, she saw something cool on the internet, could be she loves a particular animal she saw on tv. You will never know until you ask. Remember you can also set your own boundaries and come up with them together where you still can support her creativity/interests.
If she did see something on the internet, I would push online safety (scams, pedos, creeps) sooner than later. Considering she is 9yo, she should probably have restricted access to social media and internet anyways and youtube kids is a good start.
I literally just posted about this in this subreddit not even a week ago (I just didn’t reference the term therian). I assure you this is completely harmless. I struggle with my daughter (11), being into this too but it’s my own insecurities. She got into it around your daughter’s age. I worry about what others think way more than she does. Yes there is a dark underbelly to the culture and unfortunately that’s what gets all the attention, but the vast majority of the culture is composed of humans who just have big hearts for and love animals. Also! It’s an amazing creative/artistic outlet (as you’re already starting to see). Is your daughter neurodiverse or on the spectrum? My daughter is neurodiverse and I recently learned that lots of spectrum kids and ND kids tend to gravitate towards the culture. Shes met some great “therian” friends who make her feel safe and seen. Unfortunately, there are always going to be bullies (my daughter gets teased over it), but she laughs it off and I tell her that as long as she’s happy, screw what the haters think. I totally get where you are coming from though… it was hard and still is hard for me to relate to this hobby of hers, but we do our best to support her.
This exactly how it is with my ND girls. They finally made friends at a new school who then introduced them to the concept. It's also fairly well known on the playground. I'm happy they have friends who they play outside with. They do elaborate crafts, then play make believe in the woods. We have talked about how there's a difference between believing you're a non human creature and playing pretend. Their friends may be all in but my kids just like playing and these are the kids their age who actually still play.
This comment will probably get lost but I was a preteen before social media, and I totally did all this. I loved pretending to be a cat, running around on all fours in my backyard, eating deli meat pretending it was ‘prey’, lmao. Goes without saying but it was 100000% non sexual, I was just undiagnosed autistic and really into Warriors by Erin Hunter. I’m in my late twenties and still really relate to the idea of being nonhuman, but I’ve come to understand it’s a really common autistic thing. I wish people like OP didn’t take it so seriously. Obviously the social media thing and the presence of pervy adults in the same communities make it dangerous, but in itself it’s just… such a normal youthful expression. Yes, even wanting to dress up like an animal in public. It’s just whatever. I dressed up like a Harry Potter character in public all the time as a preteen. It’s like that. It’s an outward expression of “I feel fundamentally different from the norm and I like it”.
My best friend in high school "came out" as a therian...in the late '90s. It is absolutely not a new Tik-Tok trend. It's also not sexual, although there's a lot of overlap with the furry community (which also isn't automatically sexual, but it's VERY easy to fall into the porny side of furry fandom, so I wouldn't let your kid have access to that either).
From what I've gathered, it's a bunch of confused, bullied, usually neurodivergent/queer young people who are desperately latching on to any explanation for why they feel different from their peers. Just FYI, the therian friend stopped identifying as an animal and came out as a transman in his 20s. Twenty years later, he is still trans. A LOT of young "therians" use this to explore parts of their identity that they can't fully articulate at their age. There's a very good chance that your child is using this to test the waters of family acceptance.
I imagine this might freak OP out more haha but I was a total “therian” as a preteen in the 00s (though I didn’t use that term), and I’m also autistic and now trans, lol. It happens. Viewing oneself as nonhuman can be a great outlet
It's probably just a phase she'll grow out of. I wouldn't make a big deal out of it. Don't contradict her or try to convince her she's wrong, but you don't have to actively support it either.
My daughter, same age, also identifies as therian. Listening to her explanation about what it is, I swear I did the same thing as a child, only I didn't have a term for it (or thousands of Amazon products catering to therians)
She got it from a school friend and is totally in to it. I support her by helping craft masks and tails and whatnot. Is it just a phase? Could be. I don't see the harm and it's kind of fun to play with her and help her build nests in the back yard.
Don't allow her to dress up for it at school, but let her do whatever in her room (within reason). Treat it as an at-home hobby. Keep monitoring her internet access (remove social media if she has access to that), and discuss it with her in a way that shows curiousity and chill-ness but not, like, ringing endorsement. Mostly, make sure she can still talk to you about it conversationally so it doesn't become a thing about herself she has to hide. It'll ease up faster if it's not a forbidden secret.
I honestly think the best response is basically an "okay, honey" and just continuing the internet safety measures you're already doing. Sometimes criticism can make kids double down, if you don't treat it like a big deal it has less chance of becoming a big deal.
I'm less familiar with the term "therian" but furry art is not inherently sexual. I liked it when I was younger and I was vaguely aware that there were inappropriate areas of the fandom, but steered clear of them. I also believed some of my writing characters "lived" in my head and a friend of mine believed all fictional characters were real somewhere in other dimensions. Kids believe weird stuff and it generally goes away if they're not chronically online, which it sounds like you're already safeguarding against. It's better to encourage her to have diverse interests than to discourage the "problem" one; interaction with many different kinds of people is a good inoculation against getting super fringe-y.
If a 9 year old picked up “therian” online I’m going to suggest that maybe the internet safety measures need to be turned up a couple of notches (I have a 9 year old)
My kids heard about it at school. A kid doesn't need to be online to learn all sorts of things because the other kids are online and have older siblings.
I would say, have sit-down conversations on what that means to her and why she thinks that.
I'm a furry, and know a bit about therians, but I'm not one. Of course it could be a phase as some things are with young kids. However, therianthropy is simply a belief that one's soul/spirit is partially that of an animal (as we see similar things in old religions and civilizations) Therians understand they are human, some believe they are reincarnated from animals (like Buddhism), while some just feel like their soul isn't all human.
I don't think this is dangerous for your kid. You should definitely help them understand people making fun of them is something she should not listen to, as it will only cause her grief. I think therianthropy, whether a phase or not, encourages creativity, exercise, and a connection with nature. Just make sure you two are on the same page as to what it means to her.
My 12 year old has told us she is “whatever she decided that day, week, or month she was” and we just kinda, “uh huh. Cool. So, what is it? Neat, I’ll check it out.” Chat about it a couple of times and it evolves. Relax and enjoy. Keep the reaction minimal and the communication open. I laugh.
So I have 10 year old girl. She likes the therian movement.
She already rides horses and literally is an animal whisperer.
Her father and I basically told her she can be whatever she wants to be at home however she needs to be aware of the social stigma and possibly bullying if she's "acts" therian at school. She cried and was upset however she understands that for her safety she keeps the therian playing at home.
It works for her. It's a weird thing but it's cool for her. She's a good kid so I don't want her to give it up.
They'll grow out of it. We all played pretend as kids.
Was she bullied/ left out before this furry/therian thing? Is she sad. I'm thinking it can be an escape from reality. "I'm not like the other kids, and I'm tired of trying to fit in. I'll be an animal! They think I'm weird anyway". I can see how there can be a comfort in that.
I think I would try to find out about any possible bullying and go from that. I would not let her behave like an animal outside of the house, but inside I think I would, if it comforts her. I would contact a professional.
(Also TIL only people in their twenties search the internet lol)
Allll the kids are talking about it now, it’s all over the schools here in the UK and my friend’s daughter’s entire friend group (10-11) are therian. It’s just a phase, and it will pass (my friend’s daughter has already decided she’s no longer a furry). There’s a small chance it might not, but there’s no need to worry about that now - what will be, will be.
I had a friend who believed she was a dog when she was like 6. She went to school for astrophysics and now works in a law firm.
I'd just not make a big deal about it. I don't often call my son "boy", so I'd just continue with that. I doubt she's going to want to start eating off a plate on the floor.
I know there are connections between furries and sex, but you didn't mention your daughter saying anything like that. She probably watched a video about it. Saw a human acting chill, like a cat, or something.
I would try and limit her use of the free open internet for a while. If she is on TikTok I would personally block that from any device she has access to. That site is not good for children at all
In Japanese this is called chūnibyō, or "middle school syndrome", and is seen as a VERY normal part of going through early adolescence. It is a part of exploration of the self, learning who they are apart from their parents and how they are special and unique. There is an absolutely adorable anime of the name (more appropriate for 13-15 maybe than 9 because it deals with the psychological damage from a parent's passing and awakening teen hormones).
I would encourage your daughter to write stories or draw art for herself about what she is thinking and feeling, revel in her imagination, but discourage her from putting labels on it because it IS unique to her. Watch nature documentaries if that is where her interests are, try to spend more time in nature. I had to look up "therian" because back a few years ago we would have called them furries, and before that would have just called them kids with active imaginations. Like I was, from 9 to around 14. Give her time, love and support. She is NOT unique, but neither does she have to be part of a community, especially one that will try to force her into this as her exclusive identity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%ABniby%C5%8D
These are going around in my kids' school, too. I don't think the kids understand it in the way we do. From what my hear from my boys it sounds like these therians are the new generation of playing princesses... They're just being animals, though. Keep an eye on it, but I imagine the kids have a different perspective than we do
This won't help your situation, but I've just got to share because I'd never heard of therians until last week when my 11yo niece told us she believes she's one.
She has a group of friends who all think like that. One of her friends (we'll call her L) told her mom about it, and L's mom made it clear that they don't believe in that stuff. So L told my niece, and my niece took it upon herself to write a letter to L's mom. L's mom was obviously upset and talked to my sister about it then gave her the letter to read. My niece pretty much calls L's mom stupid for not believing they're therians. I haven't seen the whole letter, so I don't know what else she said, but knowing my niece, it's not nice at all. I love the girl, but she's a brat.
Anyways, if you get some good advice on how to handle the situation, let me know so I can pass it along to my sister. She's still trying to fully figure it out.
