Yolo Boomers and electric scooters: The rise of lockdown-era "reverse parenting"

An electric scooter may not seem the likeliest set of wheels for a desperado breakout but it’s how my mother is plotting to escape my shielding ministrations. She’s in her 70s, so while she isn’t about to risk public transport any time soon, a motorised toddler ride is apparently just fine.

Her destination? The allotment, a socially-distanced joy she’s determined to snatch back, even as friends and family urge her to stay home. The trouble is, her allotment is too far away to walk, she doesn’t drive and has nowhere to stow a bike. While she’d happily thumb a well-ventilated lift in a flatbed trailer (I jest not), she doesn’t know anybody who owns one. Hence the e-scooter.

The idea has my four-year-old twitchy with envy but I’m sputtering on about charging times and highway legislation. “You’ll need a helmet,” I lecture via video call. “Are they even legal on bike paths?” As my voice edges up in pitch, my mum’s hand reaches for the screen. “Just turning you down,” she explains, the septuagenarian equivalent of a teen’s exaggerated eye-roll.

Senior mutiny is something many of us encountered over the past few months. In the early days of the coronavirus crisis, my social media feeds were chock-full of friends shrilly despairing of their heedless elders, 70- and 80-somethings intent on zipping into town to catch an exhibition or keep that lunch date. Suggestions that age-specific quarantine measures might be brought in provoked heckling from the likes of David Blunkett and John Humphrys. “That is not policy: it’s discrimination,” Humphrys fumed. “I will not comply.”

Theirs is the first generation of seniors to have balked at being called granny and gramps, embraced the late-life crisis and later-life divorce, and begun out-drinking their younger counterparts. Indoctrinated by the mantra that 70 is the new 50, it should come as no surprise that “YOLO (you only live once) grandparents,” as journalist Benjamin Wallace-Wells has dubbed them, haven’t enjoyed being treated like geriatrics all of a sudden.

Meanwhile, their children are realising that reverse parenting can be just as demanding as the conventional kind. My style? Hectoring and helicoptering, apparently.

For those of us in the blessed position of having loved ones who remain hearty and independent into their 80s, it’s unsettling to have to think of them as “clinically vulnerable.” It can seem a foretaste of an inevitability that we ordinarily succeed in pushing to the farthest reaches of our minds. Oh to trade this frazzled, snippy anxiety for the burn of embarrassment that our parents inspired back in adolescence.

But if it’s distressing for us, it can only be vastly more so for them. Psychologists have described the worry that some people are experiencing as a kind of grief for the loss of past pleasures and possibilities. That feeling must be considerably more acute if the sandglass is bottom-heavy.

And yet it’s we who are not old who are making what my mum would term a “fuss.” We might feel like we’re parenting our parents but they still have plenty to teach us. Let’s not forget, either, that despite their grumbling, it hasn’t been the elderly who have been predominantly flouting lockdown rules.

Plenty has been written about the so-called sandwich generation, a fix born of lengthening lifespans and delayed parenthood, leaving the middle-aged pressed between the demands of raising children and the duties of elder care. Its toll can be exacting, and it is shouldered disproportionately by women. Less discussed are the joys these responsibilities can bring. Our parents—together with any children in our orbit—hold us in place, perfectly positioned to appreciate the wheel of life.

The parent-child bond is fascinating in its ever-evolving complexity. But all too often, its development stalls in adulthood. Checking in more regularly, as many are currently doing, has brought intergenerational benefits. Back in May, a survey found that 61 per cent of the UK’s elderly felt more cared for by relatives since self-isolation began, while 54 per cent of young Britons feel a deeper connection with their grandparents than ever before.

As for my mum and her e-scooter, I’ve decided to follow her lead and channel my fretfulness in a more life-enhancing direction with the gift of a helmet. It’s sparkly gold with lightning bolts; perfect for a 70-something rebel.