Category: Teenagers, love ’em

An Insider’s Guide to Snapchat (by a 47 year old mum)

Like many, many parents, I have literally spent the past 4 years of my teenagers’ lives (I have 4 girls) observing them with a mixture of incredulity and horror as they Snapchatted the shit out of life. Gurning into their phones, pouting, taking surprised faces, puzzled faces, photos of the dog, of me, of the table, of absolutely fecking anything and I have constantly been wondering WHY?

WHY do they get so obsessed with keeping their streaks going? (If you still don’t know what a streak is then you really are a parent in denial). WHY do they get their sisters to keep their streaks going when they are on a DofE weekend and aren’t allowed their phones? WHY does their phone buzz constantly day and night?

WHY OH WHY?

So after one failed attempt by my eldest daughter to get me on Snapchat a couple of years ago – she put the app onto my phone, set me up with an account and there it sat – she has finally managed to get me use it…and yes, you heard me right…SHE got ME to use it. More WHY’s. WHY does my daughter want me on Snapchat? WHY would she actually be encouraging this 47 year old mum to engage in her world? WHY did she insist I added her best mates – despite my protestations that I’m sure they would rather die than be hooked up with an old codger like me sporting bunny ears and a halo?

WHY OH WHY?

It took me a while to get to grips with it. This Snapchat monster is huge! There’s so much to it and I’m still learning. A week on and it’s still work in progress for me, but then I’m still struggling to use our telly with its four sodding remotes, so no surprises there. My daughters have been patient thus far, although I suspect their patience is wearing thin…because I like it! And this means I’m actually (against every single fibre I thought existed in my body and brain) using it! I’M SPAMMING MY DAUGHTERS!

WHY OH WHY?

I’m actually excited by the positives and I can honestly say that I thought I’d have been more likely to say I’d join the WI (and that ain’t happening). Revenge by spam is just one good thing. I stare into my phone and my face looks a bit wrinkly and shit and then I add a filter and I suddenly look amazing: all plumped up and flawless set in a hazy tone with huge doey eyes and something frivolous on my head like a crown of flowers and it makes me forget that actually I’m going slightly grey and have a wattle. Seriously, you can hide your wattle with a sticker – what’s not to like for a woman facing her half century? I love the fact that you can’t take yourself too seriously on Snapchat. It’s fun and it’s stupid. It’s so completely and utterly superficial that it whisks you away from the realities of life as it actually is and how you actually are – if you let it. Or you can take a photo of yourself in all your fat-arsed glory and send it off to a friend with a chuckle that you will never see that photo again and they will only get to see it for a matter of seconds, before it disappears into the abyss. At first I struggled with not being able to see the photo after I’d sent it – I’m a control freak and I wanted to ‘check’ how I’d looked. But I got used to letting the photo go and now I don’t care! Because now I realise that no-one else cares! It’s refreshing. Kids send photos of themselves looking tired and grumpy and spotty and dishevelled and that’s the whole point. This isn’t Instagram and the ‘take a 100 shots for the one perfect photo to put out there’. This is Snapchat with its ‘I don’t give a shit’ attitude and I really kind of like that.

There are pointless games that make me laugh. Like the one where it tells you to pull a … face and take a photo and then it adds a caption, such as ‘how you look when…’ you play it with a mate and it’s as time wasting as watching the GBBO but it makes you giggle for a moment in time and when life is stressful and a bit crappy, that can only be good, right?

I have spent 4 years telling my daughters how pointless it is and what a waste of time it is and I’ve been saying it as a negative, whilst all the time missing the point!

Then there’s the actual creative side to it. My daughter and I spent 20 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back creating a Bitmoji of me: the choice of details was mind blowing, down to eye shape, make up and balayage (google it). Sometimes I’m so pleased with the photo I’m about to send off to an unsuspecting daughter in the middle of the day telling them I’m on a dog walk, that I’m sad to let it go. So I may screenshot it for posterity. You can choose filters and backgrounds and moving stickers – there’s a flossing avocado for christ’s sake! I have been known to post one of my Snapchats on Instagram – IT WAS THAT GOOD! Snapchat is sharpening my brain!

