Author: Alison

The waiting game

It’s very easy as a parent of teens to worry that they are becoming distant. To grieve the absence of obvious love and to miss the spontaneous and unconditional adoration they showed when they were young.

We’re all so hard-wired to instant gratification nowadays. It’s not just our kids who crave it. We want Amazon Prime, Internet speed, Facebook rather than a real book – nearly every single one of us is guilty of wanting things now!

And we also want instant love.

We are desperate for feedback from our teens. Just a sign that they actually love us. A flicker of emotion that shows they really do care.

The trouble is, some things – the teenage brain for example – never change.

With teenagers you need to see it as a long distance race and not a 100 metre sprint to love and respect.

Don’t expect a card on your birthday. Don’t presume that they will even remember your birthday. Gone are the days of the homemade card. Tell them, remind them. Amazon Prime they are not!

They may not laugh at your jokes, they won’t always say goodnight, and for much of the time they will act as if they don’t even want you there.

Stay strong. Be firm.

Remember, it’s a long distance race, not a 100 metre sprint. Set boundaries but be flexible. Listen but don’t fix. Communicate but don’t judge.

Their love is always there and sometime in the future you will know that. Occasionally on your marathon journey together, you will know that.

Sometimes we just have to wait.

Grass roots

Three things collided on my social media feed today: an article showing that despite girls outperforming boys at school, the statistics against them in terms of equality go steadily downhill from there. The second was a video from Finland that clearly depicts how young boys see girls as their equals and feel they should get the same rewards for doing the same job as they do and the third was a friend on Twitter, whose 11-year-old son had asked her what a feminist is and once she’d explained he replied, “oh, so I’m one then”.

All these elements can on one level give us hope, but at the same time they are extremely depressing. Because whilst girls are born equal to boys, there’s immediately a whole load of gender stereotyping that is shat right upon them.

It takes a huge amount of parenting in a particular way, a mountain of good teachers and a strong will to shovel your way out of the crap as a female.

In my book, ‘Raising girls who can Boss it’ I talk about the importance of bringing up our daughters to be confident, self-assured individuals. I teach Taekwon-do and when I have a girl in my class who is displaying a bit of attitude, I am pleased. It may challenge me as a teacher, but when channelled, it is exactly what she is going to need to boss life.

Of course the boys need strength of character developed and channelled too, but because of the patriarchal way society is set up, it’s vital that as teachers and parents we are hammering home to both sexes, that boys and girls are equal. It is too easy to get drawn into traps.

Parenting is bloody hard work and we don’t necessarily feel we have the mental capacity to be waging the equality battle. It’s so easy to not notice the gender stereotyping that underlines most things and is all set to sabotage us when we are knackered and wrung out.

I really do believe that the only way we are going to achieve gender equality is by mass education of the young. By the time they leave school the statistics are clearly telling us that it’s too late. The damage has already  been done.

I worry that we sense that little boys are emotionally vulnerable and want to protect their fragility, whilst simultaneously seeing their physicality and wanting to enhance it. Or perhaps we are suffocating boys’ emotions, as we perceive them to be weak. Either way it may leave the boys confused.

Boys, just like girls, are emotionally vulnerable, but the way society reacts to this is perhaps the crux of the problem with gender inequality in the adult world. Maybe boys just aren’t sure what they are supposed to be. So while we are telling girls to ‘boss it’, we aren’t quite sure how to deal with the boys and where there’s uncertainty, the familiarity of societal norms and stereotyping prevail.

We have to teach our boys at every opportunity that boys and girls are equal and our expectations of them must reflect it, in the same way as should our expectations of girls. I often get comments from young boys in my Taekwon-do classes that suggest that the girls in the class are weaker. I make sure that I use every comment made like this as an opportunity to educate .

We know that the task for parents and teachers is massive. It’s daunting too. The media is a force to be reckoned with and as it controls our society it is a huge beast to fight.

In sport the experts are always talking about, ‘grass roots’. That is the key to Olympic success. That is how our sports teams will win major tournaments. Train them young. This is how champions are made.

Well I think the same is true of the fight for gender equality. Grass roots is where it has to start for us to win and achieve success.