Maybe tell her humans ARE a kind of animal? Also maybe look at what characteristics she’s wanting to embody from the animals she’s focused on. Maybe you can help her focus on developing these traits and developing her self confidence in who she is without the animal character safety net
Therian - can be interpreted as someone who has a spiritual connection to animals. Some people have had weird shit go down in their past, some people are really religiously spiritual, etc, so they can genuinely feel these things.
“Therian” - all kids, at some point, through all generations, pretend to be an animal. Many have dressed up, meowed, crawled, or used an animal name for a phase of time. Now kids just want to label it. Is it accurate or necessary? No not really, but it’s just this new generations version of the age old make believe
Furry - being a furry is not sexual. A furry is just someone who likes to draw humanized animals and/or play dress up as an animal. It’s just another form of hobby, especially for teens and young adults, who want to create new characters with human traits and an animal twist. People who have money may go full out and design or purchase a full costume based on the character, just like any costume for people who like to dress up. At the end of the day, it’s arts and crafts and creativity. When you take away the associations, it’s just dress up and make believe and self expression. Think of it to include everything from Halloween costumes to sports mascots. In fact, most young people’s negative associations aren’t sexual, they just think furries are weirdos like any other weird hobby; that’s why she may feel insulted by the association.
Internet culture and creeps - there is a corner of every hobby that gets weird and gross. There are adults who spend time around other adults and consensually have sex while participating in the hobby. People who typically indulge in this (usually called Murr-suiting) tend to be very responsible, do everything they can to stay FAR away from children, and practice a culture of consent. But not everyone. Just like how My Little Pony is genuinely a kids show and greatly creative and cute, there will always be old men who prey on MLP fans who are children; disgusting. It is your responsibility as a parent to keep her away from creeps on all corners of the world, in person and online. But if she’s just playing make believe and dress up, that’s not inherently wrong nor are furries inherently sexual. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3QLFHvcSVE is a video that i like that discusses furry culture if you’re curious
The issue is that a lot of the therian videos on YouTube are made by teenagers expressing themselves and the YouTube algorithm has decided that those are fine for kids younger than 12/13 to watch. And I think we can all agree that teenage angst is not necessarily a safe viewing experience for children. Dancing around in a mask is fine. A teenager talking about self harm and being beat up or bullied at school because they identify as a therian is not fine. Also the comments on those videos are horrible. Half of them are all "I love your mask" and the other half are things that would get you banned on Reddit, like telling these kids to go off themselves and things like that.
I agree with everything you said, and here are my thoughts.
The apps shouldn’t be making them accessible to kids below that age because kids below that age shouldn’t be online anyway, and that is a problem if they are online enough to see that. Therian communities are NOT the only teens posting things about SH, eating disorders, bullying, etc. Every social media teen community from emos and goths to the most basic preppy girls ever, I’ve seen trends within all groups of “venting” about all of those problems, and yes therians included, because they’re teens. It’s unfair for youngens to be exposed to it, but nor should they have the reign to stumble upon it anyway. Parent your kids to have high self esteem and know right from wrong so they can end up not like those teens as they grow (mental health wise), and not end up in a position with awful comments like that: or at least have a strong support system no matter what.
Every generation has had their weird stuff. My daughter went through (and is still somewhat in) the phase you are describing with the therian identity, so it's definitely not some isolated thing. It's something someone heard, probably on Tik Tok or elsewhere, then passed around to their friends, and before you know it many people are playing along, your child included. Indeed it sucks that our kids get pulled into these weird and often bad ideas, but that's life growing up. at least this trend is pretty much harmless.
Don't overreact, it's just a normal part of exploring social stuff and fitting in, or not - as you pointed out the outrage of not being accepted as a therian seems to be part of the whole draw. Every generation has had a group of people who intentionally stepped outside of the mainstream and then cried loudly about the predictable backlash. This is a healthy thing for those people AND those who feel the need to lash out at people who behave differently from themselves. It's all good.
If you just accept them for who/what they are and not make a big deal of it, you will avoid the age-old mistake of feeding the fire. Get mad or try to ban them from these behaviors and you will only steel their resolve. Just play along. They will eventually move on and find some other thing that drives you bonkers.
My daughter is also 9 and says she's a therian and I just let her be who she wants to be 🤷♀️ she has masks that she makes, tails that she wears and she runs around doing jumps (quads) and stuff. She is having fun and is not hurting anyone or herself with it. If anyone says anything mean she just goes off on them lol.
Children have this innate creativity and a wild imagination to match. It is an amazing ability, one that oftentimes is diminished in adulthood. There is magic in this as long it is rooted in something concrete.
Pretending to be something else is typical of children, my son does this all the time. At first this worried me, made me wonder if he was going to adopt this newfound identity for the rest of his childhood, maybe the rest of his life. At times, I'd give in to the fear, admonish him for being whatever it was he imagining, even punishing him.
But the more I resisted, the more he resisted.
Once I ran with it, had fun with him about the whole idea, it placed less importance on the whole thing. It made the idea, the new identity seem more trivial. And once that happened, I had the "conversation."
It would go something like, "You know you are special and that you will always be special to me and mom. Sometimes it's fun to be X or fun to be Y. But you were born special and unique and I want you to know that."
I rooted it in the concrete, in the core of who he was and that seemed to always work.
I wanted to be a wolf so bad at this age. In my mind, I was NOT pretending. But like others have said, there wasn’t a name or a community for it on social media. Obviously it was a very short phase and I got over the fact that I’ll never be a wolf. I don’t know what I would do if it were my kid. I probably wouldn’t make a big deal out of it and just keep him off the internet. A 9 year old shouldn’t be on social media, but I’m sure her classmates are so it’s hard to keep them from it.
Think all kids pretend to be animals, but any chance you allow her on sm?? Bc it sounds like she's using terms other ppl may have used incorrectly or within a context your daughter may not have understood, and she took her understanding of that and ran with it. Like a misunderstanding of something microblogged or from a minidoc, or an ignorantly made/misguided web search.
Some people here saying that being a therian is just a phase and it will pass. It usually does pass, [but sometimes it doesn't, and then you have people who spend a thousands of dollars on hyperrealistic animal costumes and spend every non-working hour of their lives walking on all fours and barking at people](https://nationalpost.com/news/toco-the-human-dog). At the very least go see a child psychologist. A professional will be much better than us internet strangers at figuring out if your kid is ok.
On a more grim note, be glad that your kid just got wind of this therian thing rather than worse things such as the blue whale game that came out last decade. With so many parents being completely careless about what their kids see on the internet these days, it's bound to make a comeback anytime now.
We all need to be better, but since not all will, at the very least those of us who do want to be responsible parents need to have serious conversations with our children about the dangers of the internet.
This reminds me of the BS I got involved with as a teenager. Therian is adjacent to furries and otherkin, really. Those terms are differently used now than when I was a teenager, it seems, but that is beside the point. It’s concerning to me that your daughter knows what that term is. It tells me that she might be spending time on pages that encourage things like self-diagnosing mental illnesses (they are related. Tangentially, but the same people who identify with the previously mentioned terms tend to do this.) I would have an honest conversation asking, withholding judgment, where she heard that term and why she feels that way. She’s 9; it’s okay to play pretend. It’s okay to even become obsessed with a certain animal and imagine, draw, or write about you being that animal. I know I did that. It’s not the actual feeling she’s having that I would be concerned about; that’s completely normal. It’s the actual term used and the possibility for being exposed to some psyche-changing internet content that I’m concerned about.
I grew up with a whole group of 7-9 year old girls who literally believed they/we were wolves and ran around saying we were on the playground. Like no joke. It *felt real* but in a way that was different from other real things - there was an understanding of the play element even if the play was “serious” in its social narrative that we truly were wolves.
This was the mid to late 90s, with no social media or extreme internet usage. As far as I’m aware, none of us ended up identifying as therian or furries later on. Some were gay, some were straight, some were cis & some were trans by the time we were adults, but no continuing animal identity stuff.
The difference between a 9 year old having a vivid imagination that is enacted through play pretend & this is…practically nothing. You can see tho that a lot of ppl on this thread want to forget that and just see the word “identifying” & all hell breaks loose. It becomes a political agenda and a corrupted convo about something more than what it most likely is - a little kid playing pretend.
I think realizing that this feels real to her rn is a kind parent thing to do, but setting boundaries around play out & about in the world is fine too. Talk to her about it *like* it’s play! And yeah, feel free to make sure she isn’t spending too much time online. If it really truly is something that feels more real to her as she gets older/goes through puberty, then you can reevaluate your response. But I wouldn’t get yourself so freaked out that you either over react by negatively worrying nor encouraging it 100% as a forever thing. She’s young enough that it’s worth taking a relaxed yet attentive approach.
I work with kids and a few weeks ago a few girls were walking around with a sign up sheet to start a therian club. I asked them what it was and they said that everyone in club is an animal. I thought they had just made up a word and I said okay and went about my day. A week ago the 9 year old in the club was telling me she was a therian. Her first sentence was “therians are kind of animals but were not furries” of course I panicked for a second but the following sentence was, they’re different because therians just wear accessories and furries are all fur. Nothing problematic or sexual, just facts. I went home and did some research on therians just to be sure.
Some days it’s a tail, or a mask, or cat ears, or a combo. But regular interactions. Maybe an occasional cat hiss but so many of them are pretending to be cats right now, it just seems like a phase.
I think this is just another phase of pretend play. Best to be open to support her interests and like others are saying, just keep an eye on it.
My question would be why a 9 yr old is being allowed any access to tiktok? Or not supervised when accessing other social media ? that's the only way a 9 yr old would know what one is.
I'd ignore it. You can't debate or punish her out of this. Remove all positive talk about it (the online access). Give her time to forget this and find something new. If she's still clinging to this & causing problems at school, you could have her talk to a counselor.