I can totally see now why it appeals to a teen. I can see why it appeals to kids who are actually way younger than the allowable age of 13. So what can possibly be the problem with this, frankly hilarious time waster?

WHY should parents be worried?

Well, I hate to spoil a fantastic party, but the world of Snapchat cannot be controlled by us parents. We can get an account and feel as if we’re part of the gang, or even silent stalkers, but we cannot police it. There is no way for a parent to know what our kids are posting. Unlike Instagram, we can’t have our child’s account on our phone. They can send photos to who they like with no traceable footprint. They can look up hashtags that can take them to the darkest corners of the Internet and we will never know.

The ironic thing is that as a parent the thing that really annoyed me about Snapchat was my daughters’ seeming obsession with it. It appeared to me to be relentless – a constant pressure to keep it up. I worried for their sanity, for their school work, their ability to focus on what actually, to me, mattered. But now I am less worried about all of that, because I understand it. What I am worried about is my inability to police it.

In this sense, however, it is no different to anything associated with the Internet. As parents there is no way we can keep up with what’s out there. It’s completely naive to think we can. We can of course try, but our kids will always be one step ahead. We can’t ban them from using it, because they will be pushed to be devious and will find a way. The most important thing we can do is communicate with them. To talk openly about the dangers of Snapchat and the Internet as a whole. We need to understand WHY there is an age limit but also understand WHY our children are desperate to access it younger. We need to explain why they can’t, but expect them to get it anyway, the minute we buy them their first phone. (My youngest got it in Year 7 and I’m not even sure I knew).

We need to be aware.

We need to make sure they are safeguarding themselves, for example turning off their location.

We need to talk, not prevent.

Perhaps even get Snapchat yourself. Engage with your kids on their turf. Spam them, chat to them in the middle of the day. As a teen I wanted to keep my distance from my parents, so embrace the fact that they might not mind you posting the odd photo with a bit of chat. It makes me look young, it makes me feel young and it’s safer than hormone replacement therapy…I think.

 

 

 

 

 

We can’t handle it, they most often can

Another day, another article on Facebook telling us that our children’s mental health is in crisis. Depending on the article, depending on the day and depending on the agenda, it’s that young men are in jeopardy, young girls, teenage girls, young boys…so that just about covers everyone, right? Everyone is in jeopardy and at the exact same time as the majority of young people are completely losing their shit for a multitude of reason, the mental health provision in the NHS is overwhelmed and underfunded.

As I wake up every.single.morning. I reach for my phone and lazily scroll through my social media feed, allowing crisis after crisis seep into my half awake brain. The malleability of the human brain is both our strength and our weakness.

I bump into my daughters on the stairs and talk about privacy online. I put the kettle on whilst checking that we’re all good on the effects of drugs. I watch them chomp on their toast whilst I regale then with stories of the need for consent.

They humour me. Sometimes they laugh at my ignorance.

Then I think to myself, who are the neurotic ones? Who are the ones being manipulated? Who are the ones who are really bloody stressed out because they no longer know what they should be thinking?

Mental health problems may well be on the rise in young people, but I think we need to seriously address our behaviour as adults, as parents, as journalists, even as experts, before we judge the issue as being caused by the world our youngsters inhabit. The world of a like for a like, of Internet porn, of online bullying and narcissism. We forget that this is all they know and have ever known. We forget that they talk to each other and work things out amongst themselves. We forget that we communicate with our children far more than our parents ever did with us.

Meanwhile us, the adults, are easily led. We’re totally absorbed in reading about how other parents do it. We’re malleable and neurotic and when we aren’t, we are judged as not caring. We have not grown up with the Internet. So whilst our children are using it comfortably, we are using it in a state of paranoia. We simply cannot make sense of the deluge of information that it throws at us, warping our instinctive brains.

