Even the coolest of parents will always be old fogeys

It should have surprised no one to learn that Facebook will soon be the new Bebo, consigned to the refuse tip of technology because its primary market – teenagers – don’t want to be seen using the same social media site as their parents.

It’s not just the notion of their parents accessing photographs of them drinking Buckfast through their noses or displaying their backsides to the world at three in the morning – it’s simply the fact that their parents are able to use the same forum as they are.

And that’s the same as it ever was – because if anything is popular with your parents, it’s simply not for you.

We like to think we’ve drawn on the experiences of our own youth to make us cooler mothers and fathers than our own were. But the reality is that your own kids look on you in exactly the same way that you looked on your own parents a generation earlier.

We may think we’re still ‘with it’ – even the use of the phrase betrays our ages – but the reality from their perspective is that we’re actually portly, balding, cardigan wearers whose heyday was somewhere between the seventies and the eighties.

When they look at us, we need to remember what we saw when we were their age looking at our parents 30 or more years ago – middle-aged people wearing Farah slacks paired with sports jackets with leather elbow patches.

We’re part of a generation they now study in history, contemporaries of the old guys they give a passing glance to on Reeling in the Years.

And perhaps later in life, when everyone is an adult and ideally a parent in their own right, you might move onto an adult friendship of sorts, a conversation among equals and a time when you aren’t a constant source of acute embarrassment through their every waking minute.

But for now, the notion of them liking the same things as we do is absurd; they don’t want you talking about new music or movies or websites. They want you to read your books, correspond with people via the telephone and stay away from cool sites you know nothing about.

A friend of ours recently told her son that his new chinos were cool (mistake number one) and that they were exactly the sort of trousers his father would buy (mistake number two), which only ensured that said pants were given one outing and then left at the bottom of the wardrobe.

No self-respecting teenager wants to wear the same sort of clothes as his dad, no more than they want to double up for shopping trips to Jack & Jones.

Dads shouldn’t wear football shirts anyway – unless they’re actually playing football – but there’s no way that the teenagers want to look like some Liverpool version of Little and Large in their matching Standard Chartered strips.

Parents are embarrassing enough in reality without actually taking their nonsense onto the World Wide Web; there is some consolation if they can confine their mortifications to the house or at least their immediate surroundings.

But putting up their pictures on Facebook – and in particular pictures of their children accompanied by some gushing explanation – is a different level of humiliation altogether.

Which is why this teenage exodus should surprise no one – and the moment of departure is normally minutes after your mother requests you to become her friend.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.