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Ep. 67: Danielle Marsh on Connecting with Teenagers
363 Plays2 years ago
Marsh Family Songs
Who is Danielle Marsh?
Danielle is a 45 year old mum to 3 teens and a pre teen who became known during the pandemic when a Covid parody song they produced went viral in March 2020. Since then the family have continued to post parody songs and original content on a varied host of topics from the cost of living crisis, menopause, repeated political shenanigans and overuse of technology. Juggling jobs, kids, music and life Danielle and husband Ben along with Alfie, Thomas, Ella and Tess hope to find humour in even the trickiest of topics with the belief that if they discuss it round the dinner table it’s a possibility for a song!
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Transcript
Introduction to Teenage Kicks Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to the Teenage Kicks podcast where we take the fear out of parenting or becoming a teenager. I'm Helen Wills and every week I talk to someone who had a difficult time in the teenage years but came out the other side in a good place and has insight to offer to parents and young people who might be going through the same.
Meet Danielle's Family and Their Viral Moment
00:00:33
Speaker
Today, I'm talking to that family. You know, the one we all know from our lockdown entertainment, who shot to Facebook fame with a viral video poking fun at life during the COVID pandemic. Since then, their funny but serious musical critiques of our government and its disastrous decision-making have gained them a huge following, bringing 20 million views on YouTube to date.
Discussing Menopause with Kids
00:01:00
Speaker
They've tackled more than just our political chaos too, including one topic that listeners of this podcast will appreciate, menopause. How to talk to your kids about it, and yes, they've got lots of teenagers, and even better, how to do it without eye rolls. I mean, if Danielle's family are able to sing to the public about it, surely us mere mortals must be able to manage a basic conversation around the dinner table, right?
00:01:27
Speaker
Danielle, welcome to the podcast. Can you start by telling us a little bit about your family? OK, so I'm married to Ben and we've been married for 18 years this year, known each other since we arrived at university together and studied history at the same time. But he didn't realise he loved me for a while. It took him a while to get around to it. So we have been married for slightly less time than we've known each other.
00:01:52
Speaker
And we have four children. We have Alfie, who is 16 now, doing A levels with all that entails. And we have Thomas, who is just 15 and is in year 10 and beginning GCSEs.
00:02:07
Speaker
we have Ella who is just 13 and making her options choices this week so that's always fun and we have Tess who is 11 as of four days ago and by far the most difficult child of the four of the most of the time but delightful as well so that along with two completely mental dogs and two completely crazy cats
00:02:32
Speaker
sums up why this is the quietest my house has been for a very long time.
Family Dynamics and Pets
00:02:37
Speaker
What's with the dogs and the cats did you think you were just under challenged? Well we've always had dogs to be fair when Ben and I first moved in together we sort of discussed that you know having an animal might prepare as if one day we had children and then we realized actually it's an awful lot easier for us than it is to have dogs it really is nobody really openly says don't bring your child to my house but they were quite willing to say about a dog.
00:03:01
Speaker
So we had Gus when we first moved to Scotland, because we lived in Scotland for 10 years before we moved down here. And yeah, once you've got dogs, they're just part of the way that your life functions. We then got Monty, who was supposed to be sort of brought up with the older Labrador as he was sort of fading. And in true Gus fashion, Gus decided to literally die about four days before the puppy was due to arrive. Very unexpectedly, deeply traumatic. And obviously the kids all wrote in their diaries, we're getting another puppy because our dog died yesterday. It sounded awful.
00:03:31
Speaker
No, that's not why we did it. Monty is a very different catlerfish. He is, I don't know, it's sort of like having a Shetland pony rather than a dog, to be honest. He's a bit neurotic and a bit strange, but we love him. And then we got Boo because she just loves everybody and everything and is the least complicated but completely dense animal we've ever come across.
00:03:53
Speaker
lovely. The cats, yeah, we acquired over the years. Ben came home with Cleo when I was very heavily pregnant with Thomas, I think, because he'd found that she'd been dumped outside the pet shop and he thought that we needed more females in the house. And she's hanging on and yeah, increasingly annoying, but you know, part of the family. And then we got Shoka who is just
00:04:16
Speaker
feral, I think, as far as I can tell. He likes Tess most. But yeah, apart from that, that's so yeah, we just we just ended up with them. But, you know, they always have a favorite, don't they? We've got we always joke in our family, we've got a little mulchi. He's a crossed Maltese terrier with a Shih Tzu. And he's cute and adorable with some filthy habits and irritates me because like you say, I always have to get back for the dog or arrange somebody to come for the dog.
00:04:45
Speaker
You don't have freedom once you've got dogs. But the only person in the family who he will really snuggle into for a cuddle, because he's a lap dog, that's why we got him, let's be honest, is my daughter who does the absolute least for him. She just gets on the floor and cuddles him. Everybody else feeds him, walks him, puts him in the garden to varying degrees, but she's like,
00:05:11
Speaker
But he loves her. Yeah, I know. I think they always appreciate the challenge. And I think shows the season tests a kindred spirit. Somebody who also doesn't really like doing what they're told. So yeah, but yeah, it's always it's always busy. It's always slightly chaotic.
00:05:26
Speaker
So Tess doesn't like doing what she's told. I'm not sure that's her age, I think it's a personality thing or kids are born with who they are. You're saying she's just getting ready to building up to leaving primary school and going into secondary school.