Yes, we are so malleable.

We are believing all the hype. We think that our children are suffering mentally because of Fortnite and cruel words online and not getting enough likes. And yes, sadly some may well be. Sadly when I was young a boy didn’t know that ‘no’ meant ‘no’, so I felt raped. Sadly friends suffered from identity issues and bulimia. Sadly many were bullied. A good few were anorexic. I was approached by a paedophile, my sister was approached by a paedophile and friends were approached by paedophiles, whilst others went off with older men far too young.

It happened. It still happens. Who is really suffering the most from mental heath issues now – is it our children or is it us? Are we being driven crazy by the need to keep up with perfection on Instagram? Perfect children brought up the perfect way in perfect houses. Are we going nuts having to constantly check our social media feeds? And when we do, is what we read making us unable to see the wood for the trees? Can we no longer make decisions from the gut? And what is the effect of all this on THEM?

WE are malleable.
WE are suffering from stress.
WE are judgemental and the online bullies are US.

WE can’t handle the Internet pressure.

THEY  most often can.

Fake worries

I’ve decided that I’m going to take a radical approach to parenting in the Internet age. Many may already have jumped on this train, but you wouldn’t know because maybe they daren’t say, for fear of being judged. Or perhaps they don’t care what others think. They’re not easily influenced or swayed and just don’t feel the need to ‘say’.

The sayers are worrying us. Because what actually causes a worry? You are happily parenting from your gut. Careering from one mini crisis to another and working it out – sometimes badly, sometimes like a pro. Asking friends and family for support – fairly like-minded people you surround yourself with. Your squad.

Then bam! It’s a Facebook comment that undermines you. It’s the endless articles on how you should be parenting, the ‘sponsored posts’, the fake news. Thoughts from other parents, especially mums, who are anxious and worried as they parent through the goggles of social media.

But they aren’t your squad! They may not be wrong, they may not be right. When it comes to bringing up kids, are there actually always rights and wrongs? Different children, parents, cultures, backgrounds and needs. The melting pot of ideas that is the Internet makes for a lumpy stew.

Everyone on the Internet appears worried. Worried about teens and screens, worried about apps, worried about cyber bullying, worried about online grooming. It seems that it’s imperative that we all worry.

So here’s my new radical approach: ditch the ‘fake’ worry. I’m going to stick to my own worries and work them out with my squad. They know me and my kids and where I’m coming from. I’m going to tell myself that there isn’t a paedophile luring my daughter to a secret meeting place, or that she’s sending nude photos to ‘friends’. I’m going to dress myself down and tell myself that she doesn’t self harm, despite constant streams of information telling me it’s on the rise. I’m going to remind myself that her addiction to Fortnite can be managed. In fact I’m going to make sure that I keep communicating with her, respecting her and keeping the boundaries firm. I will allow myself a peek at a parenting book (that maybe one of my squad recommends) and I’ll try what they say if I like. I will stay aware as much as is possible for a golden oldie technophobe.

So there it is: I’m done with the Internet worry fest. The breathy, ‘is it?’ ‘Isn’t it?’ ‘Should I?’ ‘Must I?’ ‘Really?’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Are you serious?’ That and the constant judgments.

Stirring the Internet parenting stew is similar to googling symptoms when you feel ill. You won’t like what you hear, it will worry the shit out of you and it’s highly likely it won’t materialise anyway. Another fake worry.

I guess my mum worried. Different times, different worries. Less bullshit, less contradictions. Surrounded by her squad. Chatting things over with cups of tea, hours on the phone (that was stuck to a wall).

Keeping it real.

The Beast

I’ve been thinking about the effects of screen time on our kids, particularly teenagers. I was comparing the time I used to spend on the Atari 800 playing some kind of crappy shite for hours on end and kids on their X boxes and Netflix now. When I think of screen use in our house, it all takes place in the teens’ bedrooms. They rarely watch TV with us and I can honestly say they never watch TV on their own downstairs. 

