The selfie generation are as self-loathing as they are self-loving: Verity Lush

As a teenager my friends and I would cram in photo booths outside Allders and Debenhams posing and pulling faces together, but they weren’t practiced in advance.

You got what you were given when they were printed out and then you stuck them on your bedroom wall.

I can categorically state that I did not ever consider dressing up and going in a photo booth alone so that I could have photos of just … myself.

Let alone photos of myself in a variety of poses, a variety of outfits, and which I then handed out to total strangers, in an early ‘90s version of posting in public on social media.

Had I done any of these things, then I imagine I would have spent the remainder of my school days hearing people singing choice parts of The Divinyls 1990 hit, I Love Myself. Chiefly the ‘I love myself, I want you to love me’ line.

And there is the crux of it.

Do people today absolutely love themselves, or do they just want other people to ‘love’ them?

Tell me, are we really so fragile as a species that we need our self-esteem to be bolstered on all occasions by pretending we are some form of celebrity and filtering photos so that we look as unreal and unlined as mannequins in a shop window?

The propensity for self-love only means that there is propensity for self-hate. 

Instagram in particular has come under fire for propagating images of eating disorders and directly effecting mental health, in a negative manner.

You cannot simply get rid of social media, but you can control your child’s access to it. 

This means them not having a phone or other device with internet, but I am beginning to think that may be a better bet if our future generations are to have any kind of stability in their lives.

Constant comparison to others is no good for anyone.

I’m so glad girls no longer care who is kicking the ball 

The Women’s World Cup has hopefully done much for both publicising the sport and garnering enthusiasm in young girls to get stuck in.

I find the game boring no matter what the gender is of whoever’s bashing the ball about, but my youngest daughter loved watching it with my husband.

I am not sure she cared either whether the feet kicking the ball were ovary or testicle-driven.

The important part, for children observing, is they will grow up subconsciously presuming it is entirely the done thing for women to play football, in the same way I grew up subconsciously presuming the opposite. 

And thank goodness – it’s about time!

Not so Fantastic Mr Fox ate our beloved family pets 

The amount of noise made by foxes in the city at night has reached an all-time high. 

Not that I have been measuring the noise, but they are pretty hard to miss.

Having lived in the same house for a decade I am used to the fact that we are always in close proximity to them, but I now hear foxes approximately four nights out of seven.

They are brazen creatures. At any time of day, out they come, strolling across the pavement a couple of feet in front of you.

This leads to much concern over pets that reside in the garden. We have lost bunnies in the past, not to mention chickens, because  locking them away at night no longer saves the poor mites.