Born fighters

From the moment a female is conceived, she is already at a disadvantage. She is already labelled in pink: on the cards people buy to congratulate her parents, the clothes that she wears and the gifts that she’s given. From conception a fighter is born.

Women are born fighters. In fact, it’s so inbuilt that we don’t even notice we are fighting. Growing-up we take a lot on the chin. It takes a big hit to knock us down.

We call these knocks ‘life’ and we live our lives to the full. Perhaps to our detriment we put up with a lot. With harassment and discrimination, with being made to feel less worthy.

We fight on. We are emotional warriors. We wear our hearts on our sleeve. We feel compassion and anger. We feel empathy and pain.

Women are always fighting something. Even each other. Contrary to the weak, mild-mannered stereotype, we were born to fight. The irony of the label ‘the weaker sex’! We were not born weak.

Weakness is learnt. Weakness is a societal demand. Weakness is thrust upon us to make others feel strong and in control.

But we were born to fight. Women are fighters with their hearts and with their voices. This is what we want our girls to be.

It’s in our blood.

#InternationalWomensDay

#NoVictim

For anyone thinking that the #MeToo campaign is about women playing the victim card, implying that women are actually saying #PoorMe – I really do believe you are wrong!

There’s three main definitions of ‘victim’: one is being harmed/injured/ killed by an event/crime/accident, one is someone who’s tricked and one is someone who ‘feels helpless or passive in the face of ill-treatment’. Funnily enough, by the very nature of women sticking their heads above the sea of inequality that exists in this world and stating #MeToo, these women are not fulfilling the definition of the passive victim. Yes, they are victims, but not in the way that many are trying to suggest. They have felt harmed and are using their voices and actions to make people aware.

I’m getting really irritated by the negativity surrounding the #MeToo campaign. Today I read in the Times, the journalist Clare Foges mockingly referring to the Oscars as a ‘carnival of sanctimony in honour of #MeToo’. I’ve heard talk of the hypocrisy of actresses wearing black at award ceremonies, when they are happily profiteering from and exploiting their own sexuality. Last week Weinstein’s lawyer said women are deciding to have sex with producers to advance their careers and so on and so forth. Some people are trying to undermine the importance of the #MeToo campaign.

Well of course they are! Isn’t this just the normal run of things? A woman dares to use her voice and suddenly it’s not a perfectly valid point, it’s a hideous whine that needs silencing. Oh, it’s ok if she has actually been raped, comes the caveat, then she can legitimately complain. But if she is just feeling like a victim of some minor inequality or other, then she should shut the fuck up with her #MeToo drone.

#MeToo is, according to some, making all men feel bad. Tarnishing the male population with the same brush.  Making the male species afraid of asking a woman out for a coffee. Insinuating that women play no active part in sexual encounters. Lionel Shriver says it’s, ‘demonising all male desire’. Basically, they’re saying, it’s anti-male.

What a load of bollocks! I’m getting frustrated that people are trying to undermine the biggest campaign waged against sexual harassment and inequality in my lifetime, by choosing to focus on the grey areas.

I feel we need to see #MeToo as the big picture. Yes, women flirt and some may exploit men and use their sexuality to gain a advantage. Yes, a brush on the knee is not as bad as being raped. But the point of #MeToo as I see it, is the much bigger picture: the vast canvas of inequality that it is bringing to everyone’s attention. The wider, difficult issues that exist around male dominance and power.

#MeToo is giving us a wake up call, a non-sexual kick up the bum. It’s telling us that problems are endemic. It’s teaching us that we need to bring up our children to understand specific behaviours that they need to conform to. Undoubtedly the key to real change is to educate the young.

The #MeToo campaign is only ‘toxic’, ‘mass hysteria’, ‘man-bashing’ and ‘a narrative of victimised women’ if you fail to see it as representative of something much bigger even than the sum of all its parts.

Unfortunately, for all the grey areas and for all the negatives it has provoked, it is needed. It is needed for our children. It is needed so that the pendulum of inequality swings the other way and settles in the middle. Feminism isn’t achieving enough. Hashtags are indeed an irritating concept born out of social media, engulfing great swathes of thought into one phrase. But however much it is pissing people off, however much it can be ridiculed and picked apart and however much it can be seen as going too far, #MeToo is shining the spotlight on something that was previously lurking in the shadows and for my daughters’ sake, I’m pleased.

