If I Speak - 67: What’s up with Generation Alpha?

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

Moya and Ash wonder what’s up with kids these days, thinking about parenting, advertising, social media and anxiety. Plus, advice for a bereaved listener who’s furious with her stepmum. Send your dilemmas to [e-mail] Music by Matt Huxley.

Hello and welcome to If I Speak. By the time this comes out, we will have done our live event, but we haven't actually done it yet because of the sequence in which we record things. So if you came to it, thank you. If it was good, hooray. And if it was shit, let us never speak of it again. Do we talk about whether Tottenham won or not?

Well, no, because I don't know yet and I don't want to jinx it. Oh. I realize that this is a very serious topic and I don't want to broach it. So I'm not going to go near it. I'm going to say, God bless. I'm feeling very sensitive about it. How are you?

What are you doing? What's going on with you? I'm well. I'm quite well. I'm quite well. That's all I'll say. Fairly well. I feel happy and content and at home, although I'm looking well, that's all I'll say. Fairly well. I feel happy and content and at home,

although I'm looking for a home, if anyone wants to give me a house or a flat, that would be so cool. That would be really sick. In a sugar daddy way or a spare room kind of way? Either, at this stage, either or. Don't mind. Any free housing.

I've always relied on the kindness of strangers I've always I'm actually so bad for sugar daddies because I physically cannot and I think I've talked about this before physically cannot let someone give me something like that it's it's a disease like I don't let men pay for me there's no such thing as free money um do you have questions for me? I do. I do. I have questions. Okay. This is 73 questions, minus 70. Do the math. My number one question is based on my own predilection that I've realized for living in a higher rise flat, up high or down low? Up high or down low? Up high or down low? Up high or down low? Up high for living.

Hmm. You live in a house. What is that about? As in, if I had to choose between top floor or basement, I would choose top floor. That was the way I was addressing the question. My preference is house. I really like living floor. Yeah. That was the way I was addressing the question. My preference is house. I really like living in a house. I like that I feel hemmed in by other people because it's a terrace and I've got lovely

neighbors either side. Also, oh my God, guess what? I saw a fucking barn owl next door. Okay, Bridget Jones 4. Maybe 5. Was Bridget Jones 5? It was crazy. That's crazy.

That my man was just chilling on some polystyrene. That's not a barn. Why is he so lost? I was like, what's Hedwig doing in the ends? There to deliver your Hogwarts acceptance, obviously. In many, many years. She's like, I'm sorry, Royal Mail. Okay, question two. I'm trying to read my own handwriting.

What the fuck does that say? Is that the question? What does that say? I actually can't read what I've written there. It says Google who wrote... I'm going to go to the question three I wrote while I try It says Google who wrote it. The question three I wrote while I try to remember what question two was. Question three is if you didn't support Tottenham, who would you support?

That doesn't make sense as a question. Yep. Come on. That doesn't make sense as a question. It does not make sense as a question. Impossible. It's not asking me if you didn't have eyes, how would you see? I really want an answer. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Because it does not work like that. It does not work like that. All right. I'm getting schooled by a football ultra.

Actually, here's another question. This is not in my third. What are the Spurs' ultras called? A word that I'm not allowed to say otherwise David Baddiel is going to jump down the plate. This is not in my third. What are the Spurs' ultras called? A word that I'm not allowed to say, otherwise David Baddiel's gonna jump down the throat. Oh, that's what they're called? Wow, that's some crazy shit. Also, side note as well,

the rise of ultra culture in English football is so interesting. Like the TFOs and the stuff and like, everyone's like, oh, it's European and Portuguese. Yeah, because it's more fun. It's way more fun. But Scotland's been on that for ages. So, up in Scotland, it's like, they've all's European important. Because it's more fun. It's way more fun. But Scotland's been on that for ages. So up in Scotland, it's like they've all, they've all had those displays going

on for a long time. They've got their ultras, they've got all that. We didn't have like TFOs and stuff, but like we did just have like horrendous acts of street violence and violent disorder. And then that got cracked down on. So then we had to, we had to think about what other things are fun to do. Did you see the Crystal Palace fans several weekends ago when they were in FA Cup final,

marching through Strand with the like big band? Yeah. That was, I loved that. What a great display of a fan support. Anyway, third question. I don't enjoy other people having fun in the footballing. I loved it. Okay, third question, which is not the question I wrote down because I still can't read

it. So no idea. That question has lost the history. Okay. You're a morning person, like moi. What's your favorite part of the morning? Oh, okay. It depends. It depends, all right? So if I am in my usual circumstances, i.e. partner is at home and we wake up together, there is a particular kind of morning cuddle and silliness and he smells a bit sleepy, which I really, really love. Like that first moment where you're like, ah, and it's like you're sort of like wrapped in a cloud. That's great. If I'm up early and in particular, if like, you know, there's no one else in the house going down to the garden and having a cup of tea when the air is still crisp. So it's the South facing garden. So you get the sun, but the air is still crisp. And when you've

got the unbroken blue above your head and you can hear the birds and there's a tree in the neighbor's garden and it rustles very, very softly and the cat is padding around. If you've just like given him his breakfast and he wants his belly scratched. Perfect. Perfect. Oh God, that was such a lovely vivid image. When you write your novel, it's going to be great. It's going to be good. It's a grim novel, though. No one's having nice mornings.

