21st Century Tween

Posted on | January 16, 2012 | 1 Comment

Thou shalt not wear flats with socks, says Sweetpea. So that’s me told then. She’s also in a huff because I bought some Converse sneakers. She says I’m copying her.

Forty-four is a strange age. I’m known for dressing a wee bit younger then I am (graphic T-shirts on the weekend, par example, or pigtails when my hair is long enough) but after so many viewings of What Not To Wear I feel I need to grow up a little. And then there’s the issue of my 10-year-old daughter now giving me fashion advice. (I mean, really? She who wears neon green leggings and ra-ra skirts as tops?) One minute she tells me the dress I’m wearing “makes you look like a Granny… like, no offence but it does”. The next she’s scowling as her friends declare my Converses to be cool. Can’t win.

Sweetpea and her friend E want to launch a website in which they will dispense tween fash advice and diss celebrities with silly outfits. Which I thought was all well and good until they talked about modeling some of the clothes themselves. I said no. I do not want my child on the web or on YouTube. E said her parents were “cool” with it (“I just texted them to tell them, and they’re cool”) but I am not. Yet again, the uncool mother.

Sweetpea wants a Facebook page and a blog and now a website, and she thinks I’m stuffy because I won’t let her tape herself in one of her own plays and put it on YouTube like some of her pals do. (Parents of these pals… what are you thinking?)

And so now I am just living in hope that the website fails before it starts, that they get bored of it and move onto something else. (What though? Starting their own TV network, for God’s sake? iCarly is a great show but I blame it for all of this fanciful celebrity-wannabe-ism.)

It would appear that not much impresses our dear tweens of the 21st century, because they really do have everything at their fingertips, and stardom is but a YouTube appearance away. Sweetpea tells me that one of her actor friends is going to L.A. very soon to discuss a show with Nickleodeon. She was ‘noticed’ by some exec or other. They only do the tiniest bit of eyelid-batting when they talk about it, her and her friends, like it’s just par for the course, and inevitable for all of them. She, Sweetpea, is so confident that she will head straight to super-stardom and a huge mansion with 45 rooms that even I’m starting to believe it. (I knew there was a reason we hadn’t started a college fund yet.)

We are heading to New York in two months, my gift to her as I have been promising her a trip to see some Broadway shows for some time now. When I booked the flights I was beside myself, couldn’t wait to pick her up from school and tell her. Her? She shrugged at the news and said, “Cool.” What excites tweens nowadays? Apparently, very little.

Meantime, she has declared that the trip will be v. busy as not only does she have to pack in these Broadway shows, but, to quote: “I have to shop till I drop and get discovered and plus E wants me to have some meetings with editors and try and sell them on the magazine idea.”

Oh good grief. There’s nothing to say to that without really sounding (and looking) like a granny.

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