Parenting Teenagers and Managing Expectations
00:05:42
Speaker
I do think that is a massive change and it's interesting, we were just saying before we started recording,
00:05:48
Speaker
I have a Facebook group, it's called Teenage Kicks, same as the podcast. If anybody wants to be in a Facebook group where they can freely and without being judged express their stress over teenagers. What I will say is that the majority of the parents in there are parents of 11, 12 year olds, so tweens rather than teenagers. And I think that's something to do
00:06:13
Speaker
with the fear we all get as mothers when our kids are nearly there. Have you experienced that with yours? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it sounds bizarre, but I think not that Covid and the pandemic hit at the right time for us, but it sort of did because Alfie was sort of, yeah,
00:06:33
Speaker
13, 14, just just on the cusp of kind of really going out and being himself. And it's sort of me and him used to argue constantly, we're very similar. And it sort of forced us back together again, in a way that you know, so many people found, but we didn't have any that were too young, and none that were too old, and you know, with boyfriends and girlfriends and devastated, being away from them. So we
00:06:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think I would have definitely found that change much more obvious if we hadn't had this sort of weird two years where we were kind of together in a way that we would never have been. I mean, I do sort of feel, it sounds wrong saying it, but I do feel lucky that we did get that extra time to be together and to find a way to kind of negotiate all of these things because it definitely tightened us all up and reminded us about, you know, if nothing else, we've got
00:07:24
Speaker
we can amuse each other and we've all got each other. And yeah, I do understand that fear though, because I think Alfie was always, he's always been the most open of the kids, the most chatty, the most keen on getting your approval. So he wasn't really the first real teenager we had.
00:07:46
Speaker
I know what you're saying. You know what I mean? To have our approval or to have us sort of talk to him and listen to him was always a real priority for him. Whereas Tess is much more happy on her own, she's much more independent and she will just disappear like vapor if there's something going that she doesn't really want to be a part of. She will just go. So she's the one, if she'd been my first, I think I would be
00:08:12
Speaker
absolutely thinking, what happens here? What if this is it? What if she just doesn't speak to me again for the next seven years? But actually, I think they're all as keen on being apart with each other. You know, there's enough of them. I think we almost tipped the balance in that they would rather potentially sometimes just talk to each other than us, but we're in the mix as well. So they'll put up with us. Yeah.
00:08:35
Speaker
But yeah, it's a funny one because I think, as you say, Tess was, Tess from the moment she was born, she was the most, yeah, she's always stood out. And I think that's what's going to absolutely stand her in good stead. She's just never going to be the final or the last. She's always going to be herself. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you're speaking my language. My first was Tess.
00:09:01
Speaker
And she's 18 now, and I totally get what you say about COVID. For me, lockdown was glorious. Once we got our heads around the panic of it all, she was 14, coming up to 15, and ready to get out in the world. She would have spent that summer
00:09:21
Speaker
not with us, as she has done since, since we've gone back to regular behaviour. But because she was forced to lock down with us, and I was forced to make her feel okay about that, well, all of us, we all adapted. And I'm so
00:09:38
Speaker
I count myself really lucky that I had that time with her that I wouldn't have had if we hadn't done it. And it did help us grow a bit of a bond. But yeah, she's, you're right about it standing testing good stead because if she's anything like Maddie, Maddie is completely free-spirited and independent and resilient and feisty in a good way. What I will say to parents listening who've got feisty 11-year-olds is
00:10:08
Speaker
don't project that forward and double it, imagining that it's all going to be hell in seven years time, because it's probably not the opposite has happened to us, but she's channeled it and made it work for her. I mean, people used to say that one, you know, obviously, they'd see me sort of wondering about with lots of
00:10:24
Speaker
more children and they'd always feel the need to say, just wait until they become teenage. I never understood any of that, you know, it's just, it's just horrible. Why would you never? But, um, yeah. And, and I remember Ben and I having a sort of real moment when we discovered we were having tests, like how are we going to manage? And actually when you look at the child that, you know, the children that we had at the time, I think Alfie was four and Thomas was three and Tess was 18 months, Ella was 18 months.
00:10:50
Speaker
But you can't play that game about what it's going to be like in a year's time or six months time, because actually everybody will be slightly different. Ella could put her own shoes on when Tess was born. You can't make these sort of flash forwards and sort of say, well, if this one's difficult, then the next one's going to be, or this one's fine. I think you do yourself a real disservice, and then a disservice, actually, just assuming you know what's going to be coming around the corner. So yeah, we've always kind of rolled with the way that they are.
00:11:19
Speaker
Yeah, we're very lucky with them, to be honest. They get on very well with each other and they are massively entertaining, to be honest. I do enjoy spending time with them, which I probably wouldn't have been able to say pre-pandemic because you just kind of get on with your life, you just do what needs doing. And you don't necessarily stop and have a moment to sort of think about what it's going to be like when they're not with you all the time. Yeah, that's true.
00:11:42
Speaker
It's interesting how they gel as their ages shift. My two have a really good friendship at the moment because they share teachers and he's taking his GCSEs this year and she's taking A levels. In fact, me and Joseph don't get a word in at the table because they're just gossiping about
00:12:01
Speaker
who they think is funny or who's the best teacher at school. I mean Alfie and Thomas are at the same school and Ella is at the girls equivalent of the school and Tess will hopefully join her there but yeah even just down to the fact that the boys both studied Mandarin and they thought it was brilliant that they could speak to each other and we couldn't understand it.