I was right there. Now we're doing a segment which requires the external input of producer Chow, and that segment is Mystery Question, and we're waiting for Ash's phone to ding. I always feel so tense. Ooh, there we go. Oh, okay. What do you know about Generation Alpha? And how worried are you about them?

Generation Alpha, of course, was born between 2010 and 2024. I know nothing about Generation Alpha because I'm not a nonce. Moira, what do you know and 2024. I know nothing about Generation Alpha, because I'm not a nonce. Moira, what do you know? I don't know anything about Generation Alpha. They're not my business. I don't care about them. I guess this question is really about the anxiety

of younger generations and seeing the world change in front of you, because it is a truism that every generation thinks the one after is worse than theirs. That's true. And worse than the ones that came before. This is true from like, your school years, everyone says, oh, the year after was a shit, we were the good year, we were the last good year. And it gets, the gap gets wider and wider until it stretches out to marketing situations, which is how generations work nowadays. They're not real generations.

Can you tell us a bit more about that? Because I've heard you say this a few times about how generations are products of marketing. Like, how does it work and how did that develop over time? Oh, well, I'm not well enough, first, to say that. Like, I'll just give you my, my take on it, which is generations obviously used to be very wide things. They're like, what, 40 years, a generation? Let me just double check my stats here.

Generation length. Generation. Okay, 20 year intervals. Yeah, 20 year intervals, 20 to 40, I would say. And the way that generations somehow have moved from being a sociological tool to measure variations between age groups and the impact of changes on them as they, you know, social changes as they're getting older, whatever, into being cohorts that you can market stuff at just by putting down Gen Z. They become lazy marketing devices, Gen Alpha, Gen Z, whatever.

And I say lazy because if you talk to advertisers who are actually worth their salt, they don't use generations, they'll use age groupings, but then those age groupings will be segmented again by consumer behavior. So I've said this elsewhere, but say like two members of Gen Z, one grew up in Britain, another grew up in North India. They are not going to have the same consumer

behaviors probably. They might have they belong to the same consumer tribe and that when they're segmented, that's what they call the tribe sometimes, when they're segmented further, you know, if they listen to the same music, they tend to watch the same things, then they might have the same consumer behaviors. But they're not gonna have the same likes, dislikes, outlook on the world just because they're born at the same time or within the same generation.

But marketing and the rise of sort of this blurred line between magazine journalism and marketing, where you have like lots of lifestyle magazines that are just talking, like basically just selling you products all the time in their articles. And I used to work for them. So I feel like I can say that. Um, just also kickstarted this really lazy trend based understanding of what generations are and how they operate.

So that's why I'm so skeptical when we talk about gen alpha and gen alpha behaviors and all of this kind of stuff. they operate. So that's why I'm so skeptical when we talk about gen alpha and gen alpha behaviors and all of this kind of stuff. I think when you look at Gen Z or whatever, who came before and I know a little bit more about because sometimes 1995 gets grouped in them. I don't think that's true. I think 1995 is obviously in terms of behavior millennial. But when you look at like poor behaviors, there's obviously trends that you see among these age groups, which are for intellectual and traditional things that you would look at generations for,

like, okay, this age group feels more disconnected than another age group. But then when you actually break it down as well, it's like, well, middle-aged people are feeling more disconnected because of the relationship to smartphones or the internet. Like, who else is having less sex than their forebears were at this time?

Like that's the only way it's useful when you're looking at, okay, at this age, what was Generation X doing? They were doing these behaviors. Now this age group at this age, are they changing their behaviors in any way from that and like what's impacted that? But when you're just looking at stuff like, Gen Z, don't drink alcohol. Okay, what other generations are cutting down their booze? So I think there are some ways in which it's meaningful. One is when you think about technology, all right, so like what technology felt natural, intuitive, what was new, what we born into, I think that's really, really important, because obviously, the internet entered my life when I was very young, but social media as we

understand it now, so kind of thinking, you know, I was on MySpace a bit, but then like Facebook onwards is that I was more like 15, 16, right? So, you know, a bit older, a bit more of my brain developed before I got turned into mush. And certainly the dominance of short video front cam based social media, not until well into my twenties. And I think that's reflected in my personal social media habits. I don't have TikTok. I don't post loads on Instagram, which I know is a millennial thing. And I have an instinctive preference for Twitter, even though it's still, you know, it's a neo-Nazi hellhole because I like that my face doesn't have to go on it.

And I like that it's a writing based form of social media. That's obviously something which does create generational divides in terms of, you know, not just are you a digital native or not, but were you born into the saturation point? So one of the things about Generation Alpha is that they are very much born into the saturation point of, you know, front cam social media. And Jonathan Haight, who wrote The Anxious Generation was interviewed by Aaron Bassani, my esteemed colleague for the downstream. And I think they made certain points which are really

important because one of the things that he's concerned about is that one, social media is obviously horrendously addictive, we've talked about it before, two, and such a sophisticated tool of predation that it completely bypasses adults' user awareness. And yet we're allowing kids to be preyed on in that way. So one of the things that he talks about, which was I think first written about in the book, Careless People, which was sort of written by a Facebook whistleblower, is that social media apps can tell when you've deleted selfies off your phone. So if you've deleted a high volume of selfies, because you don't like how you look, and that's when you get pushed cosmetics advertisements. And that's obviously something which can really get itself in the head of adults.

