Meet The Family

First, the Internet made Daddy. He was strapping and benevolent, and he looked out on his kingdom from the eyes of Pedro Pascal, Oscar Isaac, and Idris Elba. Then it made Mother — a taciturn goddess in human form, inclined to take the shapes of Cate Blanchett and Greta Lee — and rather than standing by Daddy’s side, she soon upstaged him. (She couldn’t help it: She was born to slay.) When Babygirl came in the shapes of Paul Mescal and Cillian Murphy, they proved happy to follow in their parents’ footsteps, with a youthful gait slowed by melancholy. And finally, the 30-Year-Old Teenage Girl arrived, little bows already fastened to her hair. She kept her distance from the others, awestruck and unbearably horny for them.

Thus, the Internet’s nuclear family was reborn: a storybook unit, reshaped by the furthest, most chaotic reaches of the hive mind.

Although these archetypes emerged from varied subcultures — largely queer spaces and fandoms — they’ve merged into the mainstream. And while memes are generally transient, these boast unusual staying power. For instance, when Meghan Trainor of his and hers toilet fame released the song “Mother” in 2023, it was widely seen as a death knell for the word’s in-group cache; the blow to Babygirl could’ve come when Jacob Elordi (the tallest of the Babygirls, and therefore their leader) was identified as such in a nationally aired Saturday Night Live promo on Jan. 18. But they live on, albeit in a more universally accepted form.

Because Daddy, Mother, Babygirl, and the 30-Year-Old Teenage Girl emerged separately, they’ve been considered as discrete phenomena. But step back for a moment, and it comes into focus: The Internet hive mind is rebuilding the nuclear family, one member at a time. Where it was once satisfied to crown its thirst objects “king” or “queen” (as in, the fathers and mothers to a nation of fans), it’s now pining to bring them closer. Parasocial, meet parafamilial.

Many believe this state of affairs reflects a larger impoverishment of real relationships — blame pandemic-era isolation, or the disintegrating trust in our institutions, or whatever Timothée Chalamet was referring to when he said “I think societal collapse is in the air.”

For academics Abby Kluchin and Patrick Blanchfield, the (married) co-hosts of the psychoanalysis podcast Ordinary Unhappiness, it makes sense that we’d use the nuclear family structure to work through our messy feelings about all of this. “This thing that we call the family — this institution but also the set of experiences that we associate with it — gives us one of the most powerful material templates for interpreting the world and for relating to people in the world,” says Blanchfield.

“If you imagine Mother, Daddy, Babygirl, and 30-Year-Old Teenage Girl in a house together, what I’m picturing is like pure ferality,” says Rachelle Hampton, a journalist and co-host of Slate’s ICYMI podcast. “But also it might be beautiful.”

Hampton points to the found family featured in HBO’s The Last of Us, in which a hardened older man comes to care for a young girl as his own. “You’re like, ‘This shouldn’t work, and yet my heart is warm,’” she says. “They’re both so f*cked up together.”

People who are f*cked up together: That’s a family, Babygirl.

Daddy

A Daddy is chiseled. Handsome. Strong enough to crush you, but he would never — well, maybe if you asked him to.

Because Daddy was the first of the family members to come on the scene, circa 2013, he bewildered some. (See: The raft of stories in which male celebrities were asked how they felt about being labeled as such.) After all, isn’t it a little creepy to label your celebrity crush “Daddy”? Does everyone with a Twitter account have Daddy issues?

If you subscribe to Daddy Freud, the answer is yes. “Love is sexual love, and there’s an enormous amount of work that actually goes into the de-sexualization of the parents,” says Kluchin, who teaches psychoanalysis and other subjects at Ursinus College and at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, which she co-founded. “And in some ways, what we’re seeing is just like this; it just creeps back in.” Perhaps it was inevitable that Daddy would arrive, tearing through our psychic boundaries with Tom of Finland-style biceps.

And thus he cleared the path for the Mothers and Babygirls to come, but he would not prove to be as enduring, even after a brief rebrand as “Zaddy.” Daddy was the first to arrive, and is now the first to fade. Even Pascal, once the preeminent Daddy, has recently been Babygirlified.