00:12:23
Speaker
I always call it a regular occurrence. Well, what you're describing, the fun that they have and how entertaining they are. It's one of the things that I say, because I get a lot of messages saying, oh my God, you're so positive about having teenagers. How come I'm really scared or mine just doesn't seem like that.
00:12:41
Speaker
I was two points I wanted to make. One is the best thing about having teenagers is that they are entertaining and sometimes they even notice when you're not having the best day and they can be compassionate and have empathy and it's just glorious to notice those moments when it happens. You see them growing into
00:13:02
Speaker
the saplings of the adults that they're going to be. They are entertainers, so much fun to hang out with. One of the things that I really struggled with back in the day and I wish I'd known is that I catastrophized about everything. Like you say, one of them could tie their shoelaces by the time the other one was causing you more
00:13:24
Speaker
needing more of your time. We just don't know what's coming, but what I do know is that wherever we've got them to, whether it's 2, 5, 7, or 25, we've done that
00:13:40
Speaker
through our own abilities and with them. And so I wish that I had trusted myself a lot more. I wish I'd been able to look at what I'd got and gone, well, you know, it's not so bad. I've done an okay job so far in six years time. I'm probably still going to be able to do an okay job because I will have learned.
00:13:58
Speaker
Absolutely, and I think people, I think there's the two ages, and there's toddlers and teens, and people sort of often behave like they're some kind of explosive mix, and that, you know, and I don't know, even when they were little, I never, I never, I never explained, I never said, well, she's a bit tired or whatever. I mean, I expected them to behave properly, whether they were tired or not. And I never expected my teens to stop talking to me. And, and, and because of that, if they ever did sort of
00:14:24
Speaker
leave a room and not respond, then I would say, well, that was rude. Like, you might not want to spend time with us this evening, but you can be polite. And you can, you know, if you wouldn't speak to your teacher like that, then you don't speak to me like that. And, and I think because we just didn't expect them to behave in a particular way, you know, I didn't expect them to have tantrums.
The Importance of Honest Communication
00:14:42
Speaker
And
00:14:42
Speaker
partly because they would be mortified if a stranger saw them do something embarrassing, which is always what SAVE does, I think. They never did. I mean, they could be absolute nightmares at home, but if I said, that lady over there is looking at you because you're being very naughty, would have been mortified. And I think it's a similar way. Like I would never say, well, he's not going to come down and talk to you mum or whatever because he's a teenager. No,
00:15:05
Speaker
I'm not having that, that's just rude. And I think you do kind of, you find people sort of saying, well, you know, you can't control them when they're two or three or 13 or 15 or 17. And as soon as that, as soon as you sort of accept that, then you almost perpetuate it, you almost allow that to sort of continue. And I mean, in a previous life, I was a secondary school teacher and I spent a lot of time around teenagers. And I would often get phone calls from my parents, but often mum saying, oh,
00:15:31
Speaker
He doesn't, he won't listen to me, you'll have to talk to him. And I'm thinking, I don't ever want to feel like I needed somebody else to come in and speak to them. Because as you say, they are what we have made them. And we have to accept that they're not going to be able to control all those emotions and everything else. But if I give up, if I just sort of think, well, I can't possibly decode whatever it is they're feeling at this moment in time, and I accept that, then I've sort of let them get a little bit further away from me as well. So yeah, it's a strange
00:16:00
Speaker
It's a strange thing because they're still the same people that they were, you know, six months ago before they hit 11 or 15 or whatever it was. So trusting that they are nice people, I suppose. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because you say, talking about control, I don't think we can control them, but I don't think we can control
00:16:23
Speaker
anybody or even ourselves. I think the key is in accepting that sometimes the ship might hit the fan and sometimes it might be us through it. And it's okay. And what matters is like you say, remembering who they are and who we are and coming down again afterwards and saying,
00:16:41
Speaker
and saying I'm sorry I'm losing a terrible mood today and that you came in at the wrong moment and I shouldn't have been grumpy but I am and I think I've always done that. I suppose going on to the menopause type conversations because I have always said to them I'm feeling a bit rubbish today so just be careful because I'm not going to deal particularly well with
00:17:03
Speaker
I don't know, that was always a conversation we were kind of prepared to have, even when they were little tiny ones, you know, I'd sort of say, you know, I didn't get any sleep last night because Ella's growing, you know, Ella's getting teeth or whatever it might be. So just be aware that I'm not going to be able to deal with everything like I might have done. And, and they sort of got that. And, you know, just as much as we get it, like, you know, if I can, I can say that to Ben and he can still be annoyed with me, but I sort of
00:17:27
Speaker
given a little bit more of an insight and instead of just closing down and pretending that everything, everything's okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's part of, yeah, we're human, like, if they if they have a bad day, then I have a bad day, probably at the same time. I think that's important. We remember that they're human as well. And it's not just like you say, a teenage, bad behavior, and we've got to suck it up until they're 26.
