Parents are turning their teens’ texts into AI emo songs

Parents have long turned to social media to unload about the tiny indignities of raising teenagers. The difference now is that they can feed those texts into AI and turn them into pop-punk songs that sound like they were ripped from a 2007 Warped Tour compilation.

Across TikTok and Instagram, parents are using AI music tools like Suno to transform everyday texts from their kids into emo anthems. (Whether all of these creators are actually parents of teenagers is another question.) One moment, it’s a daughter demanding Starbucks after school. The next is a full-blown post-hardcore song about forgetting gym shorts, insisting they are literally starving, or begging for a ride home.

The more you watch these videos, the more small details start to come into focus: the sheer amount of Starbucks American teens seem to consume, the way every minor inconvenience becomes a five-alarm emergency, or the casual use of “bro” and “bruh” when talking to parents. In song form, those habits become even funnier, turning ordinary teenage shorthand into lyrics that sound weirdly revealing about the way kids talk now.

There is also something very millennial about the trend. Many of the parents making these videos grew up on emo, pop-punk, and Warped Tour bands, which makes the songs feel a little less like random AI creations and more like affectionate parodies of the music they loved as teenagers.

Of course, as with anything involving AI, it’s important you know the risks before partaking in the trend. Feeding private family texts into AI tools means handing over personal conversations — sometimes involving minors — to third-party platforms that may store that data, use it to improve their models, or keep copies of the generated songs.

Privacy experts have repeatedly warned that people often treat AI prompts as more private than they actually are, even though many companies reserve broad rights over what users upload. You may not think it matters much when the text is “pick me up from soccer practice,” but it is worth thinking about before turning the family group chat into content.

And like so many AI trends right now, the actual technology almost feels secondary to the joke. What people are really sharing is not the amazement that AI can make music. It is the strangely universal realization that “Can we get Starbucks?” already sounds like the kind of lyric that would have shown up in a song about suburban teenage angst.