London - A new sound has entered our domestic world. It’s the irritating and constant pinging of “WhatsApp BAEs”.
God, these intruders are annoying. So relentless is their presence in our family life, I’ve had to hold a kitchen summit to lay down some ground rules.
What do you mean, you don’t know what “WhatsApp BAEs” are? Like, where have you been, the Australian jungle or something? WhatsApp BAEs are the “Before Anyone Else” best friends for ever who you have on the smartphone instant messaging app WhatsApp and whom you “ping” at least 1 000 times a day.
They are the 800 people you absolutely cannot live without if you are a pre-teen or full-blown hormonal teen (in which case you need double that number of BAEs).
My eldest daughters, aged 11 and 13, are addicted to messaging their BAEs on WhatsApp. These self-selected squads seem to dominate my girls’ mobile phones every second of every day with an epidemic of daft emojiis (don’t say you don’t know what they are either!).
All evening long, one or two-word messages ring up on their screens, pinging with a non-stop stream of what looks like gibberish. It’s always very emotional when I catch a glimpse of the conversations. Brief lines about not being able to get through the day without each other or how they have been there for each other in times of need (like when Starbucks runs out of whipped cream or your evil mother won’t let you stay up past 9pm).
It’s so anguished that at times I wonder if they’ve swapped maths lessons for a “how to be a drama queen” course in school.
Yesterday evening, Gracie-in-the-middle disappeared into the loo for about an hour. When I went to track her down, I found her trapped on the toilet by WhatsApp.
There she sat, replying to the endless messages as they popped up, her face creased with the concentration of someone trying to work out the plot of the latest series of Doctor Who. She couldn’t leave until the text conversation between about 12 of her friends had come to an end.
When I tried to remove the phone to release her from the loo, she was furious. I got the feeling she’d rather give up a kidney. “This has got to stop,” I declared. “Phones off now.”
The girls were, of course, outraged. But as I am the woman “who always says the wrong thing” anyway, I am used to that. I sat them down to lay down some WhatsApp guidelines. I didn’t get very far because I realised I don’t know what the guidelines should be.
Some are obvious — no phones during homework, no phones in your room at bedtime — but that gap in the evening between homework and bed is no man’s land.
Should they be limited to half an hour of messaging? Should I be approving who is in the WhatsApp group? Because I know, for sure, it’s not just BAEs they actually know; it’s sisters and friends of friends.
And, more important, there are now boys, especially the worrying kind our four-year-old Mabel calls “bigger boys”, i.e the older brothers of friends.
All sorts of friendship issues are thrown up with this WhatsApp malarkey, and when I emailed other mums, I was flooded with replies. I suggested a 9pm WhatsApp cut-off time, thinking if we stuck to it we’d relieve our children of the pressure to reply to messages, but this angered some mums, while others were all for it.
In fact, we had to form a WhatsApp group to deal with the issue (I’m loving emojis, though I can’t find one for exhausted and confused).
My girls have explained how they need to keep in touch with their friends and I get it. I love the way they seem to have hordes of mates in their girl squads.
As my eldest put it: “There is always someone on my side.” My worry is the dark side of this, the threat of it becoming emotionally complicated and manipulative.
This new mobile world is still a maternal mystery for me. Our WhatsApp summit lasted until my 75-year-old father interrupted me by calling on FaceTime — the video messaging service — at the exact moment I was explaining how you couldn’t let screens dictate every minute of your life.
“I’m still figuring this out,” Dad said, as the screen went on and off. We all are, Dad. We all are.
* Lorraine Candy is editor-in-chief of Elle magazine.
Daily Mail