00:17:51
Speaker
it is actually, they're having a bad day and they maybe need a bit of help realising that what they're doing is not the most constructive thing and they are allowed to voice their feelings. Yeah. But, you know, bringing everybody else down with them is not going to make them feel better. No, exactly. And so, you know, finding a different way of managing it or just, you know, being able to recognise it is probably as much of the battle as you're going to be able to have. But as Ben will often say to me, you know,
00:18:18
Speaker
because me and Alfie particularly are very similar, we would often shout, like I would shout to say, what do you mean? Why have you done it? And he would shout back and then it would just get anything, you know, just like nobody's ever calmed down because they've been told to calm down. Shouting is never going to get you to be in a position of less.
00:18:35
Speaker
you know, less shouting or more conciliatory position. So yeah, just recognising in that in yourself. And I think that's quite important for me, because I often I'm probably the more emotional of the pair of us in terms of the parenting. But he sounds like a good foil. He sounds like he's able to say it to you without
00:18:55
Speaker
He is, and I think he's a bit too far the other way. He needs to kind of loosen up a wee bit sometimes and just say, no, actually, I'm having a bit of a rubbish day and I don't need to pretend everything's fine. But no, we've muddled through. Yeah, well, you've muddled through very
Family's Viral Music Parodies
00:19:15
Speaker
well. You've muddled through too. How many millions of people follow you now?
00:19:19
Speaker
Oh, grief, I don't. Yeah, I don't know. We have your main channel now. YouTube is where we kind of post most of our stuff. So yeah, I think we hit sort of 20 million views or something a while ago. And that's just, it's always been a bit crazy.
00:19:36
Speaker
I mean, when it first hit, obviously, it was even more crazy because quite literally we were in our living room and we couldn't see anybody. And you're getting messages from people all over the world saying, oh, we've just watched you. I like your curtains. And it was just like very, very strange. So what made you decide to do that? Let's just go right back to the beginning because that really happened overnight, kind of, didn't it? You went completely viral.
00:19:59
Speaker
Yeah, it was quite literally overnight. So we've always, we've always sung. It was something that Ben and I did when we first met. It was something that, you know, when the kids were tiny, we would do little, you know, they would sing little songs and, you know, do little videos. And it was just for grandparents and, you know, cheap Christmas presents and such like. And that first
00:20:20
Speaker
weird thinking back to that first week before we locked down there was a Friday they were announcing whether we were locking down and they didn't lock us down and we were a bit freaked out because I just started I've got rheumatoid arthritis so I've got to take medication which means that I'm technically a bit immunosuppressed and so we'd had this conversation about what we were going to do and are we going to keep the kids off and so we actually opted to pull the kids on the Monday I think we finally locked down on the Thursday or the Friday
00:20:49
Speaker
Exactly the same thing here. So we had this literal trauma where I was writing emails to head teachers going, you probably think I'm over the top and it's ridiculous. I'm so sorry. But because we pulled them that bit early, we didn't have anything. We had no work, we had no nothing. And we sort of start looking at each other on that Monday and sort of what are we going to do?
00:21:14
Speaker
So we had musical instruments because actually we'd done a bit of an investment at that Christmas before it all kicked off because all the kids were playing instruments and we decided we would get various bits and pieces. So we actually played about, not with the One Day More song, but with the song that we did first, which was a take on Tangled. It was a DVD that Tess loved. And it was all about when will my life begin, I think is the song was called.
00:21:42
Speaker
And we did that and we posted it just to our friends and family. And off the back of that, four days later, Ben was supposed to be going to the States that week because he had a big conference and obviously it was cancelled. Alfie had been supposed to be going to China on an exchange, which is why I was completely already paranoid about the pandemic. He was going to Wuhan. That's where he was supposed to be going on his trip. So I'd been watching it with some pending doom for a while.
00:22:11
Speaker
And so we recorded that Les Miserables take, which I think was on the Saturday afternoon, and Ben posted it to our friends and family. And one of Ben's friends said, oh, the people at the conference would love to see that, because obviously we're not going to see you. Can you make it public so I can share it with the people at the conference? And Ben went on his Facebook. And we went to bed. And then when we woke up in the morning,
00:22:37
Speaker
it was there it was you know i had a friend i my best friend still lives in scotland and she said someone from australia has just sent me a song that you've done and it hit a million by that next day what does that feel like
00:22:54
Speaker
really scary actually it was really bizarre we were out on a dog walk as so much of the first part of the pandemic I seem to recall when we all sort of I had this slightly hunted feeling because everybody wanted to speak to us because there was no other news essentially apart from doom and gloom and we were the and finally story
00:23:17
Speaker
but nobody could get in touch with us because it was, you know, we didn't have any, we didn't have a YouTube, we didn't have any, anything. We just had Ben's Facebook where we were kind of, you know, 15 million odd views and people sharing it wildly. So they were contacting people from his Facebook friends and the, you know, the Dean of the university where we worked. It was all very odd. And yeah, we felt very,
00:23:42
Speaker
Like we didn't know what to do. We had terrible Wi-Fi. So when we started, we sort of said to each other at that point, like, look, we'll do two weeks of talking to people. And then after that, we just need to just disappear. We just need to not be around anymore because we can't cope with it. I don't think I slept.
