The Voice of Experience Talks Smartphones

Further to my post: The Voice of Experience

The Voice of Experience

I thought that I would share with you things that I have learnt about teenagers and their phones. This is:

The Voice of Experience Talks Smartphones

Don’t be fooled into thinking that when your child has a phone, you will be able to keep track/get hold of them. I have 4 children, all with phones and regularly ring all 4 and no-one answers. Is it a conspiracy?

Don’t get a contract without being very sure that there is a cut off to spending. However much you trust your angel and with the best will in the world, they click on an app that costs a shed load of money, that they don’t have a hope in hell of ever paying off and so you have to. I don’t let the girls have contracts. Ever.

You will get totally and utterly confused with top ups – especially if you have more than 1 child. They will all be topping up on a different day and on different networks. They will run out of credit a week before this day. They will then try and tell you that you topped them up a month ago. They are lying.

If you bought the phone for your child to be safe, bear in mind the above. No credit = back to the olden days pre-mobiles, when we were all at the mercy of paedophiles at every turn. Or, just relax until teatime, when they are sure to appear.

If you buy a phone from the internet for your child, be aware that if it is reconditioned it could be full of porn. This happened to number 1 friend. She sent the phone back after a couple of days…

Teenagers lose things. Teenagers lose their phones. This causes 2 things to happen: firstly a complete and utter meltdown of proportions you have never previously witnessed and secondly a bill for someone. Make sure that bill is theirs, to teach them responsibility. At least you may get your toilets cleaned for a year.

You will frequently be sharing your house with extras – Facetime extras. This creates more noise and just don’t enter their bedroom naked – I have had 1 or 2 close encounters with this one…or rather, their facetime friends have.

Expect the phone to be used for selfies. These selfies will also include you – probably when you are looking at your most shit and they will stick a pair of dog’s ears and a nose on you, then refuse to delete it until you up their pocket money.

image1Dog Mum and dog 2

You will take a photo of them, it will be heavily scrutinized and then they will refuse to let you keep it. Your only revenge is to photobomb their selfies.

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They will take photos of inanimate objects for the purposes of keeping a streak going. Do not question why they are taking a photo of their bedside table – you will be ridiculed, when you thought it would be the other way around.

FullSizeRender(1) copy 3Daughter 4’s note to daughter 1 when she went away with the school – no mobile phones allowed

Expect to find them on their phone first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Unless you take it away from them an hour before bedtime, just as all the experts agree you should. In which case just expect an ongoing battle, in which part of their argument will contain the phrase: but I’m only listening to my music…Ha, yeah…just like I never read your texts.

They will constantly be on the hunt for your/aunt’s/uncle’s/friend’s/neighbour’s upgrade. They have no shame. They will ask the checkout assistant in Waitrose if they have to.

Everyone has a better phone than them. Woe betide if you have a better phone than them. When their granny has a better phone than them there is total humour failure, until the situation is rectified (either they have a birthday, or granny dies).

Are you the voice of experience? If so, join in – please add. If you are a very old person, who just wants to moan about how much time we are all spending on our smartphones these day, then please feck off!

If you enjoy my blog, I would be very grateful if you voted for me in the Mumsnet Blogging Awards: Best Writer and best Comic Writer categories. It is a quick one – takes seconds and here’s the link, thank you 🙂

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The Voice of Experience

Sometimes, something rattles my cage and I have to write about it. For selfish catharsis and the overwhelming desire to set the record straight – subjectively speaking, of course. I mean, everyone’s opinions are valid… and then there is the voice of experience. 

Now, the voice of experience isn’t a know it all. It isn’t judgemental and it is certainly not saying it is a parenting guru. No, what the voice of experience is saying is that as much as we all have a way in which we want to parent, rules that we want to enforce and strict behaviours that we want our children to exhibit, we are all real people. We are all living in the real world. The world in which we are living is ever changing and if, as parents, we don’t keep our ears to the ground, observe, listen and be willing to change, then our relationship with our children and their development into mature, rational human beings will be compromised. 

