Antidoters Podcast

Jess Butcher

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PHILOSOPHY

The opposite of a doomsayer; positive inspirers; curious thinkers-out-loud who don’t self-censor; those who trigger curiosity, surprise and challenge perceptions; ideas-catalysts for positive change. antidoters.substack.com

6 DAYS AGO

Where Have all the Compassionate Neighbours Gone?

Hello Strangers! Sorry for the radio silence. I’ve spent a lovely last month taking my own advice and prioritising family, plus reading to restock my mind-pantry. Because the truth is, I’d run out of spleen-venting material and feared I was repeating myself. (Perhaps it might help all our content-overwhelm if people stopped posting for the sake of it. Two ears, one mouth etc). And what a last month it’s been with so many explosive global news events in all my fields of fascination/ concern: a poisonous feast of political polarisation; a prospective (likely abortive) TikTok ban in the US; tribal battle lines drawn over whether it’s possible to accidentally extend one’s right arm; identity-politics playing out in responses to two huge UK news stories- grooming gangs and the tragic Southport murders; and much more. I’m following as much of it as my stress levels can take, and yes, I have opinions (indeed, I was sat on a zoom with Sky News at 7.30pm last friday, thirty seconds from interview go-live to discuss the TikTok ban I wholeheartedly support before being bumped by the demise of a much-loved footballer). Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Global politics is viewed as either deeply concerning or a welcome course-correction as pendulums of ascendant opinions swing around wildly, but our obsession with the global comes at what cost to the local? Indeed, how much of what is (or isn’t) happening at the local community level is responsible for it? Arguably, all of it… The decline of community is one of the repetitive themes of Antidoters and last week I was hugely struck by a brilliant long article in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson that articulated and evidenced this phenomenon much more beautifully than I ever could: ‘The Antisocial Century’. (If you have the time, stop reading this and read that - you have my permission. If not, some highlights as follows). Whilst it’s US focussed, I believe it to be just as relevant to the UK. The article details how, from the very social early part of the 20th century (thriving churches, growth of local group participation plus the rapid spread of libraries, theatres, music venues and parks), various trends over the last few decades have seen communities go into terminal decline. It started with the rise of car-culture and the impact on urban-planning… then shifting political priorities… then TV’s appearing in every home… (“From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by nearly half” (Robert D Putnam “Bowling Alone”).. All this well before the turbo-charging of these trends by recent technology shifts, Covid, on-demand entertainment and the explosion of food-delivery services: “If two of the 20th century’s iconic technologies, the automobile and the television, initiated the rise of American aloneness, the 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware has continued to fuel, and has indeed accelerated, our national anti-social streak. Countless books, articles, and cable-news segments have warned Americans that smartphones can negatively affect mental health and may be especially harmful to adolescents. But the fretful coverage is, if anything, restrained given how greatly these devices have changed our conscious experience. The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens… By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life…. The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality…. More worrisome than what young people do on their phone is what they aren’t doing. Young people are less likely… to get their driver’s license, or to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all…. Phones mean that solitude is more crowded than it used to be, and crowds are more solitary. Bright lines once separated being alone and being in a crowd… Boundaries helped us. You could be present with your friends and reflective in your downtime. Now our social time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of dozens of friends, colleagues, frenemies, strangers…. Practically the entire economy has reoriented itself to allow Americans to stay within their four walls. This phenomenon cannot be reduced to remote work. It is something far more totalizing—something more like “remote life.” And one lovely framing theory that I’ve since plagiarised in conversation is the following: Home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities). But it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of “familiar but not intimate” relationships with the people who live around us. “These are your neighbors, the people in your town.. We used to know them well; now we don’t” I would personally add ‘the narcissistic obsession of self’ to the inner ring - and global political obsession to the outer, tribal ring. But yes, the middle ring we neglect at our peril. Thompson goes on to explain how the “the middle ring is key to social cohesion… Families teach us love, and tribes teach us loyalty. The village teaches us tolerance”. Bumping regularly into those with whom we might disagree on ideology or politics but share so many other experiences, family-dynamics or local concerns allows us to truly see each other and find common-ground. Different experiences and life-perspectives are given greater consideration. Accommodation and peaceful co-existence becomes both possible and necessary. And so, in an attempt to take my own medicine, my antidote-quest has driven me to middle-ring proactivity. I’ve volunteered with a local hospice initiative to be a ‘compassionate neighbour’ for an hour a week to a local elderly person who is lonely or socially excluded. I hesitate to share this, as I feel there’s too much ‘look what a nice person I am’ virtue signalling in the world, so I’ll be honest and admit that my motivation here is only part altruistic and part selfish/ for research-purposes. Who are the people that do this and what is their motivation? What difference do/ can they make? How might one scale this? On a personal level, who might I get to know and how differently might they see the world based on their much longer experience of it? I’d love to hear personal stories of bygone-times and to broaden my narrow ‘people-like-me’ social circle. (But yes, I will commit to it and not quit once I’ve extracted some Antidoters value!) So far, without yet having even been matched to a new socially-excluded friend, my research curiosity has already been piqued as follows: Why was it so hard to volunteer for this? Why did I need to be DBS-checked, impose on two friends for references and attend a whole-day training event to give an hour of my time each week to have coffee with another consenting adult? But of course I know the answer: the precautionary principle. If I murder Doris or steal all her money, someone will need to be held responsible (albeit possibly Amazon for selling me the knife… ‘do something! anything!’ *facepalm*). Whilst potentially there from the best of intentions, how far are all these barriers putting many off from getting involved in local initiatives? How many more football coaches, youth workers, scout-leaders or citizen-advice volunteers might we benefit from without them? We’ll never know. (In related research, I talked to the British Nightclub Association last week about the potential of putting on alcohol-free ‘lite club’ evenings in their venues for teenagers but yet again, the precautionary principle is a key blocker. One negative news story involving drugs, a fight or a spiking would see the whole initiative would go up in flames of negative publicity, so it’s easier not to try. Let’s leave the kids to hang out in dingy, underfunded parks. (Or not… watch this space… or take that idea for yourself and run with it)) Why were all the 15 volunteers in my training session (bar one) female and with an average age of c. 68? Again no surprise perhaps given how similar percentages play out across the care sector (only 18% of the people working in adult social care identify as men – and even fewer among care workers (16%), senior care workers (15%), nurses (13%) and occupational therapists (11%) source). Is this due to stereotyping and nurture? Or nature, with the female brain more attuned to community and caring roles? (My friend David Goodhart’s recent book ‘The Care Dilemma’ provides a fantastic analysis of this subject for those interested). No doubt, I’ll share more on my experiences compassionate-neighbouring in due course, but to close for now, a small selection of some recent reading/ listening: * The Telepathy Tapes podcast… has literally blown my mind. I’ve been trying to comunicate telapathically with our dog for the last week. Updates to follow. (Whatsapp passive aggression seems to work well enough on my co-parent). * TikTok - Weapon of Mass Distraction by Gurwinder Bhogal * I Can’t Believe That Free Speech, Color Blindness, and Meritocracy Became Right-Wing Issues by Jeff Maurer * Two of my favourite men talking about how to save the Western world and why the UK is going to sh1t (all podcast providers/ and YouTube) More soon (albeit, I won

