6 Ways That Kids Make You Feel Old

You ever heard those parents that spout absolute guff such as “well, I guess running around after these two keeps me young”?

Keep you young? Kids?

No.

Let me tell you: there’s nothing more aging than bringing up children. Those mini-humans have a nasty habit of making you feel old at every possible turn. I felt positively fresh out of the box before I turned into a dad, but those days are long gone now! Here’s just a few ways in which my kids manage to put a magnifying glass to my wrinkles.

 

VSCO Girls/And I Oop/Sksksk

If you’ve never heard of any of these, I envy you. For those of you that don’t have a pre-teen/teenage girl in the house, a VSCO (pron. visco) girl is a type of girl that wears oversized T-shirts and says nonsense like “and I oop” and “sksksk”. Make sense yet? No, me neither.

I thought my stepdaughter was joking when she said “what? You don’t know what a VSCO girl is?!” Surely she’d stumbled upon some weird internet meme and mistaken it as an actual ‘thing’. To my surprise (and horror) though, the VSCO life turned up in my own everyday life, when I taught a poetry lesson to some less-than-enthusiastic year 10s.

“Now this group: how can you recite this poem and convey the surprise at the end?”

They proceeded to recite the poem in the same monotone fashion as they had before, but added “and I oop! Sksksk” at the end.

I don’t teach anymore.

 

What’s this?

“Wow, okay. It’s a Walkman. It plays cassettes”.

“What’s ‘cassettes’?”

 

Hanging up

We have a landline phone. It never gets used, it’s just included as part of our internet and TV bundle and I suppose it’s useful for emergencies too. Nobody rings it apart from my mum (who for some reason still refuses to acknowledge mobile phones as a thing), the kids’ school, and the odd spam call.

My stepdaughter’s teacher rang one day, and I asked if she’d like me to put her on. I left my stepdaughter chatting away to her in the hallway. A couple of minutes later though, I was called through.

“How do I hang up?”

Really? Wow. Without that little red button on a screen, she was lost! Mind=blown.

 

“Did you live in the war?”

Wait, what?!

 

Fast-forward

“Why don’t you just skip the adverts?”

“It’s live TV. I can’t do that”

“Why not?”

“Because whatever’s on the end of this advert break hasn’t actually happened yet”

My stepdaughter looked at me with a face that suggested I’d just offered her the choice between the blue and the red pill from The Matrix.

 

I’m bored

“You’re what?

You’ve got toys that talk, toys that walk, a playset in the garden, a games console, Netflix in the other room, and devices that hold the entire collected knowledge of the human race!

I just had a couple of comics and a spinning top when I was your age, etc.”

It’s when you get to this point that you start to realise how old you’re sounding, and you either retreat to a quiet part of the house and silently reflect upon your own mortality, or double down and start on the telly. “There’s nothing on Netflix? We only had four channels, and kids’ shows were only on at teatime on two of them!”

Do your kids accidentally make you feel ancient? Let me know in the comments below.

 

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