Esther McCarthy: I need to stop driving myself mad with worry
Young hopeless woman suffering from depression having nervous breakdown holding head on isolated background, copy space
Man, there’s a lot to be worried about these days, isn’t there? As a parent, I feel like I’m slowly being saturated by all the terrible things that my kids could be exposed to.
I had a conversation with some other mams recently, and we started down a wormhole of horrors that our children are facing that we didn’t have to. The brilliant Jonathan Haidt’s phrase came up again and again — The Anxious Generation. It’s become almost a shorthand for the whole experience of parenting a generation that has to navigate coming of age with a smartphone clutched in their hands, like a poisonous mollusc. The stats don’t lie: Since social media use took off around 2010, mental health problems in our young people have risen dramatically.
There’s online grooming, doom scrolling by proxy (our precious, beautiful, innocent darlings absorbing unsuitable, distressing content — not because they are actively looking for it, but because the algorithm decides to force feed it to them), cyberbullying, sharenting regret (my God, I used to use Facebook as a photo album — I was an idiot!) and don’t get me started on the whole manosphere horror show. I think I got a couple of columns out of that already, to be fair, but it’s worth repeating, the idea that your son, that funny, kind, goofy, perfectly normal teenager, could be quietly radicalised into a misogynistic worldview by a succession of TikTok recommendations while you’re downstairs making his dinner is the stuff of genuine nightmares.
I was hyperventilating the other day about the summer holidays. The days are unscheduled, the screens are right there, and the negotiations about usage are already exhausting and it’s only the start of July. But when I actually look at the calendar, the youngest is signed up for six camps, the eldest has a part-time job, and the middle fella has a social life and a haircut schedule so intricate he needs his own personal assistant.
But still, there are gaps. And into those gaps, sidle all my fears and yes, I know it’s good for them to be bored, and of course I will be giving them jobs to do, and sure, we’ll throw them in the water, and they have GAA training, and I need to cop myself on a small bit.
And then I came across a reel by some fella standing in a supermarket aisle telling me that chewing gum is the new evil. What’s this now? I start clicking and tumbling through the internet and find a recent UCLA study that has added chewing gum to the growing list of everyday items loading our bodies with microplastics. Now I have to add chewing gum to my list of worries? Goddammit!
The pilot study found that chewing gum releases hundreds to thousands of microplastic particles per piece into saliva. On average, gum releases around 100 microplastics per gram, with 94% of the total shed in the first eight minutes of chewing. In the reel, your man was urging us to switch to a plant-based gum, but here’s the twist, actually the finding that surprised even the researchers was that so-called “natural” gums were just as problematic as synthetic ones. Four plastic polymer types were detected in saliva samples. Someone chewing 160 to 180 pieces of gum per year could ingest roughly 30,000 microplastics. The researchers were careful not to panic anyone. Lead investigator Sanjay Mohanty said that scientists don’t yet know whether microplastics are unsafe, as no human trials have been conducted. And for context, a litre of water from a plastic bottle has been estimated to contain an average of 240,000 microplastics, making gum a minor contributor to our total intake.
Sorry now Sanjay, but panic has arrived. I shove chewing gum at my fellas all the time. There’s always a pack in the car. I enjoy a little minty bullet myself after a meal now and then.
I’m poisoning us all for the sake of fresh breath! I’m the worst mother in the wooooorld, I wail, wringing my hands, dropping to my knees, and begging a god I don’t believe in to spare my children from the horror of a stomach knotted in plastic.
And then I have a cup of tea, and a memory pops into my head.
In the free-range summers of my own youth, we spent most of our days out on the road. There was kick the can, chasing, soccer, curbs, hopscotch with an old shoe polish tin as the marker, skipping, allies (marbles, for you poshos), red rover, dodging old dog turds on the footpath, and of course doing cartwheels.
And gum recycling. There was a boy on our road who was the absolute champ. He used to spend ages peeling off the old grey globs of Hubba Bubba off the tarmac with a pointy stick and popping them in for a nice re-chew. He had a jawline that no looksmaxxer could come close to.
I’m pretty sure he’s like a Supreme Court judge now or something; he’s high up in the Four Courts anyway. Never did him any harm.
So you know, maybe we all need to stop worrying, throw the kids out onto the road with a piece of chalk, a stick and an old piece of rope, a stick of Wrigleys, and let them have at it.