11 min
12/06/2024

A Ponder on the Lost Art of Pondering

I sat in a group team event last week, listening to a presentation about the trajectory of one of the most exciting technology companies in the world. Twenty minutes…. that was all it took before the fidgeting started, before hands (including my own), reached instinctively to check a device and you could feel the attention in the room wavering. This was not an indictment on the content or delivery - which were both brilliant - but on a modern culture where brains have been reprogrammed to multi-task; one where we struggle to stay in the moment and where we are slaves to the allure of devices. My mother’s generation isn’t so afflicted, but mine certainly is and as I scan the room - a brilliant team who work remotely all over the world and come together in person only once every 18 months - I notice that it’s worse the younger people are. We may worry about how this is rewiring our children’s brains, but we also need to take greater responsibility for our own and the example we set. A chant starts up in my head ‘Con-cen-tra-tion… Concentration now begin… Keep in rhythm’ - a kid’s game but apparently now ripe for adult team-building. Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. As I write, I have 102 tabs open on three browsers which I scroll between for different projects. Amongst them: 3 separate inboxes; a 40-channel Slack; 12 half-read articles; 5 half-listened-to YouTubes; 4 pdf reports waiting to reviewed; some half-baked product research; GoDaddy (because any idea that pops into my head can result in a rash url purchase); two conferences I’d like to attend; Trello, for tracking Christmas gifts and family-admin; 5 separate Linkedin tabs with posts I may or may not ‘like’; and (no-joke), the lyrics to a partridge in a pear tree. Let’s not even talk about my phone and the number of Whatsapps awaiting processing. WTF am I doing? And how uniquely chaotic is my desktop? Why, mid-sentence here, do I feel a compulsion to quickly check if anything interesting has popped into one of my inboxes in the last 15 minutes? Quick scroll left, sign a birthday-party waiver, delete a marketing spam, add a football game to the calendar… and I’m back. The reason I record an audio version of this blog is so that it don’t sit in another tab to-read-later or fall down below the inbox fold. Perhaps my dulcet tones can be enjoyed at greater leisure, next time you’re in a car, walking the dog or doing a shop. Your time is precious. I don’t take it lightly. Given that volume of content, how can we possibly give any of it proper consideration or find time to stop and process any meaningful conclusions? My tabs of potential knowledge-gems sit there contributing to mental overload in the same way that the physical detritus of our family life on every available surface stresses me out. It’s the content snorkelling habit analogy I’ve used before and I know it’s making me stupid and unproductive. Distraction is an illness and we’re all now afflicted. In a moment of down time with my husband recently I had pause to reflect on my gallbladder… as you do. What even is it? Where is it? What does it do? It struck me that I recall *nothing* from school biology and haven’t ever given it a single thought. On musing this out loud, my husband and I both reached for devices. 7 minutes later, we know the answer - thank god - but at the cost of 14 cumulative minutes of our precious together time… x20 other such examples in any given week (where do I know that actress from? How do you stop your puppy eating s**t? Synonyms for ‘pondering’?) Christ. Cogitate on the cumulative nature of that and how much of it is utterly, utterly pointless. Answers to anything and everything that pops into our heads are a tap away and this instant accessibility has dramatically altered how we think about and retain facts. Are the ones we yield on a quick search even true? (Pineapple in dog-food? Really?). As an unwelcome byproduct, we seem to have utterly lost the art of pondering. Even modern toilet roll holders are conspiring against pondering-time with their phone-rest shelves. Maybe it needs a rebrand? To ‘broogle’ is one term I recently heard.. (brain-google - although admittedly it would have yielded little on the gallbladder). And yet, to ponder is a critical life skill. To do so silently is to process the noise of modern life and come to our own conclusions (as opposed to someone else’s); and to ponder out-loud fosters deep connection through shared curiosity - remarkably effective given the rarity of volunteered-ignorance in an age of cast-iron opinions. For children, it’s even more important. As Monica C. Parker writes in Time magazine (with thanks to Hannah Oertel for sharing this quote in her own fabulous blog), “Rather than demonizing daydreaming, we should protect it, nurture it, honor it—if not for the raft of physiological and psychological benefits, then for the potential societal benefits. People who daydream are more reflective, have a deeper sense of compassion, and show more moral decision-making. And ultimately, children who are more reflective, compassionate, and moral grow up to be the adults who build a more just society.” We ignore this habit at our peril. And there are worrying trends everywhere conspiring to exacerbate the problem: the disappearance of free play and boredom for children despite its proven power to build resilience and relationship-building skills; the decline of long-form hand-writing, despite its superiority to typing on brain-connectivity, recall and comprehension; the decline of challenging, longer-form reading in education; and with ChatGPT and AI, turbo-charging these habits still further. Most depressingly, ‘Brain Rot’ has just been revealed as the Oxford University Press’s word of the year (n.) Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration. Yet still, the Antidoters persist. A founder community I’m a part of ran ‘Ponder Wanders’ for a while. A wonderful idea where loosely-connected strangers would meet to take a stroll and discuss a selection of random topics at leisure. A friend has implemented something similar locally to alleviate loneliness and connect people in Hertfordshire. The Men’s Shed movement started in response to a recognition that men only really talk to each other when ‘doing something’ side-by-side: fixing, tinkering, playing golf etc. And the ‘unplugged’ movement is rapidly gathering momentum, with many phone-free events now popping up around the globe. I believe that hope lies is something akin to an analogue renaissance. The buds are here and being cultivated by many of the innovators that have flooded my inbox since my After Babel blog with Jonathan Haidt (for which you can blame my blog inconsistency of late). I believe it to be some of the most important work happening in the world today. Attention and focus is the new gold. I’d go so far as to say that it could become the next great soceital divide. Those kids with the ability to mine it and deep-dive will become our next leaders, leaving all others snorkelling subjects of the world they create. And if we ourselves, still hope to make a dent, or at least calm our frazzled brains?… Con-cen-tra-tion…. Concentration now begin…. Keep in rhythm… Me. You. Ponder on. Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