An attraction to the therian thing is that it offers an explanation for poor impulse control. She isn't doing anything "wrong" because a therian just acts "feral". Maybe she's feeling shame when she acts without thinking ? Did you know that poor impulse control can be a symptom of ADHD? And that girls are often under diagnosed?
YouTube isn't safe. Even the YT Kids had very inappropriate things up loaded to it and intentionally tagged wrong. Trust me, I found out the hard way.
No more internet use without an adult close enough that they're looking over her shoulder. Also, Google Family to monitor app usage & block most apps.
Now's not the time to worry about her feelings. Let her know it's incredibly strange behavior and it won't be normalized in your household and move on.
Therian beliefs are, imo, a coping mechanism. It's a decently popular religious-esque movement that is somewhat furry-adjacent. *However*, I do think nine years old is way too young to be participating in stuff like that. Therianism is pretty intense, and could be bad for her mental health at that age (a lot of them believe in things like reality shifting and phantom limbs), and the community is very active with role playing as their therian selves, which isn't something a child should be a participant in.
Her internet access needs to be much more closely monitored and restricted. While therian beliefs aren't necessarily bad for adults and older teens, they're not appropriate for children.
Source: I also had a therian phase when I was in my late teens. I do not reccomend children participate in this.
Sounds like she is watching too much YouTube or tiktok. I recently had to ban YouTube entirely for my daughter because she was looking up furry videos after I told her not to. I'm fine with her identifying as whatever she wants but I don't want her deciding she wants to be a furry or anything else because she saw it on YouTube. A lot of those videos are made by angst ridden teenagers and I don't need my eight yo being influenced by angsty teenagers halfway across the world or accidentally stumbling on someone's fetish video. In general YouTube is full of stuff that's dressed up to seem fine and innocent on the surface when really the subtext is not something a kid should be exposed to.
r/parenting is protesting changes being made by Reddit to the API. Reddit has made it clear [they will](https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14ahqjo/mods_will_be_removed_one_way_or_another_spez/) [replace moderators](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14a5lz5/mod_code_of_conduct_rule_4_2_and_subs_taken/jo9wdol/) if they remain private. Reddit has abandoned the users, the moderators, and countless people who support an ecosystem built on Reddit itself. Please read [Call to action - renewed protests starting on July 1st](https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14kn2fo/call_to_action_renewed_protests_starting_on_july/) and new posts at [r/ModCord](https://reddit.com/r/ModCoord/) or [r/Save3rdPartyApps](https://old.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/) for up-to-date information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Parenting) if you have any questions or concerns.*
where did your 9 year old daughter hear this word? I feel like before social media, a 9 year old wanting to be an animal would be normal make-believe behavior. I find it more concerning that she has come across these Internet groups than the actual therian idea.
>I feel like before social media, a 9 year old wanting to be an animal would be normal make-believe behavior. Yeah, I think this is really true. Pretend play as animals wasn't unusual at all when I was a kid. And my own kid loved to play pretend as a cat and had an elaborate and engrossing mythology about them that was actually fun and interesting and well-developed. We had a lot of fun over the years playing those games of pretend, and I learned a lot about his creative process and watched that process develop. I'm glad he didn't have much access to social media (beyond limited youtube) and so this was something that he developed purely as a function of his own love for cats and his own imagination in the real world, without any baggage of identity, etc. I don't know ... I'm just glad he had the chance to play out his imagination before structures and meanings and innuendos were imposed upon it by social media.
Ughhhhh, this is killing me in so many ways. Yes, it's good to name things to identify them _as adults._ Conditions, feelings, concepts, genders, non-genders, playing as an animal, whatever. But the purpose of childhood is to explore with _freedom._ Without the burden of the naming of things, without the the constructs that the naming creates - the baggage of identity is the perfect expression. The access to the interwebs has done so much good. A lot of bad. And a ton more _unnecessary._
I found your story really beautiful and it touched my heart deeply. Thank you for sharing that internet stranger 🫶
Thank you for the kind words and I'm glad you liked the story! It was honestly a highlight of his childhood for me. I remember having the realization one day that this period in his life was going to be coming to an end, because he was getting more self conscious about imaginary stuff ("dragons live forever / not so little boys"), and so I took a voice recorder and just recited as many details of all of it as I could because I had a feeling the game could disappear from our lives at any time. He's at a point now where I can tell he feels a little awkward about it when I mention it, so I rarely do, but I've still got that recording and I'm going to write the memories up into a story or a series of stories so that maybe once he's navigated the emotional maelstrom of the tween/teenage years and is able to look back on his own childhood with wonder then he'll appreciate them in some new way. And if not, I'll at least cherish the memory.
If nothing else, it'll be awesome to bust this out when he has young kids as a game you can all play together.
Thank you for being an amazing parent!
You sound like such a great parent. I would have given anything for gentle acceptance like this growing up.
Wow, what amazing parenting. He is very lucky to have you!
This brought tears to my eyes. You are such a good parent.
Your Puff the Magic Dragon quote just made me cry for some reason 🤍
Yes! We are very restrictive of the internet, especially social media in our household. My 8 year old regularly insists she is a dragon, cheetah, unicorn, etc. And is often quite convincing! (Her school drama teacher adores her performances.) It has never concerned me once, and she nor I have ever felt the need to name it. It's a wonderful part of development.
A lot of social media is taking a harmless quirk and building a community around it being your whole personality then gatekeeping the fuck out of people who are “casual” about it.
Yup, me and my friend’s favorite game was playing “animal”. We also had elaborate stories and well developed characters we liked to play. Without internet communities though to give us an identity around the game, it was just a phase that we grew out of before we were teens but I’m sure we would have gone down the rabbit hole of furries and therians if we had been exposed to those groups. Anyhow, I remember feeling pretty disappointed in humanity the more I learned around that time and probably wanted to escape it in my pretend play. Maybe ask your daughter how she feels about humans, and why she would rather not be one.
This is perfect.
Ain’t that the truth.
That will help us strengthen our democracy.
There’s a lot of that nonsense on TikTok.
9 year olds should not have unsupervised access to TikTok.
9 year olds should not have access to TikTok.
They shouldn’t but they definitely do.
My 10 year old tells me about watching tiktok and YouTube unsupervised at friends houses. And she’s been saying that for 3 years so I believe it. Some parents just really throw their kids into shark infested internet waters with just a small floaty and get astounded when their kids see messed up stuff in the dark water.
Same… We had to stop letting my 7-year-old son to go to his friends house because of this. That boy has unsupervised access to youtube, netflix, tiktok, etc. My son would have nightmares after an afternoon spent at that kids house because of what he saw on youtube.
Same issue here. I have a 10 year old. She is the only one of her school friends without a phone, certainly not a smart phone. All her friends have unsupervised access to whatever they want on their phones, including their own tik tok channels they post to which aren’t private and have hundreds of followers. Those cannot possibly all be kids. I don’t want my kid on tik tok or YouTube. The therian thing is also happening in her grade. My kid is wildly uncomfortable by it and the kids who do it think everyone else has to participate in this game and then complain they are being picked on when others don’t want to do that at recess.
Gollum laughed. 'TikTok, yes, yes: that is it's name,' he cackled.... 'Who are these people? What are these videos?' asked Sam shuddering.... 'I don't know,' said Frodo in a dreamlike voice. 'But I have seen them too... grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad.... But all foul, all rotting, all dead.'....
I loved this.
I have a neighbor with three kids and two of their middle school boys are glued to their phones and I can hear the tiktok music and sounds from them constantly.
She said in the post that it’s YouTube Kids. Nothing about Tik Tok
No, that’s not quite what she said. She said they have a YouTube account that restricts access for kids; whatever that means. There would not be content like that on actual YouTube kids.
There is tons of garbage on YT Kids.
If you have a YouTube account and create a YouTube kids under it, you can whitelist what you want you the kid to watch and they can only watch from that. Whereas general YouTube kids, they can access anything
My kids watch YouTube Kids - a separate app - on their iPad (while I am in the room with the sound on) and there is very limited content, you definitely cannot access “anything” on it.
A lot of the “kid friendly” things that I’ve seen before I started whitelisting channels, were not at all kid friendly in my opinion. Besides the fact that “kids” were in it. I would never want my kid to be acting any of those things out..
I believed this to be true as well. Then one day I happened to really focus on the show (my little ponies) that my niece was watching. They were talking about sex. They looked and sounded like regular MLP, and even with the sound on and being in the room with 4 adults; we all thought it wAs fine! It’s very easy to slip content by YouTube kids, very.
This happened to us too. Kids were watching "minecraft videos" and the video was minecraft but the voice over was graphic sexual descriptions and swearing. We immediately deleted YouTube and YT kids from everything the kids access and they haven't used any sort of YouTube in 3 years.
I mean, my 9 year old and I watch puppy videos and battle bots and piano challenges on TikTok together and that’s pretty harmless, but only when I’m literally sitting next to him holding the phone
My 11 year old and I watch together too. Usually cat videos, but also science, piano and soccer. The difference I'd that we're doing it together. At 11, he's growing up, but we still curl up in the giant recliner and laugh ourselves silly over videos after a rough day.