The pressure nearly kills me sometimes. The desperate want and need to get it right. We read books and listen to experts on the radio. We are terrified by newspaper headlines and articles and weighed down by our own parents’ expectations of us. Through all this, however, when all’s said and done, there is one thing that we should be listening out for: yes, the voice of experience. (Oh and by the way, just to make it clear that in my mind the ‘voice of experience’ is people who are living with the issue in the moment – not well meaning very old people who can’t necessarily remember what actually happened…)

You see, the thing that rattled my cage this morning was something that someone had written about teenagers and mobile phones. It’s a hot topic of conversation this one: do we let our primary school kid get a mobile phone because her friends have all got one – justifying it with the fact that she needs it to be safe? Do we allow our 12 year old to get a smartphone, in the knowledge that once we do we effectively are giving them a free, uncontrolled rein on the world wide web and all the shit that lies within? Do we happily relinquish control of everything that up until the moment we were faced with these dilemmas, we had a pretty good handle on? Do we let our teenagers have a smartphone, but take it away from them from 9pm-7am? Do we…oh, I could go on. Such is the mountain of issues we face as parents when our child utters those words: I want a mobile phone.

So what got my goat about what this person said, was that they were talking about not allowing kids under the age of 16 to have smartphones and I could just tell that it was clearly written by someone who does not parent a teenager. It was unquestionably written by someone who isn’t yet, on this matter at least: the voice of experience. You could actually say that their voice is only as valid as the voice of the very old person I mentioned above.

Talk to my fellow blogger Helen from JustSayingMum about teenagers and smartphones. Helen is the voice of experience. She has two teenage girls and a 12 year old son, one of whom she made a vlog with about what  teenagers want and don’t want from their parents. In her vlog, her daughter tells her that the punishment you should never give a teenager, is taking away their mobile phone.

Now, you may well immediately say: ah ha! If that is the worst thing you can do, then let’s do it! Finally, I have a deterrent that is quick and fairly easy – a well-rehearsed lunge at the teenager and the offending article is in my grasp. However, what this says to me is that a teenager’s phone is quite literally, their life. Helen is the voice of experience, but she isn’t saying that she has the answers, in fact far from it – she has turned to parenting experts and is vlogging her conversations with them. She is the voice of experience because she has teenagers and she is observing their world. Check out the vlogs here:

https://justsayingmum.com/

Now, as parents we can all harp on about the fact that back in the day, we didn’t have mobile phones and we never got lost and we actually communicated with each other. We weren’t all narcissistic, selfie-obsessed snap chatters and we used Eye Spy books to get us through long car journeys.

But then you become the voice of experience.

I suddenly found myself with a teenage step daughter and I now have 3 teenagers and a 12 year old. Not a day goes by when I am not amazed by the amount of selfies they take. I honestly cannot fathom their obsession with snapchat and the compulsive need to keep streaks∗ going, even when they themselves have no access to their phone. Our house has turned into one huge vibration, as several smartphones buzz in every room, at any given moment, every day.

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However, I also now know that this is their world. This is not the world that I was in as a teenager – it is their very real world.

And you know what? Parents are now bringing up their kids in this world with full access to this technology. Toddlers are handed smartphones to keep them quiet. Films are watched on I pads and apps downloaded on tablets. I read a blog yesterday, in which a mum felt guilty for not allowing her child to have access to technology as a toddler and now at nursery she is lagging behind her peers in her techy skills. We are laying the foundations for our teenagers and if we don’t, we are feeling guilty. Because suddenly that voice of experience kicks in and you realise that all the ideals you held when your child was an embryo are actually worth jack shit, because we are living in this world that we are creating now!

So my voice of experience doesn’t say to me: abandon all your ideals! It doesn’t say to me give up, nor give in and it certainly doesn’t tell me that I’m necessarily right. What it does tell me is to listen to your kids, observe them, communicate with them, learn with them and from them and ultimately remember that we are living in this world.

If you snapchat your friend day after day and you get a number at the side of their name then that means you are on a snapchat streak. The number means the amount of days the streak has been going

If you enjoy my blog, I would be very grateful if you voted for me in the Mumsnet Blogging Awards: Best Writer and best Comic Writer categories. It is a quick one – takes seconds and here’s the link, thank you 🙂

http://www.mumsnet.com/events/blogging-awards/2016

You Should Know That Already

I was probably told it a hundred times on my teacher training course. I would have thought that my mentors on my teaching practices would have mentioned it, but something has recently become abundantly clear to me, that the worst thing you can ever say to a student is: you should know that already.

As a teacher though, it so easily slips out. Too easily. You would never open your mouth and say: you’re shit! Yet the words: you should know that already, amount to the same thing. As we say them, they sound innocent enough. Perhaps a student has been working on a particular thing for many, many months. You have gone through it and over it and explained it hundreds of times. You have seen in the past, perhaps, that they have been able to do it. Then you allow your patience to wear thin.