Mother

Mother is good at many things: slaying, smizing, quote-giving. What Mother is not good at? Mommying.

As Casey Lewis, the author of the After School newsletter, tells Bustle via email: “I’m afraid the only way to describe ‘Mother’ is that it’s a woman who’s constantly ‘serving c*nt’ (sorry, mom!).”

In a past life, Mother was the House Mother, a figure in the LGBTQ Ballroom community. Back then, she acted much like an actual mother might, offering her couch to found family in need and tutoring the youth in the ways of the world. She’s since been transmuted, interwoven with diva worship and flattened by mainstream-ification and meme-ification. Somewhere along the way, she shed her maternal instinct like a snake sheds its skin.

“When people are saying that someone is Mothering, usually it’s someone that, if they were actually your mom, you’d be a little bit concerned,” Hampton says. “It’s pushing back against or playing with this idea of expectations, and what roles people are supposed to play, and what traditional notions of these archetypes look like. Again, that’s also quite queer-coded.”

30-Year-Old Teenage Girl

Sad girls and tomato girls and coquette girls and clean girls: On the Internet, you can be infinite kinds of girls, but you must be a girl. Just ask the women in their 20s and 30s who jokingly self-identify as teenage girls — overgrown adolescents prone to angst, hormonal infatuation, and sitting in their rooms listening to sad music. As Daisy Alioto, writer and Dirt Media founder, says: “Social media is a regression fantasy.”

Last summer, a nuclear fission event — and no, it wasn’t Oppenheimer — marked the apotheosis of this particular regression fantasy: Barbie meets Renaissance Tour meets Eras Tour. But in the six-odd months since then, the figure of the 30-Year-Old Teenage girl has stuck around — possibly because the conditions that brought her about haven’t changed. “It’s often attributed to the global anxiety — that especially is affecting women with the overturn of Roe v. Wade — is often attributed to economic insecurity, layoffs,” says Internet culture journalist Steffi Cao. “A lot of women have resonated with the ‘I’m just a girl’ mentality because it offers this escape route.”

Regardless of their gender, people in their 20s and 30s are struggling to attain traditional markers of maturity: Homeownership remains out of reach; parenthood seems prohibitively resource and time intensive. Young women staring down the barrel of adulthood are faced with a particularly grim image. Motherhood — the real kind, not the parasocial iconification kind — is seen by many as a punishingly endurance sport, which requires you to check your own needs and hopes and dreams for its duration. Marriage, we’re learning from our peers and elders, can also be a letdown. Says Kluchin, “It makes sense that we would be really saying ‘Well, why graduate to an adulthood without any of the perks of adulthood?’”

“The expectation of care, I think, is what people might be pushing back against, or at least women are pushing back against,” says Hampton. “They’re like, ‘I’m going to choose to care about my 50-year-old babygirl Kendall Roy, but you can’t make me care about anybody else.’”

Babygirl

From the fog of Succession’s god-tier daddy issues and Oppenheimer’s Promethean guilt emerged Babygirl: rosy-cheeked and pale as a cherub, but with the sad eyes of a man who’s seen too much.

Whereas Daddy was the dominant one, the one who might take you under his wing, Babygirl is submissive and in need of your care. “There’s been this infantilization of celebrities online for a very long time,” Cao says. “I think the first memory I have of people parenting or babying celebrities is probably the 2010s with the 1D fandom, Directioners, when Zayn smoked a cigarette and everyone was like, ‘Oh, my God. Zayn, don’t smoke.’” Nowadays, this urge to parent is no longer just the result of a fan’s parasocial attachment but an intrinsic part of the thirst object’s appeal.

There’s also just something fun about Babygirling white adult men. “To make this grown-*ss man into a Babygirl feels like the funniest thing to do, rather than to infantilize a woman,” Cao adds.

Lewis agrees: “Women have been objectified for all of time; it’s kind of a thrill to objectify men, especially young men who seem in on it.”