THIS is a big difference between now and then. 

Back then, no one had laptops. If they had a computer it was in the family living space, fought over by everyone. TVs in the bedroom weren’t necessarily the norm. So although we weren’t exactly being sociable when we were glued to the screens, we were accessible. We were physically available and it was totally obvious to our parents what we were doing.

My teens’ screen use is hidden. Not because they are hiding what they are doing (I hope) but because they are in their bedrooms, doors shut. 

As a parent this is disconcerting. It feels as if they are doing something they don’t want us to see. It makes us suspicious, especially when the horror stories are driven home to us all. It disconnects them from us, both physically and mentally. This feels horrible when we were used to being so close. It embroils them with their friends (and you hope it ends there).

As parents we used to be told to have the family computer in a room downstairs. This advice already sounds so old, and yet it was only a few years ago it was being given out at every talk on internet safety. But things have changed.

Things are moving fast. We can’t keep up. Teens need laptops for homework. Kids are asking for phones younger. As parents we let things slip because others are getting phones younger. We give in and the slippery slope gets frighteningly fast and hard to keep a grip on. Once we are on that slope with our kids, it’s almost impossible to stop. Limit screen time? It’s an addiction, so it can’t be done without a fight. Without shouting and tears. It’s their norm. It’s their world. 

Have we got the strength? The knowledge? Have we as parents now lost our grip? And if so, what are the implications?

It worries me. I try to implement boundaries and rules, but to be honest they are hard to keep. I work. I can’t keep a bedroom watch. So I tell myself this:

  • Communicate
  • Trust
  • Keep up with new games and apps as much as possible
  • Communicate 
  • Talk to other parents
  • Implement some boundaries 
  • Trust
  • Accept that things have changed and that our world isn’t their world
  • Communicate 
  • Trust

I don’t think we will know the effects of the beast of screens on our teens for a few years. By which time they, like us will no doubt be finding their way through life with its ups and down.

I tell myself that life will adapt to the huge change in screen use and so everyone will adapt with it – yes, even an oldie like me! If our teens are able to navigate it without becoming entrapped in addiction to porn or online gambling, or meeting the wrong sort of folk, then I have little doubt they will turn out just fine. 

Our parents worried. We worry, but worrying is relative to the scale of the problem. As parents now, we know we are dealing with a beast. We know to be concerned, but equally we must know when to trust. 

It’s not their fault

Following a post I put on Facebook at the weekend, I have realised that I am in mourning. The responses it generated left me feeling a little down, quite sad.

They’re calling our teens the ‘snowflake generation’ and I understand why. But it’s not them, it’s us.

It’s us who are the problem. They are just so often the passive receivers of our suffocating ways.

My post was suggesting that parents shouldn’t feel obliged to go to University open days with their kids. I said that they should let them find their own way there, to stand on their own two feet, to let them breathe.

Just like we did when we were young. We wouldn’t have dreamt of having a parent or two breathing down our necks, asking embarrassing questions. It’s bad enough at Parent’s evenings where we accompany our teens. Do you not find that everything you do/say/wear is met with a teenage shake of the head? An eyeball roll to the ceiling? An embarrassed, hushed ‘muuum’ uttered under their breath?

But it’s not their fault, it’s ours.

It’s a trend and we are all made to feel we must follow suit. At least initially we feel we should follow, but this initial parent angst at the thought of being ‘the only one who doesn’t’ soon develops into, ‘actually, I want to be there’ and quite frankly, ‘why shouldn’t I be there?’ Then dangerously becomes ‘you’re a bad parent if you don’t’.

Why is this dangerous? Because we are creating snowflakes – children who can no longer think for themselves. We’re all guilty of it. Because however much we rally against it, it will get us in the end. Institutions don’t help. Universities quickly realised that as Mum and Dad are paying they might want to see what they are paying for. Talks are organised specifically for parents, whilst education gurus shake their heads in dismay at what this is creating.