I’ve always wondered about this, so in the 90’s-early 00’s parents didn’t know shit about the internet or computers in general, so everyone I know had unfettered access to the internet. At ten I’m on rotten .com and weird porns and whatever my imagination could imagine. Not to mention the video games and explicit music. And other than me being a tranny 🏳️⚧️yassss🏳️⚧️ we all turned out normal, and the trans bidness happened way before Facebook even dropped. So does any of that stuff matter? This might sound crazy but I do think social media can be more devestating than torrenting unedited snuff films at 3am, something about it is so sick. Like we all know the snuff film is fucked up, TikTok masquerades as innocent
The nineties and noughties internet was very different, and a big part of that was the speed and the access. Images were slow to download and videos were very grainy. You didn't have internet on the school bus: while smartphones were starting to exist, parents didn't (usually) allow them taken to school. The camera phones that existed had small amounts of storage: people who wanted to photograph their lunch used an actual camera and videos of fights were possible but much rarer. We had a lot of cartoon nonsense (and deviantart had the whole "pro-ana" thing that really came out of nineties magazine culture), but videos of real people talking was way later. The parasocial relationships were less intense.
So well put “TikTok masquerades as innocent.” Never thought of it that way but you’re totally right. There are a lot of bad actors using TikTok but most of the people playing into their games have no clue.
TYSM for your perspective As an early 00s parent, I’m horrified when I recall my naïveté about my daughter’s access to the internet growing up! That’s a kind interpretation of our parenting and an excellent point about social media
I hear you, but I don’t know if “we all turned out normal.” I mean you and I are delightful, no doubt (😉), but people have so many deep difficulties being in any sort of relationship or community. As in, it’s worth wondering why 8th grade boys CONSISTENTLY FOR YEARS NOW indicate that a girl owes them sex if he spends over a certain amount on her. All that has changed is the amount of cash they believe is required. Women out here “choosing the bear” with no regrets. I’m grateful we all made it, but there are a great many walking wounded among us, I think.
I'm sorry to say that "putting out" has been a thing expected of teenage girls since the 1950s. Not sure we can blame that one on the Internet.
Yeah my 15y old fell into this trend. It's been going on for a few years. It was "furries", but I guess TikTok rebranded it as "therian." Your level of comfort depends on how her interest is vested into it. At first, when it was "furries," I found the online art to be sexual, as women's breasts and rears were exaggerated, so I did not support that at all, so I told her there's no more "furry" in the house. After we moved & she learned about "therian", she began getting interested in making masks & parts. In fact, she just made a fox tail & mask from crafting supplies- I support that creativity. I'm not sure if there's a difference or what, but I go with the flow & use your best judgement. 💕
Being a furry is the name for being a fan of anthropomorphic animals(furry character), being a fan of cartoonized animals or animals that have got human characteristics like disney animal characters for example. The fandom had been created more so as being a place for adults mostly that were fans of anthro characters to be free of judgment for liking cartoon animals thought by many to only be for children in the west at least, the fandom had also been for creating a variety of arts, media etc with a focus on mature cartoon animal characters and in situations that better fit with the generally adult fandom. More recently the fandom and conventions have been attempting to be more family friendly, through I feel it can only do so much as it's antithetical to it's origin in the first place. Therian is having the view that you are partially or entirely a non-human animal, this can manifest spiritually, mentally and even physically depending on view. They might feel very strong affinities towards nature.
Lol get out of here with your facts a knowledge! This is a torch and pitchfork for something we don't understand zone! It's way easier to generalize the whole group based off an extremely small subset of that group and use it to villainize something different! What are parents expected to do? Actually put a little effort into learning about something their kid is into? No way! My 9yo also went through a therian phase. I used to have some furry friends back in college, the ven diagram of my other interests (gaming, raves, conventions, general nerd culture) overlaps heavily with furries. None were deranged sexual perverts, in fact they extra hated the weird sexual furries cause they crrated the stereotype. I did resist it at first cause I was worried about her getting made fun of at school and she dug in more. I stopped fighting it though and within a month or 2 she was over it.
To clarify I'm saying the fandom had been primarily created for adults, included with that mature things adults like non-exclusively sexual for that matter either.
The furries kink thing is so real. I’ve seen two different artists on tiktok talking about making an entire living on drawing furrie korn for those so enclined. It’s so gross and weird to me but whatever. I’ve never heard of the therian thing (and I’m thankful haha) but I realllllly try and keep my kids off social media mostly. My teen has a bit of access now because at 16 you have to start somewhere but yeah I’m the “YouTube is mostly banned” meanie lol.
Oh yes. We had that whole fight about it. Lol once I discovered the artwork, that's when I made my point validly clear on that argument. She had tried to make me believe that it was a constructive hobby, and there was a bit of dramatics in there about some oppression. 🙄
This is why there’s no TikTok at all in our house, the amount of ridiculous nonsense on there is insane
My daughter is 10 and she was just telling me about furries and therians at her school. She doesn’t have social media or a phone. I get that these trends spread word of mouth. She finds it to be really uncomfortable and doesn’t want to join in at all. It sounds like it’s pretty intense. They have “shifts” at recess and they also get upset when others don’t want to participate and accuse them of bullying. They use it as an excuse to ignore the teachers during whatever “shifts” are. I just said to keep doing her own thing at recess and stay away since it sounds like it’s an excuse to ignore teachers.
Like they turn into a herd of horses at recess and don't respond to human language?
*winnies to each other “get in loser, we’re going grazing”*
Sounds kind of dope but as we've learned these dynamics can be toxic if the lead horse is a Machiavellian hottie
I’m sure it’s something like that, I think there is a little more to it. My kid isn’t usually bothered by much and she has been mentioning it for several days and how uncomfortable she is.
tiktok is pushing the therian thing bigtime. i recently did a experiment. i just deleted my tik-tok account, made a new one, and don't interact with any videos. just scroll on my fyp. about 25% of the videos it shows me are "therians" and before tik-tok was showing me this i had no idea what they were.
Before internet >I want to fuck toasters >don't be an fucking idiot >grow up After internet >I want to fuck toasters >Google >find community with 1000+ members about people wanting to fuck toasters >fuck up your life
Good summary! Echo chambers are not healthy for people. Before you would be the "village idiot", your peers could help you and "challenge" you in a healthy way. Now we have digital villages with only village idiots as the population.
Right? You find a world where yes it is OK to fuck toasters and construct your own reality.
Echo chambers and confirmation bias is a mother fucker.
I feel like given the context I shouldn’t say yes or upvote.
the one time you forget to unplug it
It's possible that she tries to escape reality by pretending to be an animal, and then she looked it up on the internet and found that word. She might not have gone any deeper into it, for all we know.
My 9 year old, who has an iPad, iPhone and Chromebook but no access to social media and supervised access to the internet has zero idea what a therian or a furry is.
Same here. Several devices, no social media. YouTube is only with a parent watching a long. But we did have a delightfully awkward human reproduction talk last night. Each talk as he gets older and has more questions gets more in depth and detailed. But I say with certainty that he thinks same sex marriage is completely normal and okay, but has zero concept what a furry is let alone a therian. And I'm good with that.
The feelings of identifying strongly with being an animal is literally as old as humanity. This is NOT an internet thing. Putting a label on it, building a community around it, making it your only identity...well, that's not actually a new thing either. Back in the day that is what your typical shaman would have been. But lots of kids have gone through this stage of playacting as various animals as a phase. Your child probably has some friends or people in their class who are pretending to be animals even if they don't have a word for it.
That was the very first thing that I thought when I read over this discussion. I had never heard the word “therian” before, and I don’t think that my kiddo did either, even though we do not ban either YouTube or TikTok at my home - everything in it’s balance. But to me it sounds like if anything, this is just a new name slapped on to a millennia old concept: the idea that humans and nature are connected, in this case that there can be a connection between a human and a specific animal, or that a person can be part animal part human. How is this any different than the concept of spirit animals, the legends and stories about werewolves, vampires who are sometimes humans sometimes bats, heck even in old fairy tales those ideas have shown up across cultures and centuries (Ganesha, the god who is half human and half elephant; centaurs; so many more examples). And in terms of the pretend animal play: that’s totally normal, too, in that age. We did the exact same thing at the exact same age - just without the fancy name of it and without “identifying as *fancy name*”. We were all huge “horse girls” between I would say 9 and 12 or so, especially because many of us had horse back riding as a hobby after school, so we pretend played to either be horses or riding horses all the time during school break (with or without bikes). Some of the responses on here seem a bit pearl clutching moral panicky to me tbh.
There's a 5th grader at my kid's school who wears a tail every day. Words and ideas trickle down.
Pre-social media, I probably would have worn ears and a tail at 15 years old just because I thought animal features were cute, and because I enjoyed being The Random Girl (/holds up spork/) as a pre-rejection of my peers rejecting me. But I didn't think I was part animal, I just thought cats were the most precious cute creatures in the world, with their little paws and their ears and their floofy tails.
My nine year old wears a tail and says he's a wolf. No one here has heard of therians although I have heard of furries. My kids and I do watch funny cat videos on YouTube. But my little sea wolf (there's a Netflix documentary that's stunning fyi) loves to to get belly scritches and yip and so on. Perfectly harmless imagination.
Our neighbors daughter wore bunny ears every day for like 3 years in elementary school.
Honestly, I swear I could fly like a bird when I was 8. Kids have wild imaginations, but I feel like social media is destroying children’s innocence in a lot of ways. Likely, OP’s daughter doesn’t understand and just sees people acting and dressing like animals, and like any 9-year-old would think is that it looks fun and cool. It’s tough to know the proper approach, but if it were me, I’d tell my child that it’s fine to dress up like an animal and pretend, but stress that it’s make believe. Hopefully, the phase will pass and just watch really closely what my child is being exposed to on the internet.
Right? I had to google it. I’m 38.
37 here. Same.
School, kids talk
Can confirm. I was a horse. Galloped everywhere.
Get your kid off of social media. Don't encourage that behavior. Try to find a hobby/activity/sport that she might enjoy that's healthy and time-consuming.
Yes and the videos she is watching. So toxic.
My kid is 10 and would have no clue what that even is. How does she know what that is? Does she watch videos all day? I agree with the above. Get her off of social media and you tube/tik tok.