9 min
11/01/2024

Cheating on my Readers

A reading of my recent blog post on 'After Babel' - Jonathn Haidt's team's publication sharing resaerch and data around his book 'The Anxious Generation'. Entitled: A Mission for Businesses and Entrepreneurs: Help Bring Back Childhood When entrepreneurs hear about problems, they see opportunities. This is what I love about the entrepreneurial sectors I’ve spent my career in—the optimism, energy, problem-solving, and value-creation that abound. At the other end of the business spectrum, corporations are increasingly recognizing their societal responsibilities (CSR) and embracing sustainability and social purpose (albeit with ideological tripwires everywhere). Given the huge challenges described in The Anxious Generation—the multi-national youth mental health crisis, a generation of kids deprived of real-world independence, and an oversaturation of screens and personal devices—we need both this creative optimism and corporate conscience channeled towards solutions. My goal in this essay is to encourage entrepreneurs—both social and for-profit—to see this challenge as a meaningful market opportunity. Millions of parents around the world are mobilizing and clamoring for solutions as their concerns for their children grow. They’re increasingly recognizing the emptiness and negativity of their own digital habits, too. There is a nostalgic hunger in the air for less frenetic, polarized, and superficial times, which means that there's a market for in-real-life (‘IRL’) memory-making and businesses to be built around it. The two biggest entrepreneurial gaps are in developing IRL solutions to tackle norm #4 from The Anxious Generation––more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world––and in creating safer technology tools for young people. In other words, we need more places for young people to practice and enjoy independence, and we need better technology that will let young people use their devices as tools (like a Swiss army knife), without getting exploited through those devices by companies that are trying to control and addict them. Let’s zoom in on some of the opportunities: Opportunity 1: IRL Solutions To remind kids that the physical world is more meaningful and thrilling than the virtual one, we need to create more compelling spaces and opportunities that encourage independence. Only with greater access to these spaces will cultural norms shift, prompting parents to give their children more independence. Teens these days are sadly ‘non-grata’ in many public spaces. With downtown shopping areas and malls in decline across many Western nations, ‘teenism’ (my term) has emerged as a phenomenon. Teens are often unwelcome, barred from entering stores or shopping areas in groups, and left to mill around in dingy parks or communal street areas. Interestingly, McDonald’s has capitalized on this trend with a clever ad campaign in the UK that shows how it has become the teen meeting place of choice. But surely fast-food joints can’t be the only safe public spaces for teens? It certainly doesn’t bode well for their health if so. Video. McDonald’s ‘Make it Yours’ teenager ad campaign. There’s a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to create and expand spaces and organized opportunities for IRL hangouts, entertainment, skills-building, and memory-making. There are ambitious commercial entrants to this market, such as ‘The Den’— a membership-based, phone-free youth club brand launching in the UK that aims to scale nationally and then internationally, given the right medium- to long-term investors. These beautifully designed venues for 13- to 18-year-olds feature event calendars, open spaces, DJ decks, cafe-areas, games, shuffleboards, and critically… limited supervision. Video. Enjoy The Den’s fabulous vision. Fabrik, though targeted at adults, is another simple example in the U.S. of creating IRL community hangout spaces. Grassroots sports

15 min
09/13/2024

Shhhhhhh. In Defence of ‘Quiet’

