Tom Brady's 16-Year-Old Son Reveals What His Dad Can't Stop Sending Him On Instagram: 'It’s Like Crazy'
What’s the best way to get through to your kids? Talking to them through social media, of course! Tom Brady’s 16-year-old son Benjamin, or Benny as his dad calls him, revealed the DMs his dad is always sending him on Instagram, and it’s so relatable.
In a Feb. 4 episode of Instagram’s Carversations, the retired NFL quarterback and his son chatted about their social media use. “What do we send back and forth?” Brady asks his son, whom he shares with ex-wife Gisele Bündchen.
“You send the most motivational stuff. It’s like crazy,” Benny responds.
Brady admits to sending motivational content to Benny and his older son, Jack, 18, whom he shares with ex-girlfriend Bridget Moynahan. Brady also shares his daughter Vivian, 13, with Bündchen.
In typical teen fashion, Benny doesn’t return the favor. “And I send such stupid and funny videos. You’ll send like the most stoic quotes,” he continues.
Sometimes, Brady’s dad side comes out, and he’ll send silly posts too. “I think it’s funny to send you some goofy stuff on occasion,” Brady admits. “But I think for the most part, if I’m going to share stuff with you, I want you to look at it and see a real value in it. Like, ‘Why would Dad send me that?’”
Elsewhere in the video, the dad of three reveals that he’s comfortable communicating with his teens via social media thanks to Instagram’s Teen Accounts, which limits what content minors can see and offers more protections against unsolicited contact.
“I think the important thing is you have a Teen Account because you’re 16 years old,” Brady says in the clip. “And what do parents worry about with kids? We worry who’s contacting them, you know. And we only want you to be able to be in contact with people that know you and that you’re friends with. I don’t want some random person entering anything into your phone or contacting you in any way. That is the scariest thing for a parent.”
Brady also mentioned that he’s happy the teen accounts protect “the type of content” that his son can see — “we only want certain things that are age appropriate that are going to show up on your accounts” — and that it limits the amount of time Benny can spend online.
“Your time is limited because you have a Teen Account,” Brady says. “You get an hour a day on Instagram.”
These settings are all automatic for users under 18. “Because for a parent to keep up with the pace of change, with the amount of software changes, and these different accounts, whatever account you’re on for your social media, which look everyone enjoys social media …I do think putting parameters in place for a teen, certainly for you, is really important to me,” Brady adds.
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All of this works together with the important lessons that Brady wants to teach his kids. During the car conversation with Benny, Brady asked him, “What are some Brady family values you take with you wherever you go?”
“I mean, the biggest one that you literally drill into my brain is that being cool is to be caring,” he responds. “Like cool people are people who care. And I mean, I literally hear it in my sleep the amount of times you’ve said that to me. Kind of gets scary but.” It might be scary, but the lesson has clearly stuck!
Brady asks his son if he applies that to his life. “I feel like I do,” Benny says. “Like, you’re not going to be 100% perfect all the time, but what you can be, is you can learn from your mistakes, and you can grow from the mistakes.”
“I love that,” Brady responds.
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In a Nov. 2024 appearance at the Fortune Global Forum in New York City, Brady chatted about how hard it is for his kids to grow up in his shadow. “To be a boy, [it] sucks to be Tom Brady’s son in so many ways. There’s a lot of challenges I faced as a kid … my kids naturally are gonna be faced with their own challenges, and they gotta figure out how to overcome them. I’ll be there to support them and I’ll be learning along the way with them.”
“Whatever our kids choose … we gotta support [them],” Brady continued. “The blessings my parents gave me was when I was that long shot as a kid who was a backup quarterback on a freshman team … they never said, ‘Man, don’t do that. It’s gonna be too hard. Let’s do something different. Let’s think about another backup plan.’ They kind of said, ‘You know what, go for it. Whatever you wanna be, go for it.’ And that’s probably my parenting style.”
Protecting his kids when he can and pushing them when he needs to — it sounds like Brady has mastered that delicate parenting balance that’s so inspiring.
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