TEEN FATIGUE

Kate and her grown kids are like ships in the night

It’s scary when you hear yourself saying to your kids what your parents used to say to you. “I was a teenager too, once!” I heard myself bark at my son the other day.

As soon as I said it, I was transported back to when my parents said that to me and the horror of the thought of them being teenagers. Not possible. I couldn’t envisage it. And by the look on my son’s face when I said it, he couldn’t either. I immediately regretted saying it.

After a gigantic eye roll, he splurted out words I probably barked back to my parents when they said it to me. “No, Mum, you were a teenager in a totally different time and probably a totally different teenager.” Probably true.

They are living in a global world where they’re accessible 24/7 via a small gadget in their hands which gives life-shaping beeps every few seconds. Terrifying.

What scares me these days, with all the “wellness” going on and how much more enlightened we are about stress, our bodies and our environments, is how flippant teenagers are. I know we stayed up late too, but how on earth do they survive on so little sleep and being so permanently switched “on” via their phones?

I passed one of my sons the other day at the front door as he was coming in from a night out and I was leaving for work. Yes, I work weird hours, but the sight of him at 3.30am looking all shabby as I was gearing up to start my shift, it just seemed, well, wrong.

“Aren’t you tired?” I asked stupidly. “How are you out until now?”

He looked at me with the kind of shock reserved exclusively for old people who say dumb things. “OMG Mum,” he sighed. “Are you kidding? This is early. The clubs were boring, so we left.”

“But it’s 3.30 in the morning?” I continued.

“Yeah, but we don’t go out until midnight, so I’ve hardly been out at all,” he replied.

“So you’re staying up until midnight just to go out?” My weary brain tried to comprehend it all. “Because when I went to bed, you were just in your room chilling …”

He cut me off. “Mum, Mum, Mum,” he shook his head, embarrassed for me. “We chill, then we do pres, then we go.”

(“Pres” for anyone without a teenager is pre-drinks because buying alcohol in the clubs is too expensive, although they don’t seem to mind paying the cover charge to get into the club … but I digress.)

He put his arm around me. “Are we done with this little chat now, Mum? Don’t you have to get to work?”

And that’s the rub. I do. Whereas students like my son, what are they doing? Sleeping in, a bit of study, maybe a small part-time job, staying up late and going out. Rinse and repeat.

“One day you’ll be like me – middle-aged and working your butt off to pay the mortgage!” I said to him, but mostly to reassure myself.