00:24:01
Speaker
for most of that time. I've never been that exhausted. I can honestly say with all of the children I had, I'd never felt that sleep deprived. We were just running on adrenaline. But we had a friend who lived up the street who came and had to hold his phone against our living room window as an extra hotspot because we were doing a live thing. I think it was the Jimmy Kimmel show we were doing in the States and we didn't have enough Wi-Fi to be able to run it. So it was just like,
00:24:30
Speaker
mental. It was just crazy. And we did mean it. And after we'd sort of said to at that point, you know, if people like what we did, donate to the World Health Organization, it was a COVID-19 fund. And we aimed everything at that. And then we said, right, that's us, we're gonna, and the only thing that gave us pause was a few people who had been, well, I'll say a few people had been messaging
00:24:51
Speaker
And we had a couple of nurses who were working in ICU at the time who'd sort of said, you know, it made me smile. It gave me something to look at when I got home from an awful shift and stuff. And we sort of acquired a few people like that who said, if you do any more, would you, you know, would we be able to see them?
00:25:08
Speaker
Which is why in the April we said, look, if we set up a YouTube, then we can put anything that we do on there. And if anybody wants to find it, they'll be able to find it. And that's literally all we intended to do. And I suppose it was just, you know, it gave us an outlet, gave us something to do. But in a nice way, we didn't ask anybody to follow it. We didn't tell anybody it was there. And it wasn't until I think a few months later when we did a few other songs that kind of caught
00:25:37
Speaker
I think we did the have the new jab hallelujah song and then we did the totally fixed where you are and those were the two that really really went a bit crazy again but then people could find us and it sort of became its own thing but by that point we sort of I felt like we had our barriers prepared you know we you couldn't find us unless you came through March family songs or whatever because before that we you know we were clueless and and it was it was very
00:26:05
Speaker
the number of things we missed was quite entertaining discovering all these sort of emails in various places that had gone to various places, you know, things that we weren't checking. Yeah, that was sort of looking back, you sort of think, yeah, we just didn't know what we were doing. But thankfully, I think we didn't make too many horrendous mistakes. And yeah, we came out of it, I think, reasonably unscathed and with
00:26:31
Speaker
yeah some nice people who were kind of interested in what we were doing and it definitely made us feel like you know even when you can't see anybody there are people out there who are kind of quite like you and you know that was quite a nice thing.
00:26:46
Speaker
You must have the fact that you resonated with so many people that must have helped once you got over the initial panic to make you feel like part of something and you're not because it was very isolating that first lockdown. It was quite lonely in a very surreal way.
00:27:04
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that first lockdown, there was that kind of total unknown and panic. But actually, the one that came after, so the beginning of, was it beginning of 21? I think when we, when we, they closed the school, the kids didn't go back after that Christmas. And it was till mid-March or April or something. And you suddenly realized that
00:27:24
Speaker
it's dark and it's cold, at least in that first lockdown, it's like the sun goes out and at least we could all go for a walk. That second and third one, we were seeing Kent with the, I think we made it the first variant, didn't we down here? So we'd already been on that weird sort of tear system and everything else. I remember the next lockdown just feeling like it was going to go on forever and novelty had well and truly worn off and we just didn't know where. So at that point again,
00:27:52
Speaker
the singing and everything else really came into its own for us and for our own um and yeah it's always it's continued to be a focus it's not something we do every day it's not something we do all the time but we're often talking about things that might come up or songs that we we think we should or topics that we think we should write about and it's
00:28:10
Speaker
actually become a nice way of sort of broaching a lot of things. We did a charity song for Prostate Cancer UK and that brought up a whole load of conversations that we wouldn't ordinarily have had. My dad had suffered from and thankfully being cured of prostate cancer which is why they came to us and we'd already done a little song for him that I think we posted on YouTube.
00:28:31
Speaker
from pre from before everything so yeah it's become a sort of therapy for us i suppose in some ways and it's it's a nice it's a nice way for the kids to sort of ask about or you know we'll start we'll say this is an interesting topic or what do you think about this or um and sometimes they'll they'll bring the topics and and Ben'll get a little sort of light bulb moment and come and come back with a different idea or a different take but yeah it's been a nice way of getting them to kind of feel like they have
00:29:00
Speaker
the right to question and opinions and everything else. Yeah, and learn a bit more about it. I was actually going to ask how they felt when you sort of shot fame overnight and how whether that was anxiety inducing for them or whether they were excited. But I'm just thinking maybe now is a good time for listeners. Daniela said that her kids are on standby and we can text them and bring them in to answer questions like a chat show. I'm just wondering if maybe one of them will come and speak to
Creating Authentic Content
00:29:28
Speaker
that.
00:29:28
Speaker
I can just say, hang on a second... I've messaged Alfie.
00:29:36
Speaker
So yeah, for the benefit of people listening, we just brought Alfie in and then we had a massive tech failure, but that's all right because this is not a professional recording studio. It's probably way less professional than, I imagine you've got some kind of amazing setup there, have you? Well, not here. Not right now. We're sat on mum and dad's bed and using an ironing board as a table.
00:30:04
Speaker
I love it. So that's Instagram versus reality. Alfie, thank you for coming in. I'm sorry if we've dragged you away from homework or Xbox or maybe... Yeah, it was fine. I was looking for a way out of doing history homework. Oh, same here. We've got one of those going on here. He's just playing his trumpet to avoid it.
00:30:27
Speaker
I was just asking your mum about what it felt like for you guys, for you kids, when you suddenly became famous overnight. Your mum was saying that she woke up in the morning and was famous and found it all very adrenaline inducing and quite stressful. Was it a positive adrenaline ride for you?
