Learner Dad: My kids have spoken — you're an old man if you use the word 'cool'

The fact I’m facing is that I’m not a cool Dad.

Homer Simpson: Maybe if you’re truly cool, you don’t need to be told you’re cool.

Lisa Simpson: Sure you do — how else would you know?

I still remember watching this exchange in The Simpsons. It was the late 1990s and I was living like a student in my early 30s, sharing an apartment with a friend of mine in Dublin and sort of working for a living. There was a fair bit of leftover Chinese food for breakfast. It wasn’t unusual to find a randomer asleep on the couch.

In this episode, The Simpsons were coming back from a rock festival, and mother Marge asked if she was cool. Her kids, Bart and Lisa, said no. Marge said not caring about that made her cool, right? Bart and Lisa said no.

I had no notions of having kids back then, but I was sure of one thing. If I ever did, they’d think I was cool.

And they’d call me Pat, instead of Daddy. Because that would be cool.

Well, the other day, my daughter said ‘Daddy, could you stop saying cool?’

I said ‘why?’, in a really cool way.

She said because it’s embarrassing.

Ouch! They pity me in the same way I pitied my mother in the 1970s when she would describe something as ‘the bee's knees’.

There’s a phrase that became deathly uncool, if I was allowed to use the word cool, which I’m not.

The thing is, my kids use it all the time. But they tend to exclaim it, often in an American accent, because they watch a lot of YouTube and everyone has an American accent on YouTube.

You know they’ve found a new hack on Minecraft when one of them shouts ‘That is soooooo cooool’.

I don’t say, that’s not the way you’re supposed to say cool, because I don’t want them to pity me even more.

I didn’t always say cool. It kind of crept up on me when I was going out with what my mother would have described as a much younger woman. This younger woman used cool in an under-stated, cool way, so I said I’d give it a go.

A few close friends had also started using it at the time — they were big into what you might call alternative refreshments, and the word cool comes naturally in that environment.

I eventually got to the point of saying ‘cool’ instead of ‘OK’, if someone suggested something. It jarred a bit because there was still an ageing hippy vibe about the word cool, but a lot of people around me were into it, and I couldn’t be bothered putting up a fight.

And now it’s off limits. My kids have spoken — you are a sad old man if you use the word cool.

I care a small bit — we all want our kids to think we’re cool.

My daughter uses the word awesome a bit, because she’s 50% Californian at this stage as far as I can see.

My son has phrases that he’s picked up for gamer videos. I’ve heard him use the phrase ‘OP’ a few times. You should see the ‘you sad old man look’ he gives me when I ask him what that means. (It’s shorthand for overpowered according to the internet.) He also uses the word ‘legit’, which I love, but he’ll avoid me in public if I start saying that and, to be honest, I wouldn’t blame him.

The fact I’m facing is that I’m not a cool Dad.

It would be nice to think that no parent can never be cool in their kids’ eyes, but that’s not true. I’ve heard kids say their Mom or Dad is really cool. I didn’t ask them what makes their parents seem cool, because that would sound a bit needy.

Maybe they just let them play video games all day. I’d be up for that but then my wife wouldn’t think I was cool. So I’ll stick with the tragedy of being uncool.

That’s my final Learner Dad. Thanks a million for reading along, it’s time for my kids to write their own stories.