Dear Mrs MacPickle,

I feel like a terrible parent, but I just cannot stand listening to my children talk about boring things. Half the time I don’t even know what they are. Vloggers. Items of technology with initials and serial numbers instead of actual names. Contouring, and products used for contouring.

The children say my friends and I are boring because we only talk about coronavirus, but surely a global crisis is slightly more interesting than how many subscribers various talentless gobshites have on Youtube? None of us has anything to do anymore and we can’t go out!

How are we supposed to keep the chat going all winter when we have nothing at all in common?



My dear friend,

I do feel your pain. There is truly nothing more tedious than statistics about People From The Internet. I don’t know if we were any more or less dull in our younger days, though I do seem to recall I was only really interested in Australian Soaps and a boy I used to sit next to in Maths, but I do think it speaks well of your parenting that your kids even want to talk to you.

I don’t remember ever trying to fill my parents in on the nuances of whether Brad was hotter than Scott. So well done you.

However, I do have a couple of thoughts that might be helpful. Firstly, remember, children don’t really need you to listen to them all the time. Like all of us, sometimes they just want to prattle on a bit and have someone say ‘mmm’, ‘aha’ and ‘oh yes’.

So please don’t set yourself too high a standard in terms of actual engagement. No one is going to test you on whether a particular make-up artist has more followers than someone who films himself playing computer games. Learn to make the right bland, non-committal sounds if you can, it will probably help in marriage too. Or at work.

I also suggest you try and find a bit of common ground. Introduce them to something you liked when you were their age and they might just surprise you. Ideally a film with about six sequels that you can watch together, with boxes of Quality Street for them and wine for you.

Or an old sci-fi series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Once you find the right project, you will have At Least One Thing In Common you can fall back on to chat to them about. You can even try and draw them on which is hotter, a vampire or an alien?