Being listened to is about the smallest thing a person can ask for, and "Better Parents" is built around how rarely its speaker gets it. The poem opens with a quiet surprise. Someone has offered life advice, but what mattered wasn't the advice at all. It was "Someone to listen to me." The poem then moves backwards through the family that never did the same, and forwards to an online figure who, with a single word, starts to fill the gap. Its central idea is that parenthood has less to do with blood than with attention and warmth. When a home withholds both, a young person may go looking for them elsewhere.
The poem is careful about the difference between hearing and listening. The siblings "hear and tone me out", which reads like "tune me out" with the sound flattened. Whether the change is deliberate or a slip, it suits a voice reduced to background noise. The father's case is crueler. He does listen, and the result is his announcement that he'll "never accept my gender." Being heard, the poem shows, is not the same as being accepted. That is why "It's rare I ask for help" carries so much weight in the opening stanza. The speaker is describing a risk, not a habit.
The form is free verse with no rhyme. The short, plain lines sound closer to a diary entry or a confession than to a song. The stanzas are uneven, and the third stops almost mid-thought on the title of the post, "A 'Why Gender Matters' post", as if the speaker can't bear to say more. Punctuation works for feeling rather than correctness. Dashes interrupt the speaker, and the capitalised "SIXTEEN" is the one moment the poem raises its voice. The very next line, "That's a hard time to be alive", shrinks the volume again, and the understatement hurts more than shouting would.
The imagery stays close to the body. The only simile, "a punch to the stomach", is physical, and the next stanza is a clipped inventory: "Depression, ADHD, ADD. / Body Dysmorphia." Those full stops sound like a form being filled in, a person reduced to labels. The tense shift in "I also had depression, / And now I have dysphoria" suggests difficulties accumulating rather than being left behind. Judging by these images, the family's rejection lands on the same place where the speaker already struggles.
Then comes the metaphor the poem turns on: "Wattpad is my hometown." A hometown is normally something you are born into, so the line reverses the earlier problem. Here home is chosen: "online I can pick my own." The new parent figure, addressed as "you", has done very little, "Just called me 'sweetie'". The single quotation marks hold the word up like an object under glass, and the list that follows ("mom, dad, step mom- / They don't do that") shows how much it means. The next lines are the most surprising: "Kid, doofus", "moron". These are insults, but in the teasing register of family banter, and the speaker counts them as belonging. The closing line, "I'm getting better parents", stands alone. The present tense of "getting" keeps it unfinished, hopeful rather than triumphant. The comparative "better" sets a modest bar. The speaker doesn't need perfect parents, only ones who answer.
The poem matters because it doesn't dress anything up. It resolves no family conflict and offers no lecture. It records a kind of repair many young people will recognise, in which an online community becomes a stand-in for the acceptance missing at home. The reference to Wattpad suggests the poem was written for that very audience, readers who can answer it in the way it longs for. In its plain voice, a nickname becomes proof of care.