Abstract
<p>The growing mental health crisis among young males, marked by suicide rates that have surged over 50%since 2000 and persistent barriers to help seeking rooted in restrictive masculinity norms, demandsunderstanding of how parents discuss these issues in everyday digital spaces. While online forums haveemerged as sites of parental support-seeking and sense-making, a gap exists in understanding the thematicstructure of parent discourse about boys' mental health, particularly as it intersects with masculinity andtechnology. To address this gap, the present study applied semisupervised latent Dirichlet allocation(LDA) to a corpus of approximately 1,252,045 words drawn from the Reddit communities r/Parentingand r/Mommit (2012–2025), yielding an eight-topic solution (k = 8) validated using coherence andperplexity metrics, with temporal trends assessed via Mann-Kendall tests and Theil-Sen slope estimation.Results revealed that parental discourse is dominated by relational and emotional framing (“Parent-SonEmotional Connections,” ~21% of tokens), while technology appears primarily as a practical managementconcern (“Screen Time &amp; Gaming Expenses”) rather than a mental health or identity issue. Discourseabout gender expectations and norms increased significantly over the study period (τ = .46, p = .033),while emotional parent-son connection language declined (τ = −.49, p = .024). These findings highlight parents' need for developmentally informed frameworks for technology discussions and gender-responsive clinical approaches that support relational connection alongside growing gender awareness. By uncovering the topic structure of parental online discourse, this study provides actionable insights for counselors, educators, and intervention researchers working to support male children and their families innavigating mental health challenges in digital environments.</p>