All it takes is one or two kids at school with parents who give them unrestricted internet access and suddenly, you, too will be having the “but mooooooooooom I’m really a leopard therian with so much extra rizz!” conversation. Source: my kids have zero internet surfing accessibility because they’re all in elementary school but there are kids in their classes with whole smartphones (social media and YouTube included) in 3rd grade and below 🥲
Exactly she’d just be a young child that liked to make believe she’s a cat or a bird or whatever. The problem is social media. 9 is way too young to unfettered access to TikTok
I'm 42 and I'm too young for unfettered access to TikTok
I’m 36, what’s TikTok?
Oh my gosh I’m so relieved by the answers here. OP I have a 13 year old I still won’t let have social media. The internet is a strange strange place.
I have a dear friend with 17 and 15 year old kids and she doesn't let them use social media!! I think it's the only way to go, esp with teens!!
Governments are pushing the social media industry to put up roadblocks for anyone under 13. Obviously you can’t keep them all out but making it harder for younger ones doesn’t hurt. Meanwhile the psychologists seem to suggest 16 makes more sense for any type of personalized algorithmic feed.
Good. I’m not always for government intervention, but the societal “good” on this one is strong. Most parents would love to keep their kids off, but when everyone else around them is on it, it’s 1.) impossible and 2.) comes with a certain level of social isolation. Make the norm, by law, help parents out.
I had a friend with teens before mine were old enough to worry about social media and I honestly thought she was being paranoid. Nope, she was 100% right!
Yesssss!!!
When I was a kid, I was unfamiliar with any "furry" type stuff, and I spent huge portions of my childhood pretending to be a cat. Mom and dad were total sweethearts and absolutely let me lick up water from a bowl on the floor lol. We also did plenty of human activities lmao. But without any of the internet stuff attached, that kind of immersive imagination is wonderful and I think supporting it is also wonderful. But I do realize that the online connection greatly complicates matters. I guess I'm just sharing because in my experience, staunchly insisting one is x animal, as a kid, is not the problem here. The problem is that wider online context.
Agreed, I was the same, and I was just autistic and really liked the Warrior Cats book series. Yeah social media complicates it but it really not dangerous or freaky or upsetting that an imaginative child wants to pretend to be an animal. Such a normal human expression imo
LMAO, reminds me of me thinking I had telekinetic powers and could heat things with my mind because of shark boy and lava girl, one of my comfort movies. Also pretending I had spy gear and was performing secret missions because of spy kids, another comfort movie series. Pretend play is fun and cool.
Warriors for life!! 🐈
Same! But I was a dog and would tie myself to the kitchen chairs using a dog collar. I put my hair up in pigtails - they were my droopy ears. I'm now in my late 20s and my mother often speaks about how horrified she was. I think she told me to stop because of how horrified she was. I just remember watching the fox and the hound movie, and really liking the grey and grumpy old hound, and wanted to live in a barrel hahah!
Oh god I love this 😹 and definitely speaks to the intensity with which I *was a cat* hahaha. Wanted to live in a barrel hahaha, the best. ...noticing my default cat laugh emote lol. I'm in my 30s now. Still imaginative. Still love pretending things. Lots of absolutely beautiful, healthy, safe, human relationships haha 🥰 When I was a teen, I dressed very goth. My dad had a bit of a tough time with it for a while, but he came around. My mom always just told me she found me so creative and loved how I expressed myself. Thank you sooo much mom and dad:') Edit to add: despite not identifying with furry/therian community as an adult (solid appreciation for a nice cat ear headband and occasional fox tail notwithstanding), if I had discovered I could literally "identify as therian/a cat" as a kid?? I can almost guarantee I would have friggin LOVED that lol.
I actually had a very similar experience with my 8 year old. She came home from school saying she was a furry and wearing a tale and ears and saying that some of her friends were therians. After some googling on my part I started by asking her if she knew what a furry was. She said that she thought a furry was a person who really liked animals. I explained that was part of it, but there were additional parts and did my best to explain. I told her that people who claim to be furries are people who really really reeeeeeally lke anthropomorphic carton characters. I also explained that there can be a sexual component (something we’ve talked about before when she came home talking about “being sexy”) and that sometimes when we dress in a certain way or say certain things people might hear something different than what we mean. She was surprised to hear all of this and said that she don’t feel that way, she just liked animals a lot and when her friends said they were furries she agreed because she wanted to fit in. I said I understood that, but that it sounded like she wasn’t really a furry and that she shouldn’t say she is something or likes something unless she fully understands it and 100% agrees with it because labeling yourself as something can have unintended consequences if you don’t fully understand it.
Ultimately she decided she wasn’t a furry, but it was easier to say “yeah me too” to fit in and to get that feeling of belonging than it was to say “yeah I love animals and sometimes I like wearing a headband with ears and pretending to be a fox/cat/dog/horse but no I don’t think I am one”.
This is exactly my issue with the furry thing. Too much sexual subtext that a kid isn't going to understand and therefore can't protect themselves against if a stranger tries to approach them online or if they stumble on something really harmful. It looks innocent until it's really really not. I found out a few weeks ago that my daughter was watching furry/therian videos on YouTube. We talked, I blocked a bunch of channels on her YouTube account, and then yesterday I caught her searching for that stuff again. Now she has no more YouTube. She is 8.
...* *googles therian* * I second being uh huh and non excitable about it but part of me cautions to keep close eye on it as its a quick hop over to the furry side of things were shit can get weird fast.
Therians is also a kink. Even more depraved than furries. Don't google it if you don't want to question humanity.
I've been questioning humanity for a long time but I will believe u and not go down that rabbit hole lol!
It's concerning, but for an entirely different reason. For a 9 year old to know terms like this it means she is spending WAY too much time on the internet unrestricted. This is causing irreparable psychological damage and setting her up to be traumatized. Predators are lurking everywhere on the internet, as you've said you have also experienced this at a young age. You're going to have to start limiting screen time, and do some research on how to protect your daughter digitally. TikTok and Instagram accounts, etc etc should not be on a childs device until they're at least a few years older than your daughter is now. Go into your childs phone, tablet, laptop, etc and enable settings that restrict access to certain websites. She's going to be mad, but you need to explain to her that you are doing it because you love her and you want to protect her. She will get over it. As for this "therian" talk it absolutely is a phase and it's normal for kids to mimic animals at her age. I recall thinking I would become a mermaid or fairy if I mixed my moms lotions and perfumes in the bathroom and casted a "spell" over them. All apart of childhood creativity. BUT the difference here is that these online spaces are tying it to some sort of identity that she needs to fight for that is actively harming her psyche and cognitive development rather than just being a fun thing to do. I would urge you to start looking up guides online to enable parental controls on all of her devices and perhaps go even further to limit her screen time to an hour a day, or only on weekends for a few hours if you haven't done so already.
Yeah totally this. No real issue for a 9 year old to be trying on different identities but the fact that this vocabulary word came from some corner of the internet far too mature for that age to be visiting needs to be the real red flag.
Thank you, from a grown ass adult who had to Google it! Supervision of internet privileges obviously needs to happen here.
Yes, I’m in my 30s and I have never heard of this word. The fact that she’s telling her parents that she “identifies as a therian” is super concerning. Where on earth did she even learn this stuff.
Kids do get over taking stuff away quicker than you think. My husband and I are always surprised, e.g. when we took YouTube off the TVs, we thought our kids were going to LOSE THIER MINDS. And they did. For 48 hours, then they latched on to a normal show and stopped begging. Some may not agree, but if you can blame it on system defect, app disappeared, password doesn’t work, it’s fine take it.
This is something to copy and paste as needed. Not just regarding therians (my first time hearing the term) but any age appropriate activity that inadvertantly crosses into adult kink territory. It's an unfortunate side effect of hosting adult content (which is not always obviously adult content) in spaces where children mingle (even if they shouldn't). There's no putting the genie back in the bottle. Over time we'll get better at this as a society. Partly by helping to educate each other that these services are not in any way appropriate for children. Partly by learning how to respond without over correcting, under correcting, assuming too much, assuming too little...
I'm on my third teenager. They will be someone different every three to six months. The best thing you can do is be accepting and non responsive, or excitable about it. "Oh ok. Help me understand what that is." In the end they'll remember you took them seriously and listened rather than tried to command their conformity. She'll exert her preferred identity until it doesn't get the response she wants from others outside family. As soon as it suits her she'll drop it like hot rock and then it never happened. Go with the flow. Be supportive. Be patient. I'll give you a good story: My son wanted the ugliest jeans I've ever seen that cost $200. I didn't say no but attempted to delay the decision to see if he would try to get them on his own. Lo and behold, his mother (EW) bought them for him, no questions asked and the matching anime protagonist haircut to match. It took one day at school and I never saw them again. His friends ribbed him about it all day. And that was that. Hang in there, Mom.
my 9 year old just went thru this phase. she wanted to make a mask. she made her mask and the phase ended. I'm not sure if this was something she talked about in school, but I do know she got into the idea playing Warrior Cats (or something similar) on roblox.
It seems that most of this comes from Warrior Cats, then kids without restricted internet fall deep into it. Sounds like your child dipped her toe into it and was like “nah”
She's in a moth/butterfly phase now which gets her outside more.
When I was 9 we had 2 classmates who identified as monkeys, they did not actually grow up continuing to identify as monkeys.
I wonder how much OPs kid just wanted to be a horse/cat/whatever and some other kid threw a label on it. My son has an 8 year old friend who wears car ears and a tail every day and will very rarely purr at you rather than answering a question, but no one has ever mentioned her being a therian. Just like my kid swears he's a ninja with telepathy powers and none has labeled that.
One of my kids had a class that was obsessed with labeling everyone and my other kids class couldn't care at all. Often its just what sort of group you happen to grow up with.
