MODERN FAMILY
WHEN they were little I had to learn how to make a full dinner from scratch with only one free hand.
It was always near the end of the day, when things would get fraught and I would be stirring the cheese sauce, or trying to peel a potato while balancing a small child on my hip.
Before young children I never thought about how simple it was to use two hands to make a sandwich or to clean up a spill.
At those baby classes they teach you how to swaddle babies, the best way to feed them, how to get them to sleep, the most trusted equipment that will help with those early years, but they all failed to mention the new talent you develop – how to do pretty much everything with just one free hand.
By the time they were two I had become a bit of an expert.
Now the new skill that needs to be perfected is how to communicate with a teenager and a tween (that stage in the ‘between’ years between eight and 12), when they prowl around the house in a zombie-state with headphones on their ears, phone in hand.
Any conversation usually involves having to repeat myself at least twice or resorting to using some kind of sign language.
The call to teatime usually goes like this...
“Dinner’s ready,” shouted quite loudly up the stairs because despite the fact they were in the kitchen a minute ago complaining that they were so hungry they were going to faint (after demolishing two rounds of toast and a chocolate biscuit) they had disappeared when the main meal was actually ready.
The call is then repeated a minute later in a slightly higher voice. When I start screaming and there is still no response, I have to resort to the more modern method – the family chat group.
Caps are needed for this to get across the anger: ‘IF YOU ARE NOT DOWN HERE AND AT THE TABLE IN ONE MINUTE, YOUR TEA IS GOING IN THE BIN’.
This usually works and within seconds it sounds like a herd of elephants are coming down the stairs, heading for the kitchen, and the phone-free zone that is the tea table. But it is not long before they are plugged back in again.
The erosion of certain skills among young people is quite frightening. Apparently an independent school in Scotland is giving its pupils lessons in how to tell the time. The plan is to teach 13-year-olds, but it turns out that older students need a bit of help as well. This is because they have become too reliant on digital displays rather than on a watch. And apparently people don’t use doorbells anymore, they text to say they have arrived instead.
On the plus side, their ability to use only one hand while making a drink or putting their bread in the toaster, with the phone in the other, will be very useful when they have children of their own.