Women's Health October 6, 2025 0 Comments

From Desperate Mom to Documentary Dynamo: The Untold Battle Unfolding Behind One Teen’s Silent Struggle

At 13, my son’s entire culinary universe was a fortress of mac & cheese and every grilled cheese variation imaginable — broccoli was basically alien territory. Then, at lunch one day, out comes this curveball: he wants lettuce with a thin slice of turkey. Who had abducted my kid? It felt like an overnight plot twist straight out of a coming-of-age flick, complete with a side of gym obsession instead of Minecraft marathons. As a mom, my Spidey senses went off like a siren—the kid I knew was gone, replaced by someone chasing a hyper-muscular ideal plastered all over social media. Is this the first generation of boys who grow up feeling they have to bulk up to blockbuster star status just to fit in? Having spent countless hours worrying (and chatting with fellow moms), I dug deeper—because if our boys are battling unseen pressure behind those screens, it’s high time we talked about what’s really going on. Ready to unpack the mystery behind this sudden shift and what it means for our sons? LEARN MORE

At 13, my son lived on mac & cheese, grilled cheese, all the cheeses. I spent a ton of time fighting with him, begging him to just eat one piece of broccoli. Then one day at lunch, he announced, totally out of the blue, that he’d like lettuce with a thin slice of turkey on it. I wondered who’d abducted my son?

That same day, instead of spending his spare time glued to a screen trying to master, NBA2k, Fortnight, Minecraft or the show of the season, he started spending every spare minute working out at the gym.

He was in his last year of middle school, and my mom Spidey senses were on fire; this was not my kid and something major had changed overnight. So, I did what mothers do when they worry: talk to my mom friends. I was surprised to learn that it wasn’t just my kid, my friends had been seeing the same thing with their sons.

I have two sons, the other just a few years older in high school, and I wasn’t seeing it in his friend group. As I spent hours worrying about my youngest, it occurred to me that he was part of the first generation of boys to grow up with social media. I wondered if, as a result, he felt judged on a ridiculous hyper-muscular body standard he’d grown up looking at? Did young boys suddenly feel like they needed to look like jacked movie stars?

“Did young boys suddenly feel like they needed to look like jacked movie stars?”

As a woman, I’ve felt pressure to look a certain way literally since I could walk, I’ve been judged by society on how I look, how I dress, how I speak, the list goes on. As a society, I’d say we’ve gotten better at least at recognizing this and calling it out for what it is in girls and women but for boys, we just don’t talk about it as much.

My job is making videos, generally witty ones, you know the kind you see on YouTube and TikTok about famous people in magazines. Working at Men’s Health and Women’s Health, I had some well-informed colleagues to test my theory about boys and social media and my son. So much so that with their encouragement and support, I decided to make a documentary film about the subject.

I spent the next year following the stories of four young teens in their quests to bulk up and get cut. What I found was a dark world of social media manipulation, shady supplements, and very real consequences. I talked to the top experts in the country—from behavioral health researchers to emergency clinicians—for their insights and advice.

The result is Generation Flex, a full-length documentary film. I didn’t expect that what was happening in my home was just scratching the surface on what was happening across the country for young boys and men. The topic was so new, that I was invited to go to Congress and talk about what I learned making the film, alongside a doctor from Harvard and the Eating Coalition of America.

I was more nervous to attend a meeting on Capitol Hill than I’d ever been about anything in my life. But right after I spoke, a young Congressional staffer came up to me and immediately started spilling his heart out about how this was his own lived experience growing up. I forgot where I was and immediately went into mom mode, telling him it was ok.

My son is now in college, and I can report that he is still is obsessed with eating protein and working out but I think he’s a little more realistic about his goals. He recently deleted both TikTok and Instagram of his own free will. He’s still not eating as much broccoli as I’d like but I hope that the knowledge I gained making this film has helped him in some way.

I really hope other boy moms (and dads) watch this film, if nothing else but to get under the hood of what’s coming at our boys on social media and to learn how to be allies in the fight against the pressure of unrealistic body standards.