But then when you're thinking about 11 year olds, 12 year olds, 13 year olds, it's obviously so, so insidious. And there's another thing, which is a form of anxiety, which we've talked about a lot, which is reputation based anxiety. So how does the image of myself that exists in other people's heads, what does it say about me? Are lots of people saying bad things about me. Have I mismanaged my appearance in some way? So yeah, reputation anxiety, that being something that was introduced to my life, and I only started using Twitter really when I was in my 20s. That's the point when reputation anxiety entered my life. Whereas I think if you're part of Generation Alpha, if we're just going to use

this term as a catchall to talk about people born between 2010 and 2024, is that they don't know anything different. They don't know anything different. That's a defining feature of their social world. And I think there's one last thing that I'd want to integrate here is that if we're talking about people born after 2010, that means that their only experience of the education system has been completely defined by austerity and marketisation. And it has a massive impact on what your schooling is like, particularly if you're in the state school system. I was talking to a friend of mine about this at the weekend, and they were saying that at their previous school, it was just a complete mess. It was completely mismanaged and they were dealing with many of the problems that lots of other

London schools deal with, which is poverty, housing poverty, you know, kids coming from backgrounds where their parents have mental health issues or there's substance misuse issues, they're deeply, deeply traumatized and that trauma is manifesting in the school. But there isn't enough staff or training or time for teachers to deal with it well. And also teachers have become a sort of like service provider of last resort, that what my friend was saying is that you had these ideas like trauma informed practice being used to justify do nothing.

Like do nothing, don't expect anything more of these kids and allowing the school overall to become a much more chaotic and unsafe environment for everyone, including those kids. I'm not saying all schools are like that, but I think it was quite striking to me that certainly at that school, you've got something which sounds like

quite a progressive idea, which is like, oh, trauma-informed teaching. And basically it's used as a way to make social abandonment into a virtue. So I think that those are kind of meaningful generational experiences to talk about. And I think that that does make me worry about them. But like I said, I'm not in close contact with Gen Alpha.

Like, like, like I'm not like, I don't have kids. I don't want kids. There was a bumper crop of babies this year in my social life. Like everybody is pregnant, something in the water. So maybe that will, that will change a bit and I'll develop new neuroses and concerns or even sources of optimism as I come into contact with these kids. But at the moment, I guess that's the way in which I'm approaching the question is like digital saturation, reputation anxiety and austerity.

But maybe I'm being a bit of a bummer. I don't think it's a bummer. I think we only hear about the negative impacts of these things on these kids because you don't see the day to day. Like I've got cousins who are Gen Alpha and they're lovely, lovely kids. But all I see is, I don't say all I see,

but lots of what I see is like when I'm hanging out with them it's very rare. Like I only see them on occasions when I go home and often they're on their phones. But I'm a phone addict too. So like that's not really a generational difference. It's just, there'll be different ways in that, in how that's shaping their brain, as you say, at such a young age and what they perceive as normal. Whereas I think, as you pointed out, there's, I at least vaguely remember a time when I didn't have a phone addiction and a time before, the Greenlands of the time before, and can still occasionally put it down and be like, okay, my whole life is in here.

The pre-laptharian idyll of before phone. Exactly. I know that there is actually a way where I can walk around without it and, you know, life is good. In fact, life feels great. And I can think. Whereas they don't have that as a muscle or even a memory that they can fall back on. It's sort of like in Mad Max Fury Road, where the old lady is like, the green lands. And she still has a bit of greenery from the Greenlands. And when Furiosa goes, Furiosa knows that there's Greenland, she grew up in them, and when she goes back, it's all desert. But she's like, no, we're going to make a new Greenland.

Whereas the younger women have no memory of that. They can't remember a time when there was the Greenland. And so it has to be Furiosa who leads the back. Are we Furiosa in this analogy? I'm not sure. But that's the point of making like, we remember the Greenlands. And I think we'll only get reported like negative headlines about Jennifer because that's what sells papers. You only see the sort of scam and green things, which is like, Gen Z aren't having as much sex. What now? Where's my headline?

Where's my fucking headline? I worry more about Gen Z because they're in close proximity and their conservative swing is like that's more concerning to me because that's a whole baked in generation. Turbocharged yuppies is what Gen Z seem to be stacking up to in terms of like political understanding. They weren had not just like, they weren't just born as children of Thatcher. They were born as children of legacy Thatcher, austerity, and like, nationalism politics mixed in with all of that as well. Where it's like you literally have to stand on your lawn with a gun and protect your stash. That's the vibe that they've got. And with all of the virtue of social abandonment stuff mixed in with that as well, like that is breeding. That is breeding some selfish people. So someone who's very near and dear to me at the moment

is in New Orleans right now. And they were talking about someone who they'd met, who's a bartender and they work as a queer lifeguard by day and then they're a bartender by night. And they were like, oh yeah, well, for every shift I get to have an emotional support guest. I was like, man, America is so cooked. The level of polarization between like, MAGA,

let's say all the slurs, cruelty, obnoxious, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the concept of an emotional support guest. An emotional support guest. When you're a bartender, I was like... It's called a friend. It's called a fucking friend. But also like, is that being like a formalized thing that's defined by anxiety and vulnerability,

rather than a mate who I sneak shots to, which is like what every bartender does. I was like, I'm cooked. Okay, now I'm worried. No, I'm back on the generations. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but that's America. That's America. No, but I don't even mean like that's America's in like parcel loft. I mean, like that is, that's not even generational. That is, they are young and they've grown up with that language and think like probably more wibbly wobbly, but that is something that is being embedded in all ages

as a, as you say, polarization to like the response of these hard line, hard right, unfeeling, unempathetic values. But you can see how these things are driving each other, right? So like the wetness generates the cruelty, which generates the wetness, which generates the cruelty. Yeah. And it's just, you know, again, like how do you, how do you navigate that in a way which is healthy? I don't know, but there's also an interesting question.