I’ve been chewing on the word ‘quiet’ recently… a simple, unassuming word. Somewhat onomatopoeic and almost apologetic. It’s like a full stop. Even when uttering it, it slips gently from the sides of the mouth and silence follows (a sullen one if used as a directive). It’s certainly not a sexy word, indeed, it seems used more as a negative these days. Is it shutting down dissension? Perhaps describing something unambitious or boring? And yet quiet is one of the most powerful things in the world. Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. It’s in the quiet that magic happens. Deep thoughts, processing, creativity and invention. ‘Solitude is a catalyst of innovation’ (Susan Cain). Quiet people are the ones to watch: the listeners and processors. Because ‘quiet is turning down the volume knob on life (Khaled Hosseini)’. Less is more. Silence is golden. Ignorance is bliss. There’s a reason these idioms are so pervasive. And a friend with whom you can enjoy quiet and silence is typically one of the best. Words can dramatically shift their emphasis and meaning across time and culture. Take ‘awful’, a word that used to mean ‘full of awe’ (by which definition, ‘awesome’ must have meant just a bit good) ‘decimate’, which meant reduce by only 1 in 10; ‘naughty’, which once just meant you had naught or nothing or ‘egregious’ which used to be a good thing- eminent or distinguished. But of course words morph… because language and words are powerful and critical to our understanding of the world. Indeed, their changing meanings can alter our perception of the world. Words are weaponised to disparage and shut down debate (typically any word ending in ‘ist’); and there is much recent commentary about how the rapidly growing overuse of medicalised therapy language is, in itself exacerbating mental health New words are appearing every year. Some recent Mirriam-Webster additions include ‘padawan’, ‘rewild’, ‘GOAT’, ‘tabata’ and ‘doomscroll’ (although my spell-check hasn’t caught up)... all fascinating insights into a world of rapid cultural change (and god knows what the kids are doing at the moment with words like ‘rizz’ and ‘skibidi’ but i know enough not to use them myself). There are also some wonderful words that exist in other cultures that encapsulate everyday feelings beautifully, but aren’t available to us in English. A few now sit in a rotating box in our bathroom thanks to a brilliant gift: ‘Qurencia’ (Spanish): Describes a place where we feel safe, a ‘home’ (which doesn’t literally have to be where we live) from where we draw our strength and inspiration. In bullfighting, a bull may stake out a querencia in a part of the ring where he will gather his energies before another charge’ ‘L’Espirit de L’Escalier’ (French): The witty or cutting retort that we should have delivered to a frenemy but that comes to mind only after we’ve left the gathering and are on our way down the stairs. Captures our maddening inability to know how to answer humiliation in real time. ‘Duende’ (Spanish): A heightened state of emotion created by a moving piece of art. ‘Dustsceawung’ (Old Engligh): Contemplation of the fact that dust used to be other things - the walls of a city, the chief of the guards, a book, a great tree: dust is always the ultimate destination. Such contemplation may loosen the drip of our worldly desires. ‘Huzun’ (Turkish): The gloomy feeling that things are in decline and that the situation - often political in nature - will probably get gradually worse. Despite the darkness, there’s a joy in having the word to hand, sparing us from a personal sense of persecution and reminding us that our misfortunes are largely collective in nature’ And it’s antidote: ‘Yunen’ (Japanese):

