Is It OK For 12-14 Year Olds To Watch The Boys? A Parent’s Real Experience and Practical Tips
Last month, I was folding laundry on the couch Saturday night while my 13-year-old son Javi and his best friend Milo ate cold pretzels and flipped through Netflix after soccer practice. Halfway through scrolling, Milo stopped on the thumbnail for The Boys, the neon blue title glowing over Homelander’s scowling face. “My cousin lets me watch this when I sleep over at his house,” he said, leaning forward. “It’s so funny, all the guys in our grade talk about it. Can we put it on?” Javi turned to me, phone in his hand, already waiting for my answer.
I’d heard enough about The Boys to know it was packed with ultra-violence, explicit sex, and unfiltered adult language. My first instinct was to blurt “no” and tell them to pick another superhero cartoon. But I’d already seen Javi scrolling Homelander edits on TikTok a week earlier, overhearing him laugh about the memes with his friends. Most of 8th grade was already talking about it, whether I liked it or not. Banning it wouldn’t make the conversation go away—it would just mean I wasn’t part of it. So I said, “Let me watch the first 10 minutes with you guys first, then we’ll decide.”
They groaned a little, but agreed. We hit play. Ten minutes in, we’d already gotten a full-frontal sex scene and a mid-picnic sequence where multiple people’s heads explode into red mist. Javi cringed and ducked his head, laughing nervously. Milo whooped and said “That’s so messed up” like that was exactly what he came for. I hit pause on the remote, wiped a pretzel crumb off my sweatpants, and asked them, “Okay, what’s actually drawing you to this? It’s way more intense than the Marvel movies you usually watch.”
They both talked over each other for a minute. It wasn’t really the violence. They were tired of every superhero story being the same: good guy wins, makes a cheesy speech, everything works out. The Boys makes fun of all that, they said. It shows superheroes as fake, greedy, terrible people, which feels more real than the polished Disney version. And yeah, if you haven’t seen it, you don’t get 90% of the memes in the group chat. That was the big one. Not watching meant being left out of the conversation at school.
I sat back against the couch and thought about when I was 13, sneaking into a rated R slasher movie at a friend’s house when her mom was asleep. It felt like a rite of passage, a way to prove you were growing up. The difference now is that content this intense is accessible on a phone in your pocket, not just something you sneak into at a movie theater. So I made a compromise: we could watch one episode a week, together, on Saturday nights. No watching episodes without me, no sending clips to any of the younger kids in their friend group. If at any point either of them thought it was too much, we could turn it off no questions asked. They jumped at the deal.
That was two months ago, and we’re now five episodes in. I’ve learned a few things that I don’t see talked about much when parents argue about whether older teen shows are appropriate for early adolescence. First off, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. If your 12-year-old still gets nightmares from scary movies and struggles to separate fictional violence from real life, a hard no is totally the right call. For Javi, who’s grown up watching action movies with his dad and can already talk through why what he’s seeing is fake, that hard no would have just pushed him to watch it at a friend’s house without anyone to ask questions.
I also don’t make a big awkward fuss every time something explicit comes on. I just pause, ask a simple question, and let them talk. When that first sex scene came on, I didn’t fast forward or stare at the ceiling pretending it isn’t there. I just said “What do you think this scene is actually for? The show says it’s making fun of how superhero media sexualizes women, right? Do you think that comes across, or is it just doing the same thing it’s making fun of?” Javi thought for a minute and said it was definitely still weird, but he got what they were trying to do. It turned a cringey moment into a conversation, instead of something we all ignore and pretend isn’t there.
When I see people online complaining that teens think Homelander is some kind of hero, I just ask them what they think. Last week, after an episode where he hurts an innocent person to get what he wants, Javi said “It’s weird how everyone thinks he’s cool. He’s just a villain, right? People just make memes because he’s crazy.” That’s exactly what I wanted him to work through on his own, instead of me just telling him what to think.
I still have days where I wonder if I made the wrong call. There are parts that are way more graphic than I expected, and I leave some episodes feeling like that was too much for a 13 year old. But then I remember: the alternative isn’t that he never sees this content. It’s that he sees it when I’m not around, with a bunch of other 13 year olds who don’t know how to talk through all the messed up stuff either. For our family, showing up and talking through it together works better than a flat ban. It’s not perfect, and we’re still figuring it out week by week. I don’t think there ever is a perfect answer when it comes to this stuff.
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