And I think this feeds back into the generational things, what happens when those people become parents? Because like one of the things which I think like is interesting to look at through the generational things, what happens when those people become parents? Because one of the things which I think is interesting to look at through a generational lens, and this is much less about consumption or what music do you like or whatever, it's to do with who's parenting you and how has the ideal or the norm

or the baseline of parenting shifted over time. Also, there are cultural specificities here. I'm not saying that geographically it's all the same, but for instance, in the same family, you might have a boomer whose parents never said, I love you, never hugged them. And I know people personally whose experience of parenting was like that.

Then the generation that was raised by them, um, you know, that's when you had, you know, attachment style parenting, you got all of these things became like really dominant in the seventies, um, which is, you know, the seventies and eighties, that was when like my grandmother was training as a social worker. And, you know, that was how my mum was learning about what it meant to be a parent. So, you know, different styles of response and what you're supposed to do when a baby cries and how child-centered is your life meant to be like, you know, that changes massively. And then it sort of shifts again. And one of the things which I find interesting about how people approach parenting

is that I find that people who are of my age and of a similar background, by which I mean, you know, graduate, live in cities, like politically progressive, anxiety really shapes parenting. They're very anxious about what it means to do parenting right. And it's as if they're looking for a rule book to tell them how not to fuck up their kid. And you know, they'll reflect on their own parenting, they'll be like, oh, you know, like, I wish my my parents had a rule book.

And then you find the same thing being said by their parents about their parents, I wish my parents had a rule book. And then you find the same thing being said by their parents about their parents, like, oh, I wish my parents had a rule book. And I think that that does have an impact on like the overall birth rate. And, you know, especially people who, you know, the relationship between female higher education and having fewer kids. I think part of it is that, well, yeah, because your fertile years are being spent in higher education and, you know, early career development, but also because you've got this cultural baggage you're bringing with you, which is parenting isn't just something

that like you do and pick up on the job. Like everything else, you kind of have to study for it and there's a test and you're worried that you might fail. Yes. That studying for a thing, I think that's such an interesting observation of younger generations, including I would say the tail end of ours. This concept that you have to study for everything, that you have to already know it all before you start doing it,

whether it's jobs, relationships, whatever, so no one feels qualified to actually go and do something. The amount of times, and I used to think this all the time, I was like, the amount of times I've had people be like, oh, well, I guess I just have to go study or do a degree. And it's like, no, you're actually gonna learn so fast or just do it. Doing it will teach you so much more than a masters.

Masters is, masters, most of the time, sorry to the people that have masters that have actually taken somewhere. Most of the time, that is just a way to delay, delay doing the thing you're scared of. Wow, at me you coward. Way to delay the things. I'm not saying that masters aren't great. If we did masters just for the sake of learning, if we were able to do PhDs just for the sake of learning because they were free, wow, amazing. But a lot of the time a master's is a very expensive way

to delay doing the thing that you're scared of because you think it makes you more qualified. But like if you think about, you know, so Gen Alpha, many of them will be kids who are being raised by our generation, right? So it's, you know, the offspring of millennials. Like, so what do you think that's going to do? Like if we accept some of the wild generalizations that I've been making,

because it's a podcast and that's what you're supposed to do. Which is that like, I think that there is a lot more anxiety informed parenting these days. You know, the idea of like, they can't try a food because they might be allergic rather than, well, we'll find out if they're allergic. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. They can't have the strawberry in case they're allergic to the strawberry. It's really hard for me to answer without a parent here because I'd love to see up close what the parenting is like.

And I think there's obviously a lot of relaxed parents out there who are like, no, I think you'll get a polarization of parenting, to be honest, and a lot more judging and shaming about the way people choose to do parenting because that reputation does exist online, you have so much more discourse about the way to do it, right? I think it is that thing of though,

the thing that characterizes these generations again, whether you're a parent or not, is the idea of like, doing the best, being the best and getting it right and having the best thing. Like whether that's food, I have to go to the best taco place in London. What's the top of the list? What's both the cheapest and the best, the most authentic, all of these things. Maxing. It's like maxing everything. Maxing everything. And the same goes for parenting. It's like I have to do the best job possible with what

I've got. What does that actually mean? And then you make, as we've talked about, maximalist decisions where you have to take into account everything. And that just kind of stops you making decisions in the first place. I saw something the other day, it was a TikTok. I was reading something the other day. I was reading something with my eyes and my ears, which was talking about the best advice this person had been given. And it was advice that, unfortunately, as a heart inside me, there is a corporate hall trying to get out. That is that is how I describe myself. That really spoke to me. And it was like saying about how successful people make decisions. It wasn't my maximus thing that I've talked about before. It was like they make

decisions fast. Why? Because when you make decisions fast, you learn quicker what works and what doesn't. Whereas if someone can be right more of the time, but because the amount of time they're taking to make the right decision means that they're not learning quicker, they're not finding out what happens. So the other person is working much faster than them at finding out like what actually works, like what's going well, what can we try, what can we do? Because they make fast decisions in the moment. They're like three weeks ahead. And I think parents who are, and I, you know, this is not all parents, it's not all parents, parents, don't yell at me, but parents who are ruled by anxiety or the anxiety trait that you've identified, I imagine they will find out what works much less quickly than other parents.