7 min
08/30/2024

What I can’t see, I can’t over-parent

Kirstie Allsopp - apparently the worst mother in Britain right now (for allowing her 15 year old to go interrailing), has come out swinging. And good for her. I’m team-Allsopp. As readers will know, I’ve long been convinced that giving kids independence as early as possible is the key to building resilience, responsibility and creativity. Yes, there are risks - but, in my opinion (and increasing numbers of others’), many more to over-parenting and childhoods spent more online than off. Having said that, it’s all been a little academic to my own parenting of 3 under 5s, 6. 7, 8… until now, with the eldest just short of 11. Yes, we’ve embraced chores as early as we can, but living in a small, commuter rat-run village with few neighbourhood playmates, it’s been hard to practise the ‘free range parenting’ that Jonathan Haidt and Lenore Skenazy (his partner on the ‘Let Grow’ movement) advocate for. Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Recently, we’ve started letting the kids sleep out in a shed in the garden, to wander off on solo errands during trips to our small market town and take the puppy out by themselves but none of these allow for much mischief-making for three siblings whose boredom and/or irritation with each other I can hear from 100 yards away. Outside these small tendrils of freedom from our family bounds, I’m struggling to find many other parents willing to loosen the reins to the big-wide-world with me. Instead there are nervous texts in whatsapp checking whether a child will know anyone at an upcoming summer camp; fretful concerns over first sleepovers away from home; chaperones for hang-outs and packed-agenda playdates full of allergy-warnings and online waivers. Holidays provide the perfect opportunity. A change of scene and routine to create more colourful memories - sunny, wet, sandy, dirty, exhausting memories. And the Netherlands, it turns out, is the perfect place to practise free-range parenting. I write this (very briefly) from a holiday there with three other families and it’s the most perfect trip I could ever have imagined for one at our stage. We’re all camped separately within a huge site of static mobile-homes, safari tents and open-camping fields that wrap around a cheesy water park and a refreshingly relaxed theme park. It’s without a doubt, the last kind of holiday the well-travelled, young professional me would ever have thought I would enjoy. Staffing is minimal and unobtrusive. Gates and doors are left open. Bikes piled up in corners, unlocked. Queues are almost non-existent and there’s not a health and safety Nazi to be found (unlike in the UK). It’s all so refreshing and our eight cumulative kids, aged 6-12 are living their best free-range lives, disappearing for hours on end until their stomachs send them back to raid one of our various fridges. There have been endless hours burying each other in sand, on table-tennis tables, noisy games of Uno, beach volleyball (to a blaring Top Gun soundtrack), an impromptu gymnastic display cheered on by strangers; bike races weaving through chilled-out pedestrians and a competition to see who can ride the biggest roller coaster the most times (my 9 year old victorious on 22). There’s also been a twisted ankle, some nasty scrapes and bruises, a lot of exposure to swear words and apparently the offer of a cigarette from a 14 year old loitering around the sandpit plus a few ramifications from slagging off Dutch football players (that we know about). But when our paths cross (whilst the adults channel their inner-kid, running fully clothed through play fountains, beer in hand), the kids are filthy, dripping wet and hungry, but their shining eyes hold stories they’ll share excitedly, and secrets they won’t. And… I’ve realised, I don’t want their secrets. They’re their bonds of friendship. My new mantra…

5 min
08/02/2024

The Case for Bringing Back Child Labour

Ok, clickbait title aside, not *that* type of child labour… (although outrage-fuelling journos do your worst, it’ll all help with readers, just as it did with my TedX views). I recently came across the Harvard Grant Study findings, running since 1938, the longest longitudinal study in history. Among such fun discoveries as the fact that ‘ageing liberals have more sex’ with ‘conservative men ceasing sexual activity around the age of 68’, the most interesting finding was that it identified two key things that enable adults to be happy and successful: 1) Love and 2) work ethic. Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The main thing that correlated with self esteem was whether or not they worked as a child, with those who had some form of consistent responsibility demonstrating considerably higher self esteem than those who did not. And yet - kids don’t seem to work much anymore. If at all under the age of 16 or 17. And as we know, most of their ‘spare time’ is spent on devices. This Ted talk which references the research describes how there are two extremes within parenting: underparenting (aka ‘neglect’) and over-parenting, but whereas the negative impact of the former is self-evident, much less attention is paid to the latter despite it being as potentially damaging. Julie Lythcott-Haines talks about the ‘checklisted childhood’ as akin to dog-training with no time for free play or chores where everything has to be ‘enriching’ and ‘A’ grades are valued above all with the result that kids end up feeling brittle and burnt out. She goes on: But if you look at what we've done, if you have the courage to really look at it, you'll see that not only do our kids think their worth comes from grades and scores, but that when we live right up inside their precious developing minds all the time, like our very own version of the movie "Being John Malkovich," we send our children the message: "Hey kid, I don't think you can actually achieve any of this without me." And so with our overhelp, our over-protection and over-direction and hand-holding, we deprive our kids of the chance to build self-efficacy, which is a really fundamental tenet of the human psyche, far more important than that self-esteem they get every time we applaud. Self-efficacy is built when one sees that one's own actions lead to outcomes, not one's parents' actions on one's behalf, but when one's own actions lead to outcomes. So simply put, if our children are to develop self-efficacy, and they must, then they have to do a whole lot more of the thinking, planning, deciding, doing, hoping, coping, trial and error, dreaming and experiencing of life for themselves. The good news is that there are some easy fixes here… CHORES.. Cooking, cleaning, tidying, gardening - many possible from even pre-school years.. Because, as Lythcott-Haims told Tech Insider: "By making them do chores -- taking out the garbage, doing their own laundry -- they realize I have to do the work of life in order to be part of life. It's not just about me and what I need in this moment." Whilst far from model parents, my husband and I are embracing this. My 10 year old has started mowing the lawns, the 7 year old empties the dishwasher, bins are taken out and laundry baskets are starting to be decanted down to the machines. OK, so the lawn looks like it’s got alopecia, none of our wine glasses now match and I’m washing far too many clean clothes that were easier to sling in a basket than fold into a cupboard… but… it’s a start. And it also helps us as two busy working parents to stay on top of the household. My eldest has got to the age where he tunes into my stress levels and volunteers to do something… I nearly wept the first time. And then, as they get old enough, encourage them to get out and earn their own money. As a teenager, I stopped getting pocket