The media fuels our parental insecurities. Technology enables us to track our teenagers’ every move. I do it myself with the excuse that it’s useful to know where they are. But it’s not just that. It’s comforting in this seemingly terrifying world that the media build it up to be.

It’s not their fault, it’s ours.

We’re morphing their brains, through our own insecurities. By our own sense of guilt. By thinking that we ‘should’ because everyone else ‘is’. And everyone else ‘is’ because we are being allowed. We are being given the green light to enter our teenager’s world in a way that our parents weren’t. The media, technology and circumstance colliding to disempower our children.

Independence builds resilience. Yes, we were homesick away from our family those first days in halls. But we had something to fall back on. We had something that we didn’t even know we had until we needed it. Something that everyone took for granted, back then.

Back then we had space. Back then we had trust and with trust and space came confidence and a deep seated knowledge that we would be ok.

More teenagers than ever are not ok. The past few years have seen a huge rise in teen anxiety and suicides and we desperately ask ourselves why? Screen use? Social media pressures? Work load? Yes to all this and as parents we simply don’t know how to respond. We are terrified of what lurks on the Internet, but we cannot keep up and are left bewildered and ignorant. And our response? To protect. To draw them closer. To try to enter and to understand their world. Which quickly leads to us controlling their world. Picking them up from late night gigs to save the worry of them getting home alone. Doing their homework with them to prevent them from failure. Finding them work experience because by now we are hard-wired to help. To rescue.

It’s not their fault, it’s ours.

They are lapping up our support. They are wanting us there.

And why not? Time is precious and moves so fast. From newborn, to toddler to first day at school and then they are gone.

Why shouldn’t we hold them close? Why wouldn’t we want to protect them from harm? They are our babies after all. It’s our job.

No. It’s part of our job.

It’s also our job to let go. It’s also our job to allow them to take risks. It is our job to stand back and watch them fail.

Our job isn’t easy, but next time we hear our child being referred to as part of ‘the snowflake generation’, we must ask ourselves, whose fault is it?

 

 

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.

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

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.

Hypocrites

When it comes to our preoccupation with screens, us parents are hypocrites. Perhaps it’s our earned prerogative, or simply a rebellion via the back door. We pop off to bed early to read our book, only to find that an hour later we are still scrolling through the dregs of Facebook. Just one more person’s news, just one more click and then we’re surprised (every night) that it’s suddenly the witching hour and we’re absolutely knackered and can’t sleep because something we’ve read has pointlessly wound us up. And so we lie in our bed worrying, (because every little worry creeps around at night), and one of those little worries is that we forgot to take the kids’ mobiles off them an hour before bed (again).

We’re nothing but bloody hypocrites. But it’s ok, because we are the parents and so we are allowed to take photos of of our food, our cappuccino, our glass of wine and put them on Instagram without fear of reprisal. Being an adult gives us this right. We can wake up in the morning and grab at our phone and glasses and check our e mails and the news, because we have to know what’s been going on (obsessively).

‘Screens are a drug’, we tell our kids, as we feed it to them when it suits. When we want that moment’s peace. Like the chocolate bar, the trip to MacDonald’s – just a treat. The treat that leaves them wanting more. That leaves all of us wanting more. The treat that becomes addictive. On their birthdays and at Christmas we are their dealers. Dealers with a conscience and a sense of responsibility to those who score. A responsibility that we aren’t quite savvy enough to handle.

‘You are always attached to your phones’ I tell my teens and I don’t think they can be bothered to reply the obvious. They notice, but they think it so normal that I am attached to mine. That I check every buzz, every ‘like’, every tweet. Just like them.

I think we need to stop kidding ourselves that any of this is going to change. If we can’t change, they can’t change. This addiction is assimilated in all our lives. We can read articles about its dangers and nod and agree, but at some point we have to put our hands up and say: this is life and not just our kids’ lives, but our lives too. We are hypocrites and when we admit it, then we will accept it. And you know what? We will adapt to it (we already have). We are feeding it. What’s important is that we understand it.