And also for some very anxious children or children who just go like absolutely hog wild, crazy and rebel. Because that's what we're seeing with or children who just go like absolutely hog wild crazy rebel. Cause that's what we're seeing with the children of the Gen Z's right? Like they're rebelling against. Or not Gen Z's yet right? No, no I mean like the Gen Z as in the generation Gen Z. So the ones that are always mentioned in studies

as being like more conservative but they're rebelling against the, I would say superficial liberal culture that didn't have roots in actual tangible change. That's what they're going for. So they're like, let's just go fucking right, man. That's the counterculture. I think I'm like anxiety informed parenting. I think there's also, this is where

people having fewer children and like much more people having only children comes into it. Because I joke about this with my sister all the time. I don't think she enjoys this joke, but I think it's funny. I call her the practice pancake, right? She was ruined by too much intervention because she was our mother's first born. Whereas me, perfect pancake. The pan is the right temperature. You know not to jab it around too much. You flip it, it's golden. So when we're thinking about anxiety led parenting, is that also if you're having fewer kids and so, you know, the first time

you have a baby, of course it's an anxious time. Of course it's an anxious time. Like you're doing everything for the first time and you're saturated with messages who are telling you don't do anything crazy, eat vegetables while you're pregnant otherwise the baby's gonna come out looking like this. You are pumped full of fear and anxiety and fear of getting things wrong. And there is an incredibly steep learning curve and the way things look in books

and what's actually going on with your kid could be wildly, wildly different. And kid number two, kid number three, what parents have often said to me is that it's like, well, you're just a bit more chill and you're better at identifying what's a big deal and what's not a big deal. Whereas for that first kid, everything's a big deal. So I think you've got two things intersecting, which is that more anxiety. So I think you've got two things intersecting, which is that more anxiety driven culture, because you've got a whole system of consumerism preying on parents, right? It's a consumerist bonanza when someone's having a kid, because they've got to

buy all this stuff. And then you've got the second thing, which is more and more people having only children, which is like the most anxiety informed child, right? If you think about it. So I think that that has implications for like what the experience of gen alpha might be like. And then also the sort of erosion and shrinking of social space outside the home. Yeah. Where are they all gonna go. Where are they all going to go?

Where are they going to go? I got cackled by a Jen Alpha recently. Um, it was crazy. Um, I was, I was leaving the office with a couple of our colleagues and we were going to the pub, um, and it was a full on wolf whistle and a comment about my legs. Take that child's access to X-rated sites away. Well, I just, the thing is, is that he picked the wrong one because he was with his mates and I know exactly

what's gonna throw a teenager into a tailspin. And so I said, you're about 12 and you're short for your age. Ash, you can't. Why? That's child violence. That's not. You may have stunted that man's emotional development forever.

I'm a big, big woman. I'm a big, big woman. Don't fuck with me. I've had decades of paring. Do you understand? Right? Decades of paring. I went to an all-girls school. That was like the Wud had decades of paring. Do you understand? Right? Decades of paring. I went to an all girl school. That was like the Wudan temple of paring. Like don't try me. I did. I did.

I know you went to a girl school. That's so interesting. Why don't you talk about one day about how that shaped you? Yeah. I mean, I think it made me really great. I'm not neurotic at all. But I think like maybe the last thing on the parenting bit before we like, move on is, Philip Larkin was a crotchety old conservative in so many ways. But he said some shit, what was that? I got too excited and my keyboard fell off the side. Philip Larkin! I knew we were going to fucking get to this be the verse. I knew we were gonna fucking get to this be the verse.

I knew we were gonna get to this be the verse. What did he say? He said, they fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and some new ones just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn by fools and old style hats and coats who half the time were soppy stern and half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can and don't have any kids yourself. Taking that, do you know my mum read me that? Like really young, really young. I remember distinctly her passing it on to me. And to this day, Philip Larkin is like one of the only poets I saw, like even though he was an atrocious man. I'm not really a poet person, whereas I know you and English let go of your call. But I actually, I do have his collected poems and actually read them.

I really, I actually really, really love Philip Larkin because I don't feel the need to mold my poetic taste to my political opinions, which is why I love Esmeralda. But what I like best about that poem is that there's just the sort of an acceptance of like, this is just how it goes. Like this is just how it goes. And I think that, you know, if we accept the sort of like Jonathan Haid thesis of like our age being defined by anxiety, whether it's the anxiety of social media or the anxiety of parenting, um, is that I think an acceptance that, you know, life can't be optimized. Like, you know, it just can't like the name of the game is like, you're

going to get fucked up by your parents and you're going to fuck up your kids. That's cool. You know, you can strive, but not struggle. Mm. Strive to seek, but never to yield. Yeah, to strive to seek to fight but not to yield. Can we have some special ones though, who I know will be dying to tell us about how they parent to write in? Because we'd love to actually hear from some parents and we know there are special born parents.