Image result for quote about patience

Patience and teaching of course go hand in hand. Parents frequently say to me: I don’t know how you are so patient. I always reply that it doesn’t reflect how I am as a parent! It is quite easy to have patience with the youngest students. Your expectations of what they can achieve are obviously different to the older students. However, actually the student’s age should bear no relation to your ability to show patience.

Patience must surpass driving a student forward and wanting them to excel. Drive is important, but ultimately in order for this to happen, patience is always required. We don’t necessarily know what is going on in a student’s life. We don’t know their insecurities and fears, nor why they may have them.

I was reminded of how demoralising and demotivating it is to be told that you should know something already, when a Taekwon-do Master made that comment to me a little while ago. It immediately made me feel completely shit. The thought behind the words is so final. You want to look the person in the eye and scream at them: well, I don’t and you know what, you know nothing about me and my life so fuck off! But instead, you just look them in the eye with a forlorn look. You feel that in that split second you have let that person down, despite the fact that it is your personal journey, not theirs. Regardless of the fact that actually, it is their job to teach you again and again, until you understand what they are saying and can get it absolutely right. They are the teacher.

So if your child ever comes home from school or from a club with their head down, quietly dejected and forlorn, there is every possibility that someone has said to them, without realising the extreme impact it can have: you should know that already. Unfortunately, the damage can have a lasting effect. As teachers, we must constantly be aware of this, so as not to undermine a student’s confidence. Patience has a lasting effect too.

If you enjoy my blog, I would be very grateful if you voted for me in the Mumsnet Blogging Awards: Best Writer and best Comic Writer categories. It is a quick one – takes seconds and here’s the link, thank you 🙂

http://www.mumsnet.com/events/blogging-awards/2016

Teenage Sugar Rush

Yesterday, partner and I found ourselves driving through North London with a car full of teenagers. There was the initial, predictable dialogue of: you go in the back, it’s your turn, I don’t want to go in the back, I feel sick in the back…I used to screech at them at this point, now I zone out, because somebody does always end up going in the back, without parental intervention. After this, they all plugged themselves in to some device or other and things quietened down.

That is, until we were driving down a particular road in North London, where there were huge numbers of Orthodox Jews, going about their Sunday morning business. The teenagers all suddenly sat up and observed. They unplugged themselves and within seconds they were interested in what was going on outside. They were sparking comments off one another, as they were completely mesmorised by the scene that was taking place in front of them. To the teenagers in the car, it was a scene from another culture. They were witnessing a style that they weren’t at all used to. I’ll be honest, I was waiting for the derogatory comments to ensue, as teenagers can be brutal when faced with a look that doesn’t fit in with their idea of normal. However, there was none of that. Instead, they were interested in why the men were dressed the way they were and why the young boys had long ringlets at each side of their head.

You may wonder why I was surprised by the girls’ reaction. If you have toddlers you will be all too familiar with them being interested and excited by things they see that are new to them and all the questions that follow. I suppose that it made me realise how little I see the girls get really engaged and excited about things. I don’t think that this reflects the reality. I am sure that they do get fired up by the world around them, but I also think that they share that energy and enthusiasm with their friends, and as parents of teenagers what we see far more of, is their less enthusiastic side.

Until we came across the Orthodox Jews, I hadn’t given this a thought. I had thought that daughter 1 can be irritable with her sisters. That daughter 2 seems more serious these days. That daughter 3 niggles at daughter 4 and that daughter 4 gets very angry back.

Now I think about it, this is what being a teenager is all about. It’s like they are on a sugar rush with their friends and a blood sugar low with their family. Don’t get me wrong: there isn’t a day that goes by without a package from ASOS or China being squeezed through the letterbox – another bikini top/make-up brush/phone case causes squeals of delight. However, it was their excitement and interest at the world outside their world that I loved seeing and I’m so glad that I got the chance to witness it.

If you enjoy my blog, I would be very grateful if you voted for me in the Mumsnet Blogging Awards: Best Writer and best Comic Writer categories. It is a quick one – takes seconds and here’s the link, thank you 🙂

http://www.mumsnet.com/events/blogging-awards/2016

I Didn’t Mean It

I’ve always had a sensitive side – worrying what people think and not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings with what I say or do. Of course, this is normal. However, more recently I have become on constant hyper alert…and I think it’s a shame.

