Before beauty serums, smartphones and TikTok dances, what was it like to be a tween? On 3 December 2000, Barbara Ellen, single mother to a tweenage daughter, meditated on the very particular state of being eight, when the only certainties on any given day were ‘Coco Pops and arguments’.
Things had changed since Ellen’s childhood, when ‘You wore dresses your mum picked, went to Brownies, loved pop (music and fizzy drink) and read Enid Blyton.’ At the dawn of the internet age, Y2K tweenagers of her daughter’s generation were on ‘virgin turf. A psycho-sociological space nobody had ever been.’
It felt like the birth of a phenomenon we’d recognise today. In the year the BBC announced a ‘tidal wave’ of home web users, preteens were better informed and more opinionated than ever before: ‘razor-sharp little motormouths’ tapping, seemingly effortlessly, into the zeitgeist. ‘They all seem so much cleverer than us,’ Ellen commented – her daughter could hold forth on anything from S Club 7 to ‘the superiority of DVD to satellite and cable’. No surprise, perhaps when ‘Your child can use the internet better than you can.’
The tweenies spoke their own language, demanded privacy and ate at Pizza Hut ‘exuding the jaded élan of restaurant critics’. Ellen describes her daughter and friends raiding Claire’s Accessories like glitter-coated Vikings ‘laying waste to shopping centres’ and their parents’ wallets. They had ‘the shopping gene… like no other ankle-biter generation before them’, but weren’t necessarily spoilt: knowing what they wanted was very different from getting it.
They might fear little (‘except maybe spiders and being given a naff haircut’), but they were still, at least some of the time, babies. Ellen’s daughter could go in a moment from ‘flint-eyed independent 15 to vulnerable snuggly two’. She still wanted to be held; to have her drawings admired; to be kissed goodnight. The much-feared tween phenomenon did not mean childhood was lost, Ellen concluded, just ‘rearranged’.