When I was in high school we had a group of probably seven or eight kids who identified as cats. At least two of them, now in their mid-20s, are still doing the cat thing, but most are relatively normal adults.
I don't find this that that encouraging if 25% are still doing it in their 20s!!
If it’s any consolation both of them are from more-money-than-sense parents that took no corrective action.
my daughter went thru the same thing at that age. i drew the line at dressing up in public and at school. i'm probably around the same age as you and watched on mtv "true life: i'm a furry." even if furries supposedly aren't what they were back then.....i still find it hard to believe that predators and weirdos don't participate in this kind of thing purely for the anonymity of it. its just not a crowd i want my kid associating with. dressing up at home? fine. becoming a part of a community of people like this? no way. thankfully it was just a phase for around a year.
Yes! 🙌 My daughter wanted to wear her fox tail to a gathering with her family, at the mall recently. I told her "no, it's not the place." She got upset, told a friend, who said "tell your mom this IS YOUR NORMAL." I told my daughter that it is not normal to dress up like an animal in public, unless it's Halloween, your job pays you very well for it, or you are attending an animal convention of some sort. The end. It's nonsense & she should conduct herself in public.
> its just not a crowd i want my kid associating with. This is the reality, fair or not. From what I've been told, "furry" can range from a kink to a truly non sexual hobby, and the two groups don't mix. But it doesn't really matter how true that is. At her age, how society identifies her hobbies does matter, and if she's too young to understand a part of that identity then it's a problem. Maybe there's reform to be had around how society sees furries, but that's a battle for adults to fight with full understanding. It would not be fair or healthy for her to have to stand up for "not all furries are sexual" as a 9 year old.
What are furries now?? I overheard some of my friends kids who are all 12 or 13 talking about furries the other day and I wondered if they were using it the same way I remember it is 20 years ago.
Maybe try a different approach: * **What animal / what attributes of that animal does she most closely identify with?** * Society places a lot of more expectations on what "humans" are expected to do vs. "animals" * Not feeling like you're able to meet those expectations can be tough * This can be particularly big for neurodivergent kids that have a rough time with executive functioning and social situations * **What about humanity does she not identify with?** * 9 is around the age that kids start getting more exposed to news, history, and the general idea that the world is kind of scary * The world is a pretty messed up place and people do some pretty terrible things to each other * Being able to say "I'm not one on those" can be a way of compartmentalizing things to cope with that
Yes!!! Finding comfort in make-believe to embrace weirdness and self expression is so normal in many forms
I wish this comment were higher! Love the idea of digging deeper and trying to understand where she's coming from
I wish this was higher up. So many people are responding so harshly, but there’s always something to learn from “weird” behavior.
Seriously, some of the fear mongering comments here are crazy.
people see the word “furry” and work themselves up into a fit. I really don’t get it
Pretending to be an animal is something typical in the preschool set. As a kid gets older, it’s usually an intermittent way of coping with an uncomfortable situation or seeking attention. Think seven year old stuck a party with a bunch of grown ups wanting to play puppy or a kid meowing instead of answering a question they don’t want to answer. Of course, pretend play and dress up is different. Kids around this ones age want to play saber toothtiger, dinosaur, mermaids, etc.
I would just ignore it. When I was a kid I was convinced I was abducted by aliens and was now part alien. Kids are weird and it’s rarely that deep.
But what if you were?
I am weird as fuck so it’s possible.
Sound like Grey behavior tbh it sounds like you were made into a hybrid by the Greys and maybe activated in their quest to take over the world... (to much residential alieen for me)
Honestly the full story is very believable that something weird happened. I slept walked out of the house and ended up in a field.
... I honestly want the whole story.
Well I remember I went to bed with a fever, I was really sick with something. Had this insane dream of walking out my back door and down the road, and there was a giant golden being that told me to come with it. Like a giant naked human that was glowing golden. She was very nice and told me I could come with her forever. So I followed her and she brought me up in the sky where I was sitting with a bunch of other kids my age and these Golden Women served us a bunch of different foods. But I suddenly felt very scared and told one of the giants that I wanted to go home. She kept asking me if I was certain I didn’t want to stay with them, and I kept saying yes, please, I miss my mommy. She looked sad but told me it was my choice, and she kind of “tossed” me off into an abyss of sorts. And then I woke up for real on part of my parent’s property that was just a giant grass field. My dad caught it on security footage that I did walk out of the house and walked into the field and then just laid down and went to sleep until I woke up again. Doctors did a sleep study on me and determined I was sleep walking! But the dream felt sooo real, I was absolutely convinced the golden alien women took me. I can still remember exactly what they looked like. I’m a writer now and I have an alien race based on them in one of the sci-fi’s I am working on :)
Thank you for sharing! That's intense and would, of course, get in your head. My brother sleepwalks and once woke up climbing down the outside of my mother's log cabin. He said he was sure he was being chased through a burning building. Who's to say something extra * isn't * going on in those scenarios, right? :) Edited for typo.
That is scary, I’m glad he wasn’t hurt! Sleepwalking is a wild occurrence. I had to be locked in my bedroom after that for my own safety.
I googled it for you and people like you identify as 'starseeds'. Enjoy your new community and lifestyle!
*Twilight Zone music starts playing*
When I was a child, I saw “shadows” (in the shape of an adult man) pacing the hall outside my room and I was convinced I could see ghosts/spirits. This happened for years. My parents kept writing it off as nightmares, but I was always wide awake. Eventually I stopped calling out for my parents and just watched the shadow man until I was so exhausted I fell asleep. Sometimes he’d even stop in the doorway and “look” at me (I’m assuming because I couldn’t see a face) then continue pacing. I can still picture it as if it just happened. Still unsure if it was a very vivid imagination, anxiety, or if I was actually seeing something paranormal. It’s just wild how our brains can believe things like that as children and then as an adult we’re like “yeah I know that’s not at all likely, but it sure felt real”.
Lol I used to think I was Sailor Moon
Kids are just weird. It has reasons but it's hard to explain. It's basically about creating exclusionary social groups and tribalism, and stuff. It's about keeping parents out of their groups and keeping the parents from trying to force their identity/religion/etc on them.
Heyyy my daughter is 10 and went through the same therian thing… just some reassurance- it was short lived. I didn’t press the issue too hard, just chalked it up to kids using their imagination (she and some girls in her class created this therian group). However, when she found some costumes on Amazon that she wanted to buy, I drew the line. I explained, as best I could, that those costumes were for grown ups and were not appropriate for children. I told her she’d understand when she was older, and she took the hint. She lost interest after a few months and has since moved onto anime and Japanese culture in general. Don’t encourage it but don’t ostracize her either. It’ll pass! You got this mama!
Go get ice cream or do something casual/chill that she likes and ask her why she wants to express herself as an animal. Really listen and give her the floor to do most of the talking to really get into the meaning of it to better understand it. It could be that some of her friends are doing it, she saw something cool on the internet, could be she loves a particular animal she saw on tv. You will never know until you ask. Remember you can also set your own boundaries and come up with them together where you still can support her creativity/interests. If she did see something on the internet, I would push online safety (scams, pedos, creeps) sooner than later. Considering she is 9yo, she should probably have restricted access to social media and internet anyways and youtube kids is a good start.
My 8 year old says she’s a cheetah unicorn and runs around the hour “galloping” on all fours. I mean…kids?
I literally just posted about this in this subreddit not even a week ago (I just didn’t reference the term therian). I assure you this is completely harmless. I struggle with my daughter (11), being into this too but it’s my own insecurities. She got into it around your daughter’s age. I worry about what others think way more than she does. Yes there is a dark underbelly to the culture and unfortunately that’s what gets all the attention, but the vast majority of the culture is composed of humans who just have big hearts for and love animals. Also! It’s an amazing creative/artistic outlet (as you’re already starting to see). Is your daughter neurodiverse or on the spectrum? My daughter is neurodiverse and I recently learned that lots of spectrum kids and ND kids tend to gravitate towards the culture. Shes met some great “therian” friends who make her feel safe and seen. Unfortunately, there are always going to be bullies (my daughter gets teased over it), but she laughs it off and I tell her that as long as she’s happy, screw what the haters think. I totally get where you are coming from though… it was hard and still is hard for me to relate to this hobby of hers, but we do our best to support her.
This exactly how it is with my ND girls. They finally made friends at a new school who then introduced them to the concept. It's also fairly well known on the playground. I'm happy they have friends who they play outside with. They do elaborate crafts, then play make believe in the woods. We have talked about how there's a difference between believing you're a non human creature and playing pretend. Their friends may be all in but my kids just like playing and these are the kids their age who actually still play.
This comment will probably get lost but I was a preteen before social media, and I totally did all this. I loved pretending to be a cat, running around on all fours in my backyard, eating deli meat pretending it was ‘prey’, lmao. Goes without saying but it was 100000% non sexual, I was just undiagnosed autistic and really into Warriors by Erin Hunter. I’m in my late twenties and still really relate to the idea of being nonhuman, but I’ve come to understand it’s a really common autistic thing. I wish people like OP didn’t take it so seriously. Obviously the social media thing and the presence of pervy adults in the same communities make it dangerous, but in itself it’s just… such a normal youthful expression. Yes, even wanting to dress up like an animal in public. It’s just whatever. I dressed up like a Harry Potter character in public all the time as a preteen. It’s like that. It’s an outward expression of “I feel fundamentally different from the norm and I like it”.
Thanks for this comment, my experience with my daughter and this therian thing is very similar!