8 min
07/19/2024

The Mystery of the Disappearing ‘English’

It’s been a bad week to be English after we came so near, yet so bloody far… again… in yet another major football tournament. Whilst a fair-weather fan, I felt the depths of disappointment around me amidst a 1000-strong sea of red and white at a family festival as faces dropped and the tears flowed amongst the under 10s. Football apparently wasn’t, and isn’t anytime soon ‘coming home’. England supporters get a bad press and often rightly so when seen barrelling out of pubs, chucking lager and starting fights on the continent... but when faded popstrel-turned-podcaster Lily Allen waded in on them this week, sharing the image below, she was derided as classist, snobby… and ignorant (flag-wise). One particularly biting repost ‘I guess working class accents are more useful than working class people’... Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Because yes, pride in English identity does seem to have become a working-class thing or at least restricted to the ‘somewheres’. And football now seems to be the only time the St George’s flag is allowed to display anything akin to national pride (unless you’re a black cab driver - the Palestine flag is apparently fine, the St George not so much - although the one-sided press coverage of Sadiq Khan’s ‘woke’ ban also shows the class divide here). Whilst the UK (London especially) turns green for St Patrick’s Day, April 23rd is merely another date in the calendar, one that many English wouldn’t even know is St George’s. Want to celebrate being English? Just shush. You must be ‘far right’ or will at least be accused of it… gammon, Brexiteer, nationalist etc. Where exactly is Englishness amidst Britishness now that all the other Brits have dropped it in preference for their Scottish, Welsh and Irish identities? (Even the Cornish seem more inclined to their local identity than Englishness these days). As a result, the two are now frequently conflated, with the English the only nation to wave the Union Jack - and pretty much only during royal occasions, Wimbledon or at the Last Night of the Proms. It often gives me pause for thought as my husband is Scottish and proud - kilted and sporranned-up for every formal occassion - and now I have ‘dual-identity’ children. This makes the occasional football or rugby match difficult, but really little else besides. And for all the Scottish-English rivalry (which let’s be honest, only goes in one direction), I love that my children have Scottish heritage. Indeed, their Scottish family has much more interesting ancestry than my own, descended from Stevenson lighthouse builders and more recently, a successful female author. All ‘minority’ nationalities are allowed to be celebrated in our multicultural age of inclusivity, but we now lack any coherent umbrella under which we can all identify. In the US, immigrants (I believe!) are still required to pledge their allegiance to a flag that flies across the nation, with the national anthem played at every major event, but in the UK, we do neither and make little attempt to unify the various nationalities now on this island. Harking on about Britain’s illustrious past is now frowned upon. Too much controversy with regards to power-plays and empire. Modern Britain is no longer one evoked by Hovis adverts, ‘Last of the Summer Wine’, or John Major’s 1993 speech, where he said: Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and – as George Orwell said – “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist” and if we get our way – Shakespeare still read even in school. Britain will survive unamendable in all essentials. But is it, only 30 years on? It is, at least in the main, still a ‘green and pleasant land’ as