00:30:49
Speaker
I'd say certainly we got the benefit of having a lot less of the kind of admin stuff to do. Obviously, mum and dad kind of were the ones getting the emails through was, and we were just kind of reaping the benefits from that. So yeah, it was it was a very exciting experience when it happened, especially because everything was feeling so low at the time, you know, like, with COVID kind of
00:31:11
Speaker
getting hold on everyone and stuff like that. So we obviously were very excited when it happened. And because we'd done a lot of songs before that and it was like, it was not unusual for us to be doing songs, but the way that that one just suddenly took off, it was, I would say it's disorienting, but in a good way. It kind of felt like, yeah, it really was like a big adrenaline rush. So yeah, it was very exciting for all of us.
00:31:40
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it kind of takes your mind off the, oh my God, what the heck's going on? Are we all going to die? We need to stay two meters apart and you're too close to me and don't sneeze. Must've been a nice distraction. Yes, it was. Yeah, it was. I mean, it was kind of when you're, the first couple of times you went into some interviews, especially with some tech problems, it was stressful. There's a bit of PTSD on mum's face when the call failed there.
00:32:08
Speaker
That's hilarious. Just having a flashback. No, I get it. I was totally, because I started my podcast, I was just about to launch the first six episodes and we went into lockdown and I started having to do it all online and I've never heard of Zoom. Now look at me. So did you start getting all sorts of excited messages from your mates? Were you suddenly really popular?
00:32:34
Speaker
Uh, no, not really. Um, so my friends went through a phase of just kind of ignoring it for a very long, very long time, which is actually a very good thing. It kind of, it separated the kind of environment of Marsh family stuff from school environment, which made it a lot easier to kind of, especially once COVID was kind of receding, it made it quite a lot easier to kind of get back into a normal feel with school and stuff. But.
00:33:00
Speaker
I think more recently particularly because I was just gone into sixth form so we kind of got a load of new students into the school and stuff so it was a very it was a very useful icebreaker for them to other people to say they knew me which was kind of it was quite awkward for me at that point but up until then it was pretty normal they were pretty good
00:33:22
Speaker
Oh yeah, they were remarkably attentive when it came to my mistakes, remarkably inattentive when it came to anything else. So I did get quite a few videos on loop of when I made certain mistakes. I believe one of them was on live TV, which wasn't great. But they got out of their lesson and they made sure to put every effort in to send that one back to me almost as soon as it happened. So that was brilliant.
00:33:50
Speaker
Kids like to keep it real. I know my kids get tormented with anything that I put online of them, any photograph on Instagram, even if they've okayed it, they will get ripped to shreds for it by their mates. But that's how they know that they've still got mates.
00:34:06
Speaker
Yeah, it's very useful. It's kind of part of what your friends are for, I guess, it's just making sure that you retain a sense of self and I've gone very philosophical there. Keep going, I like that.
00:34:21
Speaker
your post like kind of I always thought my personality with my friends is a slightly different personality to the ones that I kind of have with friends and with family. So kind of retaining that almost old sense of because everything changed with both COVID and with going viral. So having that same sort of relationship with my friends gave me a sense of continuity over a time that was very kind of tumultuous for every one of us. So yeah, that was very useful for for me.
00:34:52
Speaker
I love the way you said that. It's a really good take on it and I hadn't thought about that. But yeah, there's definitely some benefits to the stability of something staying ordinary and normal and constant in your life. Yeah. I was going to ask you then, so let's just see if we can really embarrass you, but probably not because you've sung about it out loud. Who broached the subject of Shall We Do A Public Song about menopause?
Menopause and Open Conversations
00:35:20
Speaker
Um, so it was a bit of a weird one because we originally, we wrote, me and dad both wrote the kind of the tune to the song. Um, we, we do that quite a lot, just kind of going and just playing music and seeing what we can do. And so dad and I wrote it. I think Thomas was there as well. So all three of us wrote it. And for a while it was just to kind of, uh, a music track that we didn't have a name to, which we've got quite a lot of. Uh, and then dad kind of, um, randomly approached and he was like,
00:35:49
Speaker
oh I think I've got an idea for what I want this this song to become and Thomas and I were a bit excited because uh it was a really a really funky bassline and we were getting kind of really hyped up about it and like oh what's it gonna be what lyrics is he gonna have written and then uh he kind of pitched the menopause which I'm gonna be honest it wasn't what I was
00:36:10
Speaker
kind of envisioning when I saw this bassline and this kind of track that we'd laid down. But, I mean, the lyrics were great. He always writes great lyrics. So it's kind of, it was a really fun song to do as well, kind of the video and stuff. So even though it wasn't exactly what I had in my mind when I wrote the bassline, it turned out fine.
00:36:34
Speaker
Oh my God, Mum, I've written this really cool song. I think it could be a chart topper, but actually, oh shit. I was going to ask you to ask your mum, what was her reaction initially to that? I think, what was your reaction? I was kind of, I'm not really sure.
00:36:57
Speaker
I'll just join, I'll read you on that. Actually, Ben came through and said, I think we could do this song about the menopause. And I said, right. And then I said, I don't want it to be laughing at me. That was my fundamental asset. I don't mind listing some of the issues that I have been through and I'm going through, but it's not gonna be, ha ha ha, isn't she broken? And he said, yeah. And I said, so I need veto on this. I need to be able to say, yeah.