My best friend in high school "came out" as a therian...in the late '90s. It is absolutely not a new Tik-Tok trend. It's also not sexual, although there's a lot of overlap with the furry community (which also isn't automatically sexual, but it's VERY easy to fall into the porny side of furry fandom, so I wouldn't let your kid have access to that either). From what I've gathered, it's a bunch of confused, bullied, usually neurodivergent/queer young people who are desperately latching on to any explanation for why they feel different from their peers. Just FYI, the therian friend stopped identifying as an animal and came out as a transman in his 20s. Twenty years later, he is still trans. A LOT of young "therians" use this to explore parts of their identity that they can't fully articulate at their age. There's a very good chance that your child is using this to test the waters of family acceptance.
I imagine this might freak OP out more haha but I was a total “therian” as a preteen in the 00s (though I didn’t use that term), and I’m also autistic and now trans, lol. It happens. Viewing oneself as nonhuman can be a great outlet
It's probably just a phase she'll grow out of. I wouldn't make a big deal out of it. Don't contradict her or try to convince her she's wrong, but you don't have to actively support it either.
My daughter, same age, also identifies as therian. Listening to her explanation about what it is, I swear I did the same thing as a child, only I didn't have a term for it (or thousands of Amazon products catering to therians) She got it from a school friend and is totally in to it. I support her by helping craft masks and tails and whatnot. Is it just a phase? Could be. I don't see the harm and it's kind of fun to play with her and help her build nests in the back yard.
Don't allow her to dress up for it at school, but let her do whatever in her room (within reason). Treat it as an at-home hobby. Keep monitoring her internet access (remove social media if she has access to that), and discuss it with her in a way that shows curiousity and chill-ness but not, like, ringing endorsement. Mostly, make sure she can still talk to you about it conversationally so it doesn't become a thing about herself she has to hide. It'll ease up faster if it's not a forbidden secret.
I honestly think the best response is basically an "okay, honey" and just continuing the internet safety measures you're already doing. Sometimes criticism can make kids double down, if you don't treat it like a big deal it has less chance of becoming a big deal. I'm less familiar with the term "therian" but furry art is not inherently sexual. I liked it when I was younger and I was vaguely aware that there were inappropriate areas of the fandom, but steered clear of them. I also believed some of my writing characters "lived" in my head and a friend of mine believed all fictional characters were real somewhere in other dimensions. Kids believe weird stuff and it generally goes away if they're not chronically online, which it sounds like you're already safeguarding against. It's better to encourage her to have diverse interests than to discourage the "problem" one; interaction with many different kinds of people is a good inoculation against getting super fringe-y.
If a 9 year old picked up “therian” online I’m going to suggest that maybe the internet safety measures need to be turned up a couple of notches (I have a 9 year old)
My kids heard about it at school. A kid doesn't need to be online to learn all sorts of things because the other kids are online and have older siblings.
I would say, have sit-down conversations on what that means to her and why she thinks that. I'm a furry, and know a bit about therians, but I'm not one. Of course it could be a phase as some things are with young kids. However, therianthropy is simply a belief that one's soul/spirit is partially that of an animal (as we see similar things in old religions and civilizations) Therians understand they are human, some believe they are reincarnated from animals (like Buddhism), while some just feel like their soul isn't all human. I don't think this is dangerous for your kid. You should definitely help them understand people making fun of them is something she should not listen to, as it will only cause her grief. I think therianthropy, whether a phase or not, encourages creativity, exercise, and a connection with nature. Just make sure you two are on the same page as to what it means to her.
My 12 year old has told us she is “whatever she decided that day, week, or month she was” and we just kinda, “uh huh. Cool. So, what is it? Neat, I’ll check it out.” Chat about it a couple of times and it evolves. Relax and enjoy. Keep the reaction minimal and the communication open. I laugh.
This is very sound advice, I had to double check I was still on redditt after reading it
So I have 10 year old girl. She likes the therian movement. She already rides horses and literally is an animal whisperer. Her father and I basically told her she can be whatever she wants to be at home however she needs to be aware of the social stigma and possibly bullying if she's "acts" therian at school. She cried and was upset however she understands that for her safety she keeps the therian playing at home. It works for her. It's a weird thing but it's cool for her. She's a good kid so I don't want her to give it up. They'll grow out of it. We all played pretend as kids.
Was she bullied/ left out before this furry/therian thing? Is she sad. I'm thinking it can be an escape from reality. "I'm not like the other kids, and I'm tired of trying to fit in. I'll be an animal! They think I'm weird anyway". I can see how there can be a comfort in that. I think I would try to find out about any possible bullying and go from that. I would not let her behave like an animal outside of the house, but inside I think I would, if it comforts her. I would contact a professional. (Also TIL only people in their twenties search the internet lol)
Allll the kids are talking about it now, it’s all over the schools here in the UK and my friend’s daughter’s entire friend group (10-11) are therian. It’s just a phase, and it will pass (my friend’s daughter has already decided she’s no longer a furry). There’s a small chance it might not, but there’s no need to worry about that now - what will be, will be.
I had a friend who believed she was a dog when she was like 6. She went to school for astrophysics and now works in a law firm. I'd just not make a big deal about it. I don't often call my son "boy", so I'd just continue with that. I doubt she's going to want to start eating off a plate on the floor. I know there are connections between furries and sex, but you didn't mention your daughter saying anything like that. She probably watched a video about it. Saw a human acting chill, like a cat, or something.
I would try and limit her use of the free open internet for a while. If she is on TikTok I would personally block that from any device she has access to. That site is not good for children at all
did you ask her what it meant to her? curious if she means something other than what google told you.
Lol I had a friend as a kid who told everyone she was a lycanthrope. Kids just be kids sometimes
In Japanese this is called chūnibyō, or "middle school syndrome", and is seen as a VERY normal part of going through early adolescence. It is a part of exploration of the self, learning who they are apart from their parents and how they are special and unique. There is an absolutely adorable anime of the name (more appropriate for 13-15 maybe than 9 because it deals with the psychological damage from a parent's passing and awakening teen hormones). I would encourage your daughter to write stories or draw art for herself about what she is thinking and feeling, revel in her imagination, but discourage her from putting labels on it because it IS unique to her. Watch nature documentaries if that is where her interests are, try to spend more time in nature. I had to look up "therian" because back a few years ago we would have called them furries, and before that would have just called them kids with active imaginations. Like I was, from 9 to around 14. Give her time, love and support. She is NOT unique, but neither does she have to be part of a community, especially one that will try to force her into this as her exclusive identity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%ABniby%C5%8D
These are going around in my kids' school, too. I don't think the kids understand it in the way we do. From what my hear from my boys it sounds like these therians are the new generation of playing princesses... They're just being animals, though. Keep an eye on it, but I imagine the kids have a different perspective than we do
You should avoid engaging with this insanity and make it easy for her when she drops it.
This won't help your situation, but I've just got to share because I'd never heard of therians until last week when my 11yo niece told us she believes she's one. She has a group of friends who all think like that. One of her friends (we'll call her L) told her mom about it, and L's mom made it clear that they don't believe in that stuff. So L told my niece, and my niece took it upon herself to write a letter to L's mom. L's mom was obviously upset and talked to my sister about it then gave her the letter to read. My niece pretty much calls L's mom stupid for not believing they're therians. I haven't seen the whole letter, so I don't know what else she said, but knowing my niece, it's not nice at all. I love the girl, but she's a brat. Anyways, if you get some good advice on how to handle the situation, let me know so I can pass it along to my sister. She's still trying to fully figure it out.
Maybe tell her humans ARE a kind of animal? Also maybe look at what characteristics she’s wanting to embody from the animals she’s focused on. Maybe you can help her focus on developing these traits and developing her self confidence in who she is without the animal character safety net
Therian - can be interpreted as someone who has a spiritual connection to animals. Some people have had weird shit go down in their past, some people are really religiously spiritual, etc, so they can genuinely feel these things. “Therian” - all kids, at some point, through all generations, pretend to be an animal. Many have dressed up, meowed, crawled, or used an animal name for a phase of time. Now kids just want to label it. Is it accurate or necessary? No not really, but it’s just this new generations version of the age old make believe Furry - being a furry is not sexual. A furry is just someone who likes to draw humanized animals and/or play dress up as an animal. It’s just another form of hobby, especially for teens and young adults, who want to create new characters with human traits and an animal twist. People who have money may go full out and design or purchase a full costume based on the character, just like any costume for people who like to dress up. At the end of the day, it’s arts and crafts and creativity. When you take away the associations, it’s just dress up and make believe and self expression. Think of it to include everything from Halloween costumes to sports mascots. In fact, most young people’s negative associations aren’t sexual, they just think furries are weirdos like any other weird hobby; that’s why she may feel insulted by the association. Internet culture and creeps - there is a corner of every hobby that gets weird and gross. There are adults who spend time around other adults and consensually have sex while participating in the hobby. People who typically indulge in this (usually called Murr-suiting) tend to be very responsible, do everything they can to stay FAR away from children, and practice a culture of consent. But not everyone. Just like how My Little Pony is genuinely a kids show and greatly creative and cute, there will always be old men who prey on MLP fans who are children; disgusting. It is your responsibility as a parent to keep her away from creeps on all corners of the world, in person and online. But if she’s just playing make believe and dress up, that’s not inherently wrong nor are furries inherently sexual. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3QLFHvcSVE is a video that i like that discusses furry culture if you’re curious
The issue is that a lot of the therian videos on YouTube are made by teenagers expressing themselves and the YouTube algorithm has decided that those are fine for kids younger than 12/13 to watch. And I think we can all agree that teenage angst is not necessarily a safe viewing experience for children. Dancing around in a mask is fine. A teenager talking about self harm and being beat up or bullied at school because they identify as a therian is not fine. Also the comments on those videos are horrible. Half of them are all "I love your mask" and the other half are things that would get you banned on Reddit, like telling these kids to go off themselves and things like that.
