Talking to teenagers

I recently read a short article by Lorraine Candy declaring that you cannot be a best friend to your teenage children…my response was why would you want to be a best friend? Lorraine, who I must point out is the editor-in- chief of the style magazine, writes a weekly column for the family section of The Sunday Times magazine. In the article she explains a trip to the theatre where there is hardly any conversation amongst her and her daughters and that they film videos of their mother swearing at the over complicated microwave. She concludes that the gradual separation is heart-breaking. A statistic alongside the article is that 75% of adolescents lie, with an average of nearly 3 untruths a day. Well I would like to bet that 65% of adults lie, with 2 whopping untruths a day…so what? what has that got to do with being attuned to your teenager. This kind of article perpetuates the notion that teenagers are these distant, unreachable, difficult people that as parents we a...

Six weeks ago, I went for a routine smear examination, the nurse told me she couldn’t take the smear as she could see something that needed investigating at Colposcopy, she said the referral would be quick as colposcopy are very efficient in our health trust (they are) So there starts my journey, a journey that hijacks peoples thinking and allows the worse case scenario to creep in. I have pain in my breast, but its bearable and so I just get on. I decided I would take a holiday alone (5 days) my mum kindly said she would have the children. I hadn’t had a holiday for a year and my thinking was that if I needed any sort of treatment then I may need to grab the chance while I can. ·        My mum saves me Sunday newspaper magazines, I go through them all and take out the interesting articles and staple them into a folder to read when I am there. ·        I went to somewhere I had been before and that felt safe...