Blowing in the wind

Watching the Winter Olympics in complete awe of the bravery, determination and talent shown by the competitors, it upset me to hear that the female ski jumpers had to fight for years to finally be allowed to jump in the Sochi Olympics four years ago (apparently one argument against it was that their reproductive organs may get damaged on landing) and even now they only get one event, while the men get three.

There are still, as we know, huge inequalities in sport across the board: from prize money, to coverage, to access…it makes for depressing thoughts and until there are more females holding top positions on boards, progress will continue to be slow. Women are underrepresented and therefore open to exploitation and abuse.

The female snowboarders competed in horrendous winds in Pyeongchang a couple of days ago and most people, including the competitors, felt it should have been postponed as it was dangerous. Yet the message that came across was that the female athletes hadn’t made their voices heard. That they hadn’t wanted to make a fuss, to rock the boat. To me this mirrors the bigger picture of where female athletes see themselves in the pecking order.

Women need to have a voice in sport – they need to make themselves heard!

As I was pondering this inequality (and I ponder it often, as my daughter is a footballer) I thought about how important it is that we get girls into sport and keep them there! The vast majority give up sport as teenagers.

Teenage girls are incredibly self conscious and I’m convinced this is one of the main reasons why they quit sport: the outfits, the gear, the sweat, the performance- it all draws attention to them at a time when they prefer to hide behind screens with filters and two hundred takes for that perfect look.

How do we convince our girls that sport will rock their self-esteem far more than 100 likes on Instagram and more than comments such as ‘beaut’ and ‘hotty’ ever will?

How the hell are we going to convince them, when actually there’s not enough action coming from the top? This is the problem.

IF we are going to get more girls into sport, we’ve not only got to smash stereotypes at the ground level, we need to get a huge momentum going at the top end of the sports themselves.

Yes, we need sportswomen as role models, we need females in the boardrooms, we need female coaches, we need a VOICE!

The struggle is real. Sadly I think that we are years away from big change. As an International female Taekwon-do competitor, as a Taekwon-do coach, as a mum to a female International footballer, as an avid spectator of sport, I see and have seen terrible inequality.

In my sport I teach people how to fight in the ring. As a female it can often feel as if every step towards equality is a fight. Not all women are taught to fight. The ‘fight’ response is often quashed by gender stereotyping at a young age. While boys are told to ‘man up’ girls are conditioned to be ‘like a girl’ – both are wrong.

But the fight is on!

We must all play our part. We must not allow our voices to get lost in the wind.

      Stepdaughter fighting in the ring

What if?

Whenever a debate opens up about female objectification, the waters always get muddied with ‘what if’s’: what if I want to compliment a woman on what she is wearing? What if I want to wear skimpy clothes? What if there were male grid boys? What if I want to ask a woman for a coffee? What if a 60 foot banner of David Beckham in pants is adorning Piccadilly Circus? What if the grid girls enjoyed their job? The list is endless as the debate goes on.

Yes, muddy waters.

#metoo has now become muddied. People are asking if it’s gone too far? Is the movement sexist towards men?

At a time when the heated debate around the inequality of women is moving on a pace (faster than any meaningful action) I think we need to rewind and consider history.

Women have always been and still are unequal to men. But let’s for a moment rewrite the history books.

What if men as well as women had always been objectified? Human nature loves a beautiful form (beauty, of course, being subjective). Women are sexual beings with huge sexual appetites. Women love to lust over semi-naked males. Women are apt to flirt, to tease and to touch. So what if the male form had, since the beginning of time, been championed as something to openly admire? What if there had always been grid men and males in speedos telling us what round it is in the boxing ring? What if products aimed at females had always been sold by the objectification of the male?

Because women love that too – right?

If we rewrite history, where would we be now? Would there be equality? Would women have always been paid the same as men? Would girls not be growing up thinking that their feelings matter less than men’s? Would women be less harassed?

We’ll never know. It’s complicated. It’s muddy and ‘what if’s’ seem a little pointless.

History has been written in a tangled web of words, emotions, actions and conditioning. It is going to take years to untangle the mess it has become.