10 min
06/21/2024

The Ick of Sharing Your ‘Life Lessons’

It’s been a while since I’ve shared ‘my story’ (thank God). I used to do this a lot in my ‘Female Entrepreneur’ days to rooms of early-career women or invincible first-time founders. Years before ‘35 things I learnt by 35’ became popular clickbait, I had curated an entertaining monologue of anecdotes and life-lessons from across my career - something for everyone… (so thought my flattered ego). Since retreating from London with a young family, I’ve gotten better at saying no, plus have had fewer reasons for self-promotion, but suddenly I find myself committed to an encore - the first in 5 years - and frankly, I feel a bit embarrassed. So I’m killing birds this week by using this post to try and think out loud on how to bring my story up to date and maybe draw out some different conclusions with more years under my belt. The previous version, delivered to graduating girls at my old school in 2018 can be found here and as I commented in the blog-blurb at the time: Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. My inner philosopher came out …slightly patronising and preachy in tone I realise on re-reading — but as an exercise, it was an invaluable one. I’d love to write one of these every 5 or 10 years and see how my rules and advice would change… as even re-reading this 2 years later, some of these ideas have moved on. Hello, 6 years later. And yet I hesitate. Because increasingly I find the presumptuousness of the whole ‘what I want to tell you about life’ trend gives me the ‘ick’ - at least from anyone under the age of 65 or who hasn’t been seriously confronted by their own mortality. The older I get, the more aware I become of how much I have to learn, let alone impart… Life lessons assault us. As previously discussed I feel an almost physical aversion to the modern cult of ‘personal brand’ and the narcissism I fear it encourages but it now seems to be a prerequisite for authors, musicians or creators to bring a ‘following’ with them should they want to go ‘pro’. Even start-ups now only seem newsworthy if their founders’ stories are newsworthy. Above all, it has struck me that my lessons - borne from my interests, my background, priorities, values, family-life and financial circumstances - are only really relevant to… er… me. The value in stepping back to consider these lessons is always greater for the story-teller than the listener. What is it they say? That we should not compare ourselves with others, but with who we were yesterday. We should be our own competition. Strong sentiment but surely we can’t help but look for mirrors in the faces around us- whether close at hand, or in the spotlight. Chat shows, biographies, Desert Island Discs and podcasting wouldn’t exist and be so popular if this wasn’t the case. Stories are the most powerful way of influencing people; shared fears, hopes and experiences are the glue that connects us. We seek inspiration for ideas we can borrow and combine into mash-up role models: prioritise like her, write like him, parent like her, financially-plan like him, command speaking fees like her etc. The problem is that huge success in one field for any one of these people has usually come at the cost of something… breadth of knowledge, family, friends, mental health, balance... How many of us are actually willing to make those sacrifices? And yet how many of us still end up feeling like failures because we don’t? Scott Galloway (NYU professor, author and entrepreneur) spoke brilliantly on this at a recent podcast recording I went to - admirable (if a little unlikeable) for his single-minded focus on wealth and status-creation, which he was honest enough to admit came at the expense of knowing his children when they were young. He asked everyone in the room the question: what is ‘rich’? It brought to mind a social m

9 min

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Creator

Jess Butcher
Years Active

2024 - 2025
Episodes

24
Rating

Clean
Show Website

Antidoters Podcast

Antidoters Podcast

Where Have all the Compassionate Neighbours Gone?

A Ponder on the Lost Art of Pondering

Cheating on my Readers

Shhhhhhh. In Defence of ‘Quiet’

What I can’t see, I can’t over-parent

The Case for Bringing Back Child Labour

The Mystery of the Disappearing ‘English’

The Ick of Sharing Your ‘Life Lessons’

About

Information

Antidoters Podcast

Episodes

Where Have all the Compassionate Neighbours Gone?

A Ponder on the Lost Art of Pondering

Cheating on my Readers

Shhhhhhh. In Defence of ‘Quiet’

What I can’t see, I can’t over-parent

The Case for Bringing Back Child Labour

The Mystery of the Disappearing ‘English’

The Ick of Sharing Your ‘Life Lessons’

About

Information