00:37:27
Speaker
There's a positive, it's not the end of the world, it's coming to everybody. And as I said to the girls at the time, I don't want you, as you're beginning your journey, to be looking and going, oh my God, and then look what happens that you end up like this crazy woman just screaming about how hot you are. So it was quite important actually how we did that and how we
00:37:49
Speaker
And actually it was in my discussing certain bits and saying I don't mind that bit, I don't mind you describing me in that way, but it needs to end in a positive way. It's not going to be a kind of, yeah, everyone avoid mum because she's gone crazy. Well, that's the narrative that unfortunately Menopause has had since forever.
00:38:09
Speaker
It's what you've done as part of what's starting to happen now with people like Davina McCall and lots of influencers on social media talking about it in much more respectful and awareness raising terms. I got contacted by a woman who was outraged. How could you have teenage boys singing about something like that?
00:38:31
Speaker
And I just sort of responded and I was just a bit like, well, they're all, they've all got mums, they're all going to have wives and, you know, they're going to know women like me, like the idea that it's okay or it's not okay to discuss just perpetuates all of these, you know, these sort of
00:38:47
Speaker
silly perceptions that you know everyone is going to experience it in the same way and we know that's not the case at all but if you can't discuss it and you you kind of you know even when we were writing I remember Ben talking about his mum and saying you know I look back at when she used to get those headaches and sort of disappear and actually it must have been to do with this but we didn't know at the time and how can you expect them to sort of you know and I do think they are much more attuned to some of the the sort of more
00:39:17
Speaker
Yeah, I think certainly Alfie, you know, Ben will often look at him and just be like, when Alfie's about to take me on on something I've asked him to do for the 14th time, just don't. And there is a little bit more awareness, I would say, with all of them, that actually, yeah, it's not worth an argument. We really need to go there. And it gives them a chance to
00:39:38
Speaker
to be nice people about it sometimes because sometimes you're not feeling great and it's not necessarily menopause but you know I think we all need to be we all live in a house together we all need to be a bit more aware of other people around us so yeah the song itself was a nice icebreaker for a lot of different things and as Ben was sort of saying well what what symptoms should I talk about the kids were around going oh I didn't didn't even know that was a thing because you know it's not necessarily something I would come down at breakfast go well the list of symptoms today children let me tell you
00:40:05
Speaker
But it was a way of sort of discussing it without sort of feeling really exposed, bizarrely, even though it was going to be heard by lots of people. Yeah, no, it's good. I mean, I do want to ask Al for another question in a minute, but first of all, I was going to say I think that
00:40:26
Speaker
this generation of teenagers just feels really different to our generation and generations that have preceded them. As you're talking about discussing menopause and men, the boys are going to know women, be married to women, work for women, employ women, they need to know.
00:40:47
Speaker
My son, who's 15, by the way, Alfie, has not got a chance in hell of not knowing because his sister is adamant he will know. There is no, we don't say the P word in this house. It's like, dad, go buy me some tampons I've run out. And that is how it's expected to be. And I feel like that's not that uncommon in this.
00:41:11
Speaker
than this generation of teens. And I think that is, and if it is something that's entirely spoken about and acceptable and there aren't off-limits things, then when they do come across things that they aren't sure about, it makes it a little bit more likely that they're going to raise it with you or talk to you about something that's happening at school or something that's happening on their friends. You know, if you compartmentalise and say, this has happened to me and I'm not sharing it with you, then how can you expect them to come to you with other things that they're going through? So
00:41:37
Speaker
Yeah, it wasn't like, you know, we don't sit down every night and say, let's just share a bit more about how we're feeling. But at various points, it has come up in conversation and it's not shied away from and I think that's fine. Yeah, no, that's how it needs to be, isn't it? Yeah, I'll give it back to Alfie if you don't mind. I've got another question. Has there ever been a topic that you guys want to do and they've said absolutely not no way?
00:42:01
Speaker
No, but that's kind of the other way around, really. It's kind of, I don't think that there's ever been any topic that we've suggested that mum and dad have ever turned down. But I mean, in a way, I don't think that's kind of because in terms of the way that writing the songs often work, the contribution that whether that's
00:42:23
Speaker
any one of us really makes to writing it, especially if it's an original song. So for me personally, that's mostly writing the music to it. Well, that's the bassline or the piano and stuff. But the lyric writing comes down almost completely to Dad. And so
00:42:44
Speaker
often he will be the one that pitches songs and there have been several occasions which we have just vetoed songs to do but I don't think... You don't want to tell me what those are do you? There are a couple, there was one that I think he was trying, he wanted to do one kind of like you know defying gravity that one but kind of on the topic of puberty. Oh okay. Which is like
00:43:12
Speaker
I didn't really, I think Thomas and I didn't particularly want to do, especially because he wanted us to sing a very high part in that song. Okay, I get that. That doesn't maybe be a step too far. Yeah, no, I can imagine, as a parent, I can imagine how hilarious it is to poke fun at puberty, but it doesn't feel a bit like poking fun at menopause for mothers. It doesn't feel right when you're on the receiving end of it.
00:43:38
Speaker
Thank you so much. I've never had a 16 year old on the podcast before. It's just, it's fantastic. Thank you for sharing all your stuff with me. No worries. And yeah, go and do your history essay.