100 years ago women stood together and gained the right to vote. 100 years on and women are arguing with other women about the meaning of equality. Sometimes accusing each other of jealousy if they don’t agree with women wearing bikinis and parading as eye candy for men. Suggesting that fellow females are exaggerating harassment or criticising them for not speaking out. Some are saying that women’s rights have been taken away by the end of the grid girl.

So, what if we focus on our children? What if we teach our sons and daughters that they are equal? What if we reflect this in our actions? What if we don’t limit a girl’s potential by always referring to her first by her looks? What if we tell her that it’s what she thinks and feels that matters most and not how someone reacts to her? What if we tell our boys that ‘no’ means ‘no’ and girls that it’s ok to say it? What if we stop telling our sons to ‘man up’ and stop crying ‘like a girl’? What if the future, 100 years from now is a more gender balanced place?

‘What if’ doesn’t have to be pointless.

Click on the link:

Not just ticking boxes

When I did my teacher training (PGCE) over 20 years ago, we were encouraged to plan our lessons to the minute. To set out our objectives to the students at the beginning of the class and to summarise what they had hopefully learnt at the end. All of this is important, and yet through this admirable meticulous planning I think that sometimes, something gets lost, perhaps forgotten. That is the very people who we are going to teach. Our students.

You see, as we are focusing so intently on our lesson plans, we are perhaps seeing the lesson through our own eyes. We are imagining how we are going to teach it. How we are going to get our points across and how we are going to make ourselves understood so that boxes can be ticked.

Through many years of experience I have come to realise that this isn’t the way.

When I blog I use my own voice, but as I write I imagine the reader. I think about how they are receiving my words and what it will mean to them. I try to put myself in their shoes as the receiver, rather than concentrating on myself as the giver, the planner, the font of the knowledge. I took the same approach when writing my book. I wrote it as if I was the consumer, which tragically meant laughing at my own jokes!

When I teach my Taekwon-do classes, I see every student as an individual. Everyone has a different goal. Even those students who are grading for the same belt will be approaching it in very different ways. This is why it is so important not to just tick the boxes. This is why meticulous planning must remain flexible and it is why Instructors must approach the lesson from the student’s viewpoint and not just from the point of view of what they want to get across.

This approach, although it sounds sensible and obvious, actually takes a flip in the Instructor’s head. It probably takes confidence that perhaps comes from experience. It means that every time I address a student, I am trying to think about what I am saying from their point of view and not just thinking that what I am saying is imparting great knowledge.

Each student hears things differently. Each student walks in to the dojang with a different agenda. No student fits in a perfect square box. When I take the time to immerse myself into each of my students’ heads, then I know that their goals will be reached and their individual boxes will be ticked.

Photo credit to Radnor House

 

 

Melting worries

I turned to my 18 year old daughter the other day and asked her if she’d ever smoked. 18 years old and I’d never asked her before. It seems I’d only just got around to it. As I was rather pleased that I had finally thought to ask one of the questions that is surely in the parents’ guide of things to ask, I asked her one by one if her sisters had ever smoked (just in case I didn’t get around to asking them myself).

This morning I was thinking about this as I remembered how, when my daughters were really little, I was dreading the fact that they might smoke when they were teens. Of course, even now I don’t want them to smoke. But the point is that I forgot to worry about it when they became teenagers. I forgot to worry about it because bigger worries came along and took up my head space. I worried about them taking drugs and then this worry was displaced with a worry about screens and now this worry has been displaced with a worry about dreadful things happening to them when they get drunk.

Of course I am not suggesting that I am only capable of one worry at a time, but it made me realise that many of my worries simply melt into nothing and are replaced with trust.

When we reach a point with our teenagers that we feel able to trust them, it feels as if a huge weight has been lifted from us. We are quite literally able to take a big step back and observe.

We can observe their fuck ups. But we can also observe that they are doing just fine.

As parents we will never, ever stop worrying. However, we must not smother our kids with our worries. I don’t think there’s any harm in letting them show either – it makes our children feel secure and maybe, perhaps, think a little more about how they act and what they do.

A teenager needs to feel trusted, because just as parents we feel more relaxed when we trust, our teenagers will gain in confidence with the knowledge that we trust them.