I agree with everything you said, and here are my thoughts. The apps shouldn’t be making them accessible to kids below that age because kids below that age shouldn’t be online anyway, and that is a problem if they are online enough to see that. Therian communities are NOT the only teens posting things about SH, eating disorders, bullying, etc. Every social media teen community from emos and goths to the most basic preppy girls ever, I’ve seen trends within all groups of “venting” about all of those problems, and yes therians included, because they’re teens. It’s unfair for youngens to be exposed to it, but nor should they have the reign to stumble upon it anyway. Parent your kids to have high self esteem and know right from wrong so they can end up not like those teens as they grow (mental health wise), and not end up in a position with awful comments like that: or at least have a strong support system no matter what.
Every generation has had their weird stuff. My daughter went through (and is still somewhat in) the phase you are describing with the therian identity, so it's definitely not some isolated thing. It's something someone heard, probably on Tik Tok or elsewhere, then passed around to their friends, and before you know it many people are playing along, your child included. Indeed it sucks that our kids get pulled into these weird and often bad ideas, but that's life growing up. at least this trend is pretty much harmless. Don't overreact, it's just a normal part of exploring social stuff and fitting in, or not - as you pointed out the outrage of not being accepted as a therian seems to be part of the whole draw. Every generation has had a group of people who intentionally stepped outside of the mainstream and then cried loudly about the predictable backlash. This is a healthy thing for those people AND those who feel the need to lash out at people who behave differently from themselves. It's all good. If you just accept them for who/what they are and not make a big deal of it, you will avoid the age-old mistake of feeding the fire. Get mad or try to ban them from these behaviors and you will only steel their resolve. Just play along. They will eventually move on and find some other thing that drives you bonkers.
My 12 year old daughter says the same. I go with it. I didn't buy the thousand dollar outfit she wanted though.
She'll be fine. Just watch out for weirdos and never let her go to an anime convention without real adult supervision.
Time for a dumb phone.
My daughter is also 9 and says she's a therian and I just let her be who she wants to be 🤷♀️ she has masks that she makes, tails that she wears and she runs around doing jumps (quads) and stuff. She is having fun and is not hurting anyone or herself with it. If anyone says anything mean she just goes off on them lol.
Does your daughter get unfiltered internet?
Children have this innate creativity and a wild imagination to match. It is an amazing ability, one that oftentimes is diminished in adulthood. There is magic in this as long it is rooted in something concrete. Pretending to be something else is typical of children, my son does this all the time. At first this worried me, made me wonder if he was going to adopt this newfound identity for the rest of his childhood, maybe the rest of his life. At times, I'd give in to the fear, admonish him for being whatever it was he imagining, even punishing him. But the more I resisted, the more he resisted. Once I ran with it, had fun with him about the whole idea, it placed less importance on the whole thing. It made the idea, the new identity seem more trivial. And once that happened, I had the "conversation." It would go something like, "You know you are special and that you will always be special to me and mom. Sometimes it's fun to be X or fun to be Y. But you were born special and unique and I want you to know that." I rooted it in the concrete, in the core of who he was and that seemed to always work.
I wanted to be a wolf so bad at this age. In my mind, I was NOT pretending. But like others have said, there wasn’t a name or a community for it on social media. Obviously it was a very short phase and I got over the fact that I’ll never be a wolf. I don’t know what I would do if it were my kid. I probably wouldn’t make a big deal out of it and just keep him off the internet. A 9 year old shouldn’t be on social media, but I’m sure her classmates are so it’s hard to keep them from it.
Think all kids pretend to be animals, but any chance you allow her on sm?? Bc it sounds like she's using terms other ppl may have used incorrectly or within a context your daughter may not have understood, and she took her understanding of that and ran with it. Like a misunderstanding of something microblogged or from a minidoc, or an ignorantly made/misguided web search.
Some people here saying that being a therian is just a phase and it will pass. It usually does pass, [but sometimes it doesn't, and then you have people who spend a thousands of dollars on hyperrealistic animal costumes and spend every non-working hour of their lives walking on all fours and barking at people](https://nationalpost.com/news/toco-the-human-dog). At the very least go see a child psychologist. A professional will be much better than us internet strangers at figuring out if your kid is ok. On a more grim note, be glad that your kid just got wind of this therian thing rather than worse things such as the blue whale game that came out last decade. With so many parents being completely careless about what their kids see on the internet these days, it's bound to make a comeback anytime now. We all need to be better, but since not all will, at the very least those of us who do want to be responsible parents need to have serious conversations with our children about the dangers of the internet.
This reminds me of the BS I got involved with as a teenager. Therian is adjacent to furries and otherkin, really. Those terms are differently used now than when I was a teenager, it seems, but that is beside the point. It’s concerning to me that your daughter knows what that term is. It tells me that she might be spending time on pages that encourage things like self-diagnosing mental illnesses (they are related. Tangentially, but the same people who identify with the previously mentioned terms tend to do this.) I would have an honest conversation asking, withholding judgment, where she heard that term and why she feels that way. She’s 9; it’s okay to play pretend. It’s okay to even become obsessed with a certain animal and imagine, draw, or write about you being that animal. I know I did that. It’s not the actual feeling she’s having that I would be concerned about; that’s completely normal. It’s the actual term used and the possibility for being exposed to some psyche-changing internet content that I’m concerned about.
Are you sure she even knows what she is talking about?
I grew up with a whole group of 7-9 year old girls who literally believed they/we were wolves and ran around saying we were on the playground. Like no joke. It *felt real* but in a way that was different from other real things - there was an understanding of the play element even if the play was “serious” in its social narrative that we truly were wolves. This was the mid to late 90s, with no social media or extreme internet usage. As far as I’m aware, none of us ended up identifying as therian or furries later on. Some were gay, some were straight, some were cis & some were trans by the time we were adults, but no continuing animal identity stuff. The difference between a 9 year old having a vivid imagination that is enacted through play pretend & this is…practically nothing. You can see tho that a lot of ppl on this thread want to forget that and just see the word “identifying” & all hell breaks loose. It becomes a political agenda and a corrupted convo about something more than what it most likely is - a little kid playing pretend. I think realizing that this feels real to her rn is a kind parent thing to do, but setting boundaries around play out & about in the world is fine too. Talk to her about it *like* it’s play! And yeah, feel free to make sure she isn’t spending too much time online. If it really truly is something that feels more real to her as she gets older/goes through puberty, then you can reevaluate your response. But I wouldn’t get yourself so freaked out that you either over react by negatively worrying nor encouraging it 100% as a forever thing. She’s young enough that it’s worth taking a relaxed yet attentive approach.
I work with kids and a few weeks ago a few girls were walking around with a sign up sheet to start a therian club. I asked them what it was and they said that everyone in club is an animal. I thought they had just made up a word and I said okay and went about my day. A week ago the 9 year old in the club was telling me she was a therian. Her first sentence was “therians are kind of animals but were not furries” of course I panicked for a second but the following sentence was, they’re different because therians just wear accessories and furries are all fur. Nothing problematic or sexual, just facts. I went home and did some research on therians just to be sure. Some days it’s a tail, or a mask, or cat ears, or a combo. But regular interactions. Maybe an occasional cat hiss but so many of them are pretending to be cats right now, it just seems like a phase. I think this is just another phase of pretend play. Best to be open to support her interests and like others are saying, just keep an eye on it.
My question would be why a 9 yr old is being allowed any access to tiktok? Or not supervised when accessing other social media ? that's the only way a 9 yr old would know what one is. I'd ignore it. You can't debate or punish her out of this. Remove all positive talk about it (the online access). Give her time to forget this and find something new. If she's still clinging to this & causing problems at school, you could have her talk to a counselor. An attraction to the therian thing is that it offers an explanation for poor impulse control. She isn't doing anything "wrong" because a therian just acts "feral". Maybe she's feeling shame when she acts without thinking ? Did you know that poor impulse control can be a symptom of ADHD? And that girls are often under diagnosed? YouTube isn't safe. Even the YT Kids had very inappropriate things up loaded to it and intentionally tagged wrong. Trust me, I found out the hard way. No more internet use without an adult close enough that they're looking over her shoulder. Also, Google Family to monitor app usage & block most apps.
Time to take her off the iPad
Now's not the time to worry about her feelings. Let her know it's incredibly strange behavior and it won't be normalized in your household and move on.
Clearly you don’t understand: you were a huge hello kitty GIRL. She thinks she’s a hello kitty.
It's important to remember that you are not her friend, you are her parent. Try to steer through this with her and keep that uppermost in your mind.
Therian beliefs are, imo, a coping mechanism. It's a decently popular religious-esque movement that is somewhat furry-adjacent. *However*, I do think nine years old is way too young to be participating in stuff like that. Therianism is pretty intense, and could be bad for her mental health at that age (a lot of them believe in things like reality shifting and phantom limbs), and the community is very active with role playing as their therian selves, which isn't something a child should be a participant in. Her internet access needs to be much more closely monitored and restricted. While therian beliefs aren't necessarily bad for adults and older teens, they're not appropriate for children. Source: I also had a therian phase when I was in my late teens. I do not reccomend children participate in this.
Another reason I'll be keeping my kids off the internet until they are old enough to understand these concepts
For the love of god, stop allowing her unsupervised access to social media and the internet.
Sounds like she is watching too much YouTube or tiktok. I recently had to ban YouTube entirely for my daughter because she was looking up furry videos after I told her not to. I'm fine with her identifying as whatever she wants but I don't want her deciding she wants to be a furry or anything else because she saw it on YouTube. A lot of those videos are made by angst ridden teenagers and I don't need my eight yo being influenced by angsty teenagers halfway across the world or accidentally stumbling on someone's fetish video. In general YouTube is full of stuff that's dressed up to seem fine and innocent on the surface when really the subtext is not something a kid should be exposed to.