00:43:53
Speaker
Where does it go from here? Are you just carrying on seeing what happens? I know you've raised money for charity. What are your plans? So we kind of about every six months all sit down and say do we still want to keep doing it? And we had another one of those sort of big conversations just around Christmas time because obviously as you start in a new year and you know that
00:44:16
Speaker
kids have got loads of stuff on and we've all got things you know we've all got work pressures and everything else we kind of check in with them and say like is this something that you still want to be a part of you still want to do and they were all absolutely adamant that they did um and that they enjoyed it and you know it's never a bad thing then to kind of be like well then when we say
00:44:36
Speaker
particularly with the parodies where you don't have very long, you know, whether it was the Suella Braverman ones or whatever, you are looking at, well, we need to do it now because the topic is only going to be relevant for this government often. Well, you never know.
00:44:53
Speaker
you know, and they will understandably on some evenings, there's always, there's often only one, but there'll be one who'll be like, oh, no. And then we'll always say, well, you don't have to do it, and we don't have to do it, but they kind of then go, well, nah, do you know what? All right, I don't want to be, I don't want not to do it. And we have the boys,
00:45:13
Speaker
have been doing their own little podcasts because we have like a little Patreon group where people who are very kind to people who are kind of bizarrely interested in us sort of have a, we have a sort of separate group for them. And the boys do a little podcast normally once a month, which is normally a rare topic and they invite us in and at the moment it's just confined to them because one of the things that Ben and I discuss quite a lot is making sure that
00:45:36
Speaker
we don't stop them having an opportunity that that comes up but we we've been very careful not to divide them we don't want people to you know early on they would say oh we'd love to have thomas do this or what about and we didn't want to do that it was either all or not and i didn't want people commenting
Social Media and Future Projects
00:45:53
Speaker
about individuals or he's good at that or she's better at that. It felt like we were all in it together. And similarly, we didn't want to just go, well, the boys are doing podcasts and people can all tune in. I think probably if they keep going, they're quite entertaining, then we might well put them all up as a thing that people can kind of tap into later on. But it was about letting them find their feet and in quite a safe space.
00:46:22
Speaker
before we go any further with that but yeah I mean evolution of creation isn't it and I mean they are very they understand that they don't have their own social media actually we you know not because we've kind of banned it but just because it wasn't something that they had before we went into lockdown and obviously with this world that we we kind of sort of
00:46:42
Speaker
straddle I don't know what we do in it but we certainly sort of still have a sort of a public face as it were we didn't want anybody to sort of approach individual one of them and sort of try and friend them in a different way or whatever so we've been quite careful to
00:46:58
Speaker
filter everything through the, you know, the sort of the marsh family thing. But if they are interested in something like Alfie's really into kind of writing songs himself now. And so we've got a couple of other songs, we had an awful experience, which was entirely my fault, where we got hacked in the early on in the summer.
00:47:16
Speaker
It was Facebook. It was a nightmare. It was an absolute nightmare for the period of time. Anyway, we managed to solve it eventually, but the song has been written. Mother Hackers will at some point be recorded. And so the kids are very kind of
00:47:32
Speaker
interested in that kind of side of it of composing and stuff and so we want to kind of allow that to happen without and at some point if they want to take it and go off and do something themselves as the younger generation that will be absolutely fine and Ben and I will just sort of quietly go off to the side but
00:47:51
Speaker
At the moment, they're still interested, they still want to do it. We've got a few songs coming out. We're doing this kind of online festival thing that starts next month. And that was with the original song we wrote for my mum and dad's 50th wedding anniversary, my storybook, which was kind of, yeah, that was another sort of nostalgia type song about where you spend your entire time, especially looking back at the videos we've done. When we started, Alfie was a foot shorter than me and now he is
00:48:20
Speaker
I just look like I've shrunk in every video. I'm just getting shorter and shorter. But you realize how fast it goes. And we're talking about reassessing every six months and then going, well, Alfie's going to go off to university at some point. What are we doing at that point? And so I think we, you know, who knows what's coming around the corner. We know
00:48:41
Speaker
what we didn't want to do we didn't want to be beholden to anybody we didn't want to sign anything that meant that i had to say to the kids we've said we're going to do it and they you know we have to go on stage this weekend and you know um so whatever we've chosen to do has been very much based upon what we are able to commit so doing the comic relief live show was amazing that was something we'll never forget but the idea of putting ourselves out there and having to do something every single week is a whole different thing so we're just kind of
00:49:11
Speaker
as we have been from the start, making it up as we go along, I suppose, but as long as they're content. Well, we all are. All of us as parents are teenagers. That's perfect. Pointing it to professionally. Strap on this whole episode. Exactly. And it works, it's fine. Tell people where they can find you if they don't know about you already, which I can't imagine anyone doing.
00:49:33
Speaker
So basically, Marsh Family Songs, there is a website, www.marshfamilysongs.com, which will take you to any of our social media pages. So I, we sort of divided it down the middle and I look after the Facebook stuff, which is where I'm most comfortable, to be honest. And there is an Instagram thing as well. And then Ben presides over Twitter and the YouTube, which is where all the videos go up.
00:49:57
Speaker
Um, so yeah, at the moment we kind of look at about two or three a month, depending upon what kind of disastrous shenanigans are going on around the world. And so, you know, we, we just, uh, yeah. And then we've got obviously the ones that we write ