Margaret Lynch

IT IS ONCE again time for my teens to launch their annual Autumn rebrand. Back in the day, we used to call this ‘back-to-school shopping ’, but apparently that is now ‘cringe’ and ‘very much a 90’s thing’. Feelings are hurt, but we persevere.

My younger daughter recently announced that she had made a list. Already, I was filled with worry, because she has never once made a list that was in any way grounded in reality. I obviously knew we needed some things. She is starting the senior cycle, for example, and therefore needed a new uniform. That’s fair. But surely we would approach this with a degree of common sense, I mean last year’s bag and shoes are still functional, and it would be such a shame to just bin them.

Functional, it transpires, has no place on her list. She cannot be seen in anything that she was seen in last year and wants to buy all new. She even has a theme for this year (pastel, in case you were wondering), and a vision board on Pinterest. I don’t know where kids get these crazy notions from. I mean, I do, it’s from TikTok and the never-ending way that influencer culture sweeps across our young, but it’s definitely not from me. I am entirely blameless.

My back-to-school preparations in the 90s were significantly less exciting. I used to think getting the books was the most exciting part (probably because it was the only part) and then we would bring them home and cover them in brown parchment paper. One year my granny gave us some leftover wallpaper from her house, the thick padded floral pattern kind, and thinking back, it might have been Ireland’s first fidget toy. I spent many classroom hours pressing the little raised flowers back down with my fingers instead of listening.

This likely explains some of the gaps in my education.

About 90% of my stationery came from cereal boxes. I would root a pencil out from a drawer in the house and add one of the Troll or Rugrats pencil toppers to it, or place some glow-in-the-dark Casper stickers onto a copy. Bonus points if you also had the Rice Krispie watch. And that was it. You were officially ‘back to school’. There were no trends, no themes and no vision boards.

Heavily influenced generation

This is why I struggle to understand how I have raised a child who can confidently brief me on the ‘theme’ of her rebrand. I mean, where do they even get these ideas from? (I know, it’s TikTok).

This year’s theme involves a schoolbag which is actually a handbag, from a brand I had never heard of, and a quick Google search informed me is sold only in Brown Thomas. How she had even heard of the brand is beyond me (Again, TikTok). I looked it up online, gagged a little at the price and then wished I had spent less time being distracted by my wallpapered books because, although I didn’t understand the dimensions of the bag, it definitely didn’t look like it was going to hold very many books.

And it really needed to hold a lot of books because she effectively decommissioned her locker last year. She forgot the code, repeatedly entered the wrong one, and eventually jammed it so badly that the school now need a specialist to come out and fix it. God love her school.

Anyway, the handbag-schoolbag was only the beginning, because she also apparently needed a new water bottle. I told her we have plenty of water bottles at home, but she said she needed a new Stanley. I asked her what was wrong with the current one, but it doesn’t match the theme of her new brand, and you apparently cannot drink water from anything that will clash with your lunchbox.

The actual lunchbox that she chose is nothing short of a work of engineering art and could easily have been a 3-storey Barbie dream house in the 90s. It has around 17 different compartments, all with their own individual lids and clasps. Sadly, it doesn’t fit into the handbag-schoolbag and has to be carried separately, so I give it till the second week of September before it is left behind in a classroom accidentally-on-purpose and never to be seen again.

Then we get to stationery. You might think this would be the more financially gentle part of the operation, but you would be very wrong. We need notebooks in every pastel shade ever created, and pencils to match. The highlighters need to be so pale that they barely highlight anything at all. The pencil case has to match the notebooks, which match the water bottle, which must coordinate with the handbag that cannot hold the lunchbox or the majority of the books.

At this stage, I would like to reiterate that they do not get these notions from me. This is not me or my lifestyle. I spilt tea on my work diary last week and spent days wondering if I could justify buying a new one this late in the year. Every time I looked at it, I thought about getting a new one. Eventually, I decided it was wasteful and have just accepted that the tea stain is with me until January.

If only I could get my hands on a slice of Granny’s wallpaper to cover it.

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Major efforts

Anyway, by now I had assumed we must be approaching the end of the list, but instead she opened a second tab to bring me through her rigorous beauty schedule for the next few days, which I can only describe as how a recently divorced actress might prepare for the Oscars. She told me she needed to get her lashes lifted, a facial and some highlights. I reminded her that she actually can’t get any of these things done at 15, and she rolled her eyes as she flounced off upstairs.

As if I am the problem. As if it is me who has lost the run of myself, rather than the army of teenage influencers sharing videos called things like ‘HUGE back to school haul’ to millions of other teens and acting like any of it is normal. It’s all presented to teens as if it is the starting point, or the bare minimum, instead of a massive pile of luxuries.
I understand that teens struggle to find a perfect balance between standing out, for only the right reasons, while also blending fully in. I get that they have to always be completely unique, in the same way as everyone else. I also realise that school can be fairly difficult for the kids that don’t fit in.

Secondary school can be really hard. Being 15 can be brutal. And as parents, we just want to make those years a little easier for the ones we love. But it does feel like every year the goalposts shift further and further back.

It would, of course, be so much easier to dismiss all of these things as frivolous, and easier still to just refuse to buy any of it. But there are very few parents out there deliberately trying to make things more difficult for their kids. For most of us, we are just trying to find a balance between our own baseline of normal and these constantly changing standards.

I don’t want to raise adults who think they have to rebrand every August. But I also don’t want to make the next year of their lives miserable just to prove some grand point about materialism.

Parenting teens really just boils down to having a firm grip on your bank card and constantly trying to work out which battles actually matter.