Snowflake Parenting

Our kids are being called, ‘the snowflake generation’ – lacking resilience and emotionally vulnerable, but you know what? It’s not their fault. It’s our fault as parents. We are parenting them from a position of fear. We are snowflake parenting.

When you go with your gut instinct in a situation, you usually make a quick decision. You don’t necessarily work through every possible scenario and consequence, you just react to your initial thought. You then will probably go about the rest of your day without it taking up much more head space. Brilliant.

Unfortunately, this isn’t how most parents these days parent. Parenting from the gut is a dying art and I blame Google, Facebook and Mumsnet.

Back in the day when you had a persistent cough or a weird rash, you’d get one or two people’s opinions on what it might be, and that may or may not have included a doctor, and before you knew it, it would have gone away. Nowadays we google the shit out of every ailment, so that within an hour we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s something far worse than it probably is.

It’s the same with parenting. We have a concern about our child. We voice our concern… to literally thousands of people online. We get back a deluge of opinions, many of which are basically telling us that our parenting is shit. We doubt our ability to parent. We wonder how we are even allowed to parent. We sit in a darkened room, lit up only by a computer screen and we worry and we are confused and we may even cry.

We are parenting from a position of fear. It’s making us forget what we really should know: that our kids will be ok. Because my mum didn’t breastfeed me and I am ok. I walked to the shops on my own when I was 7 and survived. I went up to London with a friend from the age of 12 without a mobile phone and I didn’t get lost. My mum didn’t care less, she worried less. She went with her gut and then carried on with her day.

Yet now we are parenting from fear: fear of what others might think, or even worse, say. Fear of defying the online majority’s opinion. Fear of being told by someone we don’t even know that we are a bad parent.

Fear takes hold and spreads like a wild fire. We quickly lose control and our way of trying to regain control is by smothering it.

We are smothering our children. They are unable to think for themselves. We would rather rescue them from difficult situations than watch them struggle.

They are delicate and so are we.

The snowflake generation can blame us for their emotional weakness, but it really isn’t our fault. The internet has stripped us of our logic and is leaving us vulnerable too.

In my book, ‘Raising Girls who can Boss it’ I address this fear. I talk about how we as parents need to have the confidence to let go a little. To give our children space to breathe in their own air and to exhale their own thoughts.

We need to worry less. Stand back, take a breath and hope.
…and yes, nowadays this is easier said than done.

Like good girls

I’ve just opened the paper and there are two articles on one page relating to sexual harassment. The first has the headline, ‘I struck a deal to escape Weinstein, says star’ and the other is headlined, ‘Minister is named on secret chat group about sex pest MP’s’.

It strikes me that the main theme that these articles share is not just harassment…it’s fear.

Fear is allowing sexual harassment to perpetuate. I mean, how crazy is it that there needs to be a WhatsApp group for women working in Westminster, on which they share information on MP’s with a reputation for sexually inappropriate behaviour? Seriously. Why the hell do us women feel the need to keep it amongst ourselves? Why aren’t we shouting this stuff out, rather than keeping it in the confines of WhatsApp?

Why?

Why are we muttering quietly to each other about intolerable and unacceptable behaviour, which is allowing that behaviour to carry on?

Why did every woman who put #metoo on her social media feed, not feel able to expand? Why did many women who thought it, not put it?

Fear. Fear and shame.

Women aren’t supposed to have a voice. We’re supposed to be nice and kind. When we get angry, people get very nervous. It just doesn’t sit right. We’re supposed to be the epitome of calm and control and really shouldn’t lose our shit. Society brings us up knowing this as it’s seemingly better that way.

There are so many reasons for our fear: fear of losing or not getting a job, fear of being disbelieved, fear of being ignored…perfectly legitimate reasons for fear. Then the shame – shame that we didn’t leave/shout/retaliate/say ‘no’ more forcefully.

Fear and shame are the two reasons why men are ultimately in control. We don’t like to admit it, but it’s the truth.

This is why we must bring our daughters up to have a voice.
This is why they must not feel shame.
This is why they must face their fear.

Because we are failing to.

Where are their role models? Whispering and silent. That’s where we are. Hiding the truth to keep the peace…like good girls.