Firstly, came the e mails from my ex. I would e mail one thing and he would e mail back in a rage. Try as I might, I couldn’t see it from his point of view. I would read and re-read what I wrote and couldn’t work out what I had said that set him off. I would get my friends to read it and they couldn’t work it out either. However, I know that you can always read an e mail using a tone that reflects your own feelings and perhaps insecurities.

Then there is social media. Sometimes I read in disbelief the angry reactions from people to fairly innocent sounding posts. I came off Facebook for a while because of this. Faceless Book I call it – where people feel they can say what they want, because nobody can see them. These people are cowards, who are hiding behind the protective glass of their screen. Bullies, who don’t see the face drop and contort into disgust and tears as their victim reads the vindictive comments. The bully just scrolls on.

It is these cyber bullies who help to create this irrational fear of hurting someone’s feelings. With the internet, e mails and social media sites, has come the ability to innocently offend, while at the same time the heightened paranoia that you have hurt someone’s feelings with a reply to a post or a tweet. Before this, we relied on more human contact to correspond, where misinterpretations could be easily questioned and dealt with – without the worry of coming across as a social retard. Humour is far more easily inferred verbally, than through words on a screen, where subtle and important nuances can be lost.

It’s not just humour that can get lost in onscreen translation – meaning can too. People can only make sense of a comment with what they read and while of course a discussion can ensue, it is far harder to conduct a debate clearly through a quick fire exchange of the written word.

Never has this been so evident than in the past week since the referendum. I have read many, many posts on Facebook, discussing the result and not only have I been pretty shocked at the level of nastiness in the exchanges, often in response to a mild point of view, but also how many people who voted to leave the EU, are beginning to admit that they won’t post anything on line for fear of reprisal.

This fear of reprisal is growing on a local mum’s network. People are asking the administrator to post entirely innocent questions on their behalf, because they are too afraid to do so themselves – such is the level of hatred that runs intermittently through these online forums.

And so I am scared to offend. I am not always replying to posts, because I am worried that my answer may be taken the wrong way. I am reading things into people’s comments on my posts that they don’t even mean and I know they don’t mean them because they are having to reply to my nervous response with: don’t worry – I was only joking! While at the same time there is a large part of me that wants to rebel against the mediocrity, that I feel an undercurrent is trying to pull me towards.

But I do worry and I worry for our children and their generation, who are growing up having known nothing else. A generation who are shunning dates and who seem to be more prone to avoiding human contact. Teenagers who choose to game with friends, rather than meet with the real life versions. They are immersed in this culture that breeds mistrust, that is open to misinterpretation and with that comes paranoia and a culture where bullying thrives.

 

Reflections From Me

Dishwasher Hell

I need to have a chat with y’all about dishwashers.

Some background: our dishwasher broke at least two years ago. We spent months training 5 tween/teenage girls how to wash up. It became part of their initiation into the real world: pull your weight sunshine, that’s what will get you on in life. There’s no ‘i’ in team etc etc…

It worked a treat: they sorted out their own system of a washer and two dryers, a put awayer and someone to oversee the whole operation. Perfect.

But partner fussed…

He fussed that it was him who was doing the lion’s share of the washing up (vaguely true). He fussed that his hands were suffering (Fairy Liquid claims can go and take a running jump, because that stuff is EVIL!) He just generally fussed.

Now, I am a master at ignoring a fuss. Teenage girls ‘fuss’ about bollocks a lot of the time. Students in my Taekwon-do classes ‘fuss’ and partner fusses…I can spot a ‘fuss’ at a hundred miles and divert it to Mongolia with a well rehearsed brush off.

However, partner’s fuss went on and on. Until, thanks to Tesco Clubcard vouchers, he insisted on buying a new dishwasher.

ON THE PROVISO THAT HE STOPPED FUSSING!!

Now, the new dishwasher is installed. (After a huge stress over plumbing…are you sure you don’t want to pay the extra £10 for them to plumb it in, I innocently cleverly asked?)

Ok. So this morning, as I appeared bleary eyed and slightly hungover in the kitchen, partner leaped on me (metaphorically) and said: I don’t like the way the cutlery basket is on the right hand side. I need it on the left.

Now, here’s the thing. I don’t give a shit about the dishwasher – for me our house ran well without it. I don’t give a crap about baskets and I don’t give a flying fuck which side they are on. So, I am looking at my partner like he is an alien.

Then comes the stacking…oooh (suck in of breath)…you don’t want to put that there…

Actually, I do want to put that there, because it’s a dirty plate and it goes where the fuck I want it to go AND you know what…NOBODY DIES when I put it there.