Yeah, if you are parenting a Gen Alpha, I wanna know. Tell us about it, tell us what it's like, tell us how you do it, tell us how you feel, we'd love to hear from you. So I was gonna write and be like, my kid won't stop cat calling women on the street. Oh. And you'll be like, I'm sorry for the way

I psychologically dismantled your child. Look, but it's because also I knew he wasn't 12. And I know that the worst thing you can say to a teenager is accuse them of being younger than they are. And I know that- And then when you get older, the best thing that apparently you can say to a woman is accusing them of being younger than they are. How things flip, how things change. So, talking about when I was coming back from Mexico, the people at Heathrow thought I was an unaccompanied minor and they were worried that I was being trafficked. What? Sorry, what the hell? I was coming back through Heathrow and so my partner, me and my partner

had gone to Mexico together and he'd stayed to do some work stuff in the States and I'd come home. And I was like coming through Heathrow, I was a bit tired. And there was this random South Asian guy, maybe like three or four meters ahead of me, like, you know, we're just walking. And someone stopped us both and was like, do you know this man? And I was like, what? No. And this guy was like asking him questions as well, this other guy. And the other guy was like looking terrified, like what the fuck? And he was like, so you don't know this man? He's not your dad. And I was like, no, he's not my dad. And they were like, can you just like step to the side and step this way? And I was like, oh, wait a minute.

I was like, no, no, no, like he's not my dad. And I don't know him because we were just on the same flight. And then the guy realized his mistake and he was like, how old are you? And I showed him my passport. Um, and he was like, Oh, I'm sorry. He just. You got profiled. Like there must've been something going on in the event. You guys got shit. It was like massive racial profiling.

Obviously it's at airport. All right. It's not my first fucking rodeo being profiled out in the airport. The fact that this one didn't end with a strip search, which is what happened when I was 19. That was grim. Was like, a good day, a good time was had by all. But with this one, I was like, hang on a second, hang on a second, hang on a second. Do you think I look young enough to be a victim of child trafficking?

Oh my God. I was so... Like the sun, I'm glowing, I get it. I was like, oh my God. You're like, don't worry about it, it's fine, it happens all the time. But there's also this poor guy who is being accused of being a child trafficker who's freaking out.

Shall we move on to I'm in big trouble? Yes, yes. Yes. What do people do if they're in big trouble? They have to email us and they have to email us, where do they email us? They have to email us at ifispeakatnevaramedia.com. That's ifispeakatnevaramedia.com.

And I do read all your emails, even the ones that are rude. Oh. Get over it. Not even rude, not even rude specifically to me. Just sometimes rude, just sometimes rude. Get over it. But not some nice ones too. Get over it. Not some nice ones too. Get over it.

Sometimes, sometimes people are just like, you know what? Put it in the Spotify comments guys. All right. So this is kind of a long one. I did like trim out some bits, but all the details that I left I thought were relevant and important. Here goes. Dear our wise and wonderful queens, before I begin, thank you so much for if I speak.

It always shocks me how much overlap there is between what my friends and I are discussing amongst ourselves and your weekly topics. That's because we have very sophisticated surveillance tech installed on all of your phones. My current dilemma is not making me feel like a good person in the slightest, and I would love your help. I'm a child of divorce, and when I was eight, my dad moved in with my step-mom. She had a baby girl from a previous marriage, and a few years later, they had my baby brother together. It was a bit of a rocky start,

but as I grew into adulthood, we became a really close family unit. I developed a beautiful relationship with my sister that I really value. Despite our age difference, she is my best friend in the world, and I adore her and my brother. Last year, after years of saving, I planned to take a sabbatical

from work and go travelling. Sadly, a few months before I was due to leave, all of our worlds were turned upside down when my dad died suddenly and unexpectedly. Understandably, it was extremely traumatic. Following his death, my stepdad had what I would call a pinging breakdown, in that, rather than talk about what had happened, she became like a Duracell bunny, buzzing here, there and everywhere, not sitting down for more than 30 seconds at a time. In their relationship, my dad was very much the doer. He took care of all the bills, household management and was who you would turn to if you needed emotional support or advice. He had a very no-nonsense approach to life. Notably, the week before he died, he sat in the GP's office and refused to move until we could be offered some meaningful support for my brother's years-long struggle with his mental health.

Almost automatically after his death, I stepped into my dad's role. I organized everything for the funeral. I started working from their house to look after the dog, going to bank meetings with my stepmom, and offering to support them financially whilst inheritance got sorted. I also prioritized trying to emotionally support my siblings as best as I could. I was always a protective big sister, but after having to break the news about my dad's death to them at their young ages, I felt a sudden intense parental protectiveness over them as well. In the painful hellish months that followed, our little family grew even closer. The only real conflict we had was in our approach.

I discovered that where I am very similar to my dad, my stepmom is a very passive person. At dinner on one occasion, she said to me and my sister, your brother is going to kill himself one day, isn't he? As though it is an inevitable fact, rather than something she can try and prevent. When my stepmom asked if I could postpone going traveling as she was worried about the impact on my siblings' mental health, I was happy to do so, despite friends and other family members thinking it was a bad idea. From my perspective at the time, I felt fully responsible for their wellbeing. And in all honesty, I was so terrified that if I took my eyes off any of them for more than one second, they would also in fact die suddenly and horribly.

Oh, special one, do I know that one. Do I know that one, special one. I decided to go in December ensuring I was there for both my siblings first birthdays and first Christmas without my dad. It was incredibly difficult being away from home and for the first month there was a mess, feeling guilty for abandoning them and doubting if I'd made the right decision. However, with support from my amazing beautiful friends, I settled in and began doing exactly what my dad would have wanted, focusing on myself and seeing parts of the world that he always wanted to see but never got the chance to. But things started to change. There were multiple instances where I'd messaged my

sister and I would get left on read, which is fine, but odd for our relationship. No one was reaching out to me unless I was reaching out first, and even then the replies were not consistent. The tipping point was a text from my biological mum asking how my step-mum's foot was. It turned out she had broken it a few weeks before and no one had told me. When I reached out in my family group chat and asked to be notified of such events going forward as being kept out of the loop only increased my anxiety, my step-mum replied, don't be silly, we didn't tell you because of your anxiety, we didn't want you to worry. Eventually, I managed to coerce my sister onto a FaceTime call. I could tell instantly that something was off.

When I asked how my stepmom had injured her foot, my sister had no choice but to reveal what had been going on. Within a week of me going traveling, my stepmom started seeing someone from work and had asked my sister not to tell me. My sister not wanting to lie to me, but simultaneously not wanting to upset me

and feeling forced into an impossible situation, retreated from contacting me altogether. She told her mum she wasn't happy about her seeing someone new so soon after my dad's death, that she didn't want to meet the new boyfriend and that under no circumstances did she want the new boyfriend in my dad's house. Not a week later, she came home from work to find my step mum and step mum's new boyfriend sat in my dad's kitchen. No one told me about my step mum's broken foot. She stood at the falling down the stairs at her new fella's place and didn't tell me they would have had to lie to my face or reveal that fact. I have never felt anger or betrayal like it.

In the last month, I tried to justify her absence as her not being like my dad and checking in not being her style, but to find out she had the time to get her leg over but not to reach out to me was heartbreaking. I feel betrayed for my dad, but more than that, I feel betrayed that she overstepped my grieving sister's boundary, has still not arranged my brother professional mental health support,

and completely isolated me from my family whilst I was on the other side of the world going through the hardest thing anyone could go through. My step-mom texted me a few weeks later and said she was aware of my and my sister's conversation and I could ask her anything I liked. After a lot of deliberation, I decided that although I was angry, hurt and disappointed by her actions, she still deserves to be happy. I replied telling her exactly that. She validated my feelings and agreed with my justifications for them. Herein lies the dilemma. I can't get over it.

I think less of her as a person, as a parent, and I'm furiously disappointed that she has been unable to step up and be who all of us, including me, needed at the hardest time of our lives. I find her inability to be alone pathetic. As more time passes, my resentment deepens and my empathy for her situation lessens. I find myself thinking she's emotionally mature, an incompetent parent, and ultimately a selfish and weak person, none of which I thought before or have ever thought about anyone ever. I'm plagued by the snagging need to swoop in, oust her and take full parental responsibility for both of my siblings. So Moira and Ash, my question is this, how do I for the sake of my siblings and myself

let go of this incessant need to impose moral judgement on my step mum? How do I get back to feeling like a sibling instead of a parent and let my step mum make her own bad parenting You should go first. of love, a confused and heartbroken daughter, furious big sister and full time special one. You should go first. That is a mirthless laugh that comes from, I lost a parent, I lost my stepdad a year ago, just over a year ago. And it was also traumatic, it also felt sudden. And so many of the things that you put in your email special one, I just immediately recognized. Not wanting to go away in case someone dies unexpectedly. It took me so long to feel comfortable with just being outside of London,

not being a 20 minute Uber ride from my mom, not being to where I could get to my sister who's got her own health issues. I don't know if you felt this as well, but the image of something bad happening, it just leaps into your mind and it's so fully realized. It's so difficult to separate what's in your imagination and what you're projecting forward into the future and something that's actually

happened. Everything that you're going through, it's so normal. It's horrible, but it's really, really normal. It's so normal to lose somebody and feel like you've got to step up into their place. And I think especially when somebody has died, you can turn them into a little bit of a superhero in your head so you remember all of the incredible, heroic, superhuman things that they did and maybe their flaws and limitations fade from your memory a bit. So what you do is you create an impossible standard for you to live up to and that becomes a real rod for your own back. Another thing which is really normal, this isn't something which has gone on within my own family, but it's happened with other friends of mine who've lost a parent, is that the widowed parent, whether it's a man or a woman, a biological parent or a step-parent, they're

dealing with their grief and their loss of a partner and their loss of romantic love and a loss of an aspect of themselves. They can also sometimes behave in ways which you experience as chaotic and deeply disruptive because they're trying to restore something that's missing from their family constellation as well. You're trying to restore a parent who is no longer there and you're doing that by stepping up into the role of a parent. Something that I've seen is that when someone's lost a partner, they're trying to restore that missing piece in ways that can often be impulsive or thoughtless. And it's hard because when you're dealing with that from your stepmom, she's being less of a parent to you and in some ways more of a woman, more of a person,

more of someone who has her own flaws and contradictions and desires and mad things that she's doing. And these things feed back at each other. You're crying out to her saying, I need a parent and she's crying out to the world saying, I need to be more than just a sole parent for these three kids. I need to be a woman. I need to be loved. I need to be held myself. Similarly, I think her saying, you know, your brother's going to kill himself one day. I think it's worth bearing in mind that while that may have sounded very, very callous to your ears and you experienced that as a very callous thing and you experienced that as why are you giving up on him, it sounds to me that that's a

product of her own grief and trauma as well. And this same feeling you have of something terrible is going to happen to my siblings, she's having that with her child. And it's not about being passive in the face of it. It's about her brain, which is so traumatized and so locked into the idea that the bad thing is the thing that's going to happen. Like her brain's trying to like ready herself for it. Like it's something which is like really, really common for people experience trauma. So what's my advice? My advice is that time is going to help, like it just is. I don't think this stuff's ever really going to fully go away. Once a parentified child, always a parentified child. It's just the degree of extremity that changes rather

than your ability to disengage. I've never been able to disengage from it. It was my mom's birthday recently and so I had her and my sister over and I realized that I was running around like a blue ass fly because I'd internalized the responsibility to make her birthday special without my stepdad. And I couldn't get the idea that she'd woken up alone without someone to tell her happy birthday and give her a kiss. And I decided it was my job to make it all better with a roast chicken. And so then after her and my sister left, I was just, I was in bits and I was crying and I was having a big old freak out because I can't, I can't shake that that's been my response to grief and trauma throughout my life. I go, ah, I'm going to create more

responsibility for myself. I think that's always going to be a part of who you are. But you can shift it a bit. And I think part of it will be speaking openly and candidly with your stepmom. You're already doing that. Another part of it will be creating spaces, dynamics within your other relationships, your friendships, maybe even your relationships with your siblings, where you get looked after a bit. Don't forget your siblings have something to offer you, which is more than just staying safe themselves. And maybe it would be nice for them to feel that they can support you. Maybe in a way it will take a bit of pressure off of them because rather than them having to manage upwards, which is maybe how it feels when they're aware of how much responsibility that you've taken for them,

they get to just look after you a bit. They get to feel like they're the one who's strong and resilient and has a well of love to draw upon. Maybe that's good for them. And let this stuff flow through you. Like, I just, I don't think there is one crazy trick. And I don't think that grief like this ever leaves you. I think that you are sort of indelibly shaped by it forever, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't shift,

transform, soften, mellow out. But yeah, just say a special one. Hopefully you don't feel like I just like projectile vomited my own experience all over you like, blah, this is really about me. But I'm just trying to say that what you're going through is incredibly human, incredibly, incredibly human.

And hopefully that makes you feel a little bit less alone in it. What do you think, Moya? I have so little to add to what you said because I think that your experiences are very relevant to this dilemma. The only thing I would say in terms of practical advice is I think that this special one has the answers already. It is written into the end of the dilemma. You've identified the issues here. You've already said, how do I stop imposing moral judgment on my step-mum?

How do I get back to feeling like a sibling instead of a parent and let my step-mother make her own bad pairing decisions? That's a mantra, which is you turn it into, I'm going to let my step-mother make her own decisions. I'm going to stop imposing moral judgment on my step-mother. You just keep repeating that. It's almost CBT, I find. If I have thoughts of this kind of thing, I talk to myself about them and I talk to other people about them. So it's like, you know, I have this resentment against someone. I know that resentment is not going away in a month, in maybe a year. It takes time. You have to process it, but you can only process it by, as Ash says, like admitting it and talking about it and letting it see the light.

So you have to be like, okay, I'm imposing this moral judgment on my stepmom. I know this isn't fair. I know that this comes from a place of grief. And that's sometimes all you have to just acknowledge for a bit. Just so long as you know it's not an emotion that you should act on,

and that it's not something that you should actually act out in this sense of seizing parental control and take it. So long as you're aware of where it's coming from and you use that as the sort of full stop of, okay, I know that I'm not going to take any further action on this. I'm just going to be aware of this, where the emotion is coming from. Identifying the root of an emotion is so powerful and where it comes from this parentified child thing and why you need to, you feel like taking control is an answer to your grief and will give you something that stems the tide of grief because you're grieving now not just your father, but also seeing your stepmother in a certain light as a parent or that she

could have been the kind of parent that you really want to take care of you, which sounds like your dad filled that role. But she can't do that and you've acknowledged she can't do that. She's not that kind of person. So you're grieving that too. Ashu, I can see you saying something. What I was gonna add is that,

that mantra of like, let her make her own decisions is definitely do it the way Moira phrased it, which is get rid of the bad parenting decisions. Because also what's happening here is that I think that there's a bit of, you know, binary, very polarized thinking. So your dad becomes the source of all that was good and responsible and you become his heir. And she becomes the source of all that is passive or selfish or dysfunctional or maladapted. And I think that that is a thought pattern that you may need to break. That doesn't mean you're not going to feel frustrated by her and she's not going to drive

you up the wall sometimes or that all her decisions are good. It's just that her and you are kind of in the same boat. You're in the same boat, you're experiencing this like traumatic, tremendous loss. And the flip side of being a parentified child is that you long to be cared for and you also don't let anyone else do it. Yeah. Because deep down you believe no one else can do it as well as you.

Preach to parentified children, just yapping it up. Yeah. And you have to let them try because they will surprise you. Your friends will surprise you, your loved ones will surprise you. They will say things about you. They will observe things. They will pick up on stuff. And the more you let them do it, the better they get at it. That's also the key.

Except that she's human. Because also your dad was human too. And right now he's become a paragon. He's become the totem of all that was good. And it doesn't mean that those good qualities aren't real or that you shouldn't think about them. You shouldn't value them. You shouldn't treasure them and hold them

close to your heart. But he wasn't a paragon, he was a person. And similarly, your stepmom is a human and a person the way you are. Yeah. I think that's a good note to end on. Special ones. We love you. Parentified and childlike among you. You're all part of the special family. And we will see you next week. Parentified children, stand up! Hives up, paws up.

Bye!