NOBODY DIES…

Or do they? Because I have heard this fuss before, from my ex father in law: you don’t want to put that there…

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…DISHWASHER STRESS!!!

You see, you are so bloody wrong, because I really, really, ACTUALLY do want to place that bowl right there. Partly because I know that, for the rest of the entire evening, it is going to annoy the hell out of you…yes, that one bowl is going to ruin your entire evening, because it is is the ‘wrong’ place.

We have had the dishwasher for 3 days. The jury is out. The girls are still filling the sink with luxurious, bubbly, hot washing up water, because they keep forgetting that we have a dishwasher. Partner is still fussing, but his fuss is diverted to stacking strategies. I am sitting on the fence…but one more comment about how to stack that bloody dishwasher and…

dishwasher

 

 

Tits Up!

FullSizeRender(1) copy 2The hammock…inside for the month of June

Partner is, rather cruelly I feel, blaming the dreadful rainy June we have just experienced, on my hammock. In fact, he is actually blaming me, because I bought the hammock and every goddamn day since the fateful 13th June, when I dragged him off to Lidl (in the rain) to buy the hammock, it has rained.

Now, I know that it is far too easy as a Brit to blame the weather on everything and to actually think that it has been worse than statistics prove. However, without a word of a British lie, that hammock has not seen enough sunshine to warrant the huge effort of getting it outside, climbing into it, risking injury as dog 1 follows suit and both falling unceremoniously onto the floor when dog 2 puts two paws on it to see what the fuss is about.

The tan lines that graced my body in May, when I got all cocky and thought that I’d avoid having to get a spray tan for our holiday to Spain in August, are rapidly fading. As are the comments from the stream of people who asked: where have you been, you’re so brown? To which I smugly replied: my garden. Yes, I didn’t need to spend hundreds on airfares and hotels to get that orgasmic feeling of the sun on your face, I only had to open my back door.

That was May and here we are at the start of July, wading once more through mud and watching the weeds and the slugs suffocate and kill all the plants on which we spent shed loads of cash on Bank Holiday Monday – back when we felt all positive about the future. I’m struggling not to bring in a Brexit metaphor here…I’ll let you fill in the blanks.

Ah July! With its promises of Pimms and BBQ’s. With it’s alluring thoughts of Sundays spent in my hammock, reading the papers and staring up at the sky. I’m full of optimism for this month. I’m not going to buy any sun cream, charcoal, nor am I going to shave my legs. Let nothing I do curse this wonderful month and then at least, if all goes tits up, it is one thing that I cannot be blamed for.

Sometimes

When my kids were younger, there were times that I was incredibly proud of my parenting. I wanted recognition. I wanted a boss and an appraisal scheme. I wanted to be called into HR and told by a lovely person with a huge smile what an amazing job everyone thinks I am doing. I wanted to get employee of the month and get taken out for drinks on a Friday night to celebrate the week I’d just had. I wanted to stand at the bar, getting back slaps and hi fives. I was desperate for all my hard work and achievements of that week to be acknowledged.

Now the girls are tween/teenagers, whether I like it or not, they are my HR personnel. They are the vocal judges of my parenting skills. They are the ones who very occasionally will tell me with a big smile that I am getting it right, but will also make me feel and quite often tell me that I am getting it wrong.

We were sitting having a family meal the other day, when their uncle asked them directly, “is she a good mum?” They squirmed with discomfort and didn’t seem to know what to say. I was metaphorically kicking them under the table: ‘say “yes” goddamn it, please say yes.’

“Sometimes”, daughter 1 replied.

“Like when?” their uncle continued.

“Erm, I can’t think of any examples”, she said.

I was crushed by her words. Gone were my hopes of celebratory drinks. No pats on the back or hi fives for me. All my hard work: my taxi driving, my hugs, my support, my cooking, the cleaning and the washing on a 24 hour turn around – none of this really seemed, in that instant, to matter.

Yesterday, it was raining and I thought I would swing by the station on my way home from work to pick the girls up, as I was almost passing and I knew that they didn’t have coats. (Why would any teenager ever need a coat…ever? I mean, really mum!) In the car daughter 1 said to me: “you see this is what I meant when I said ‘sometimes’. You never normally pick us up, but today you did and I’m surprised, but this is the kind of lovely thing you do, sometimes.”

She gave me the biggest smile. I smiled back. I think that I know what she meant and I took it as a great, big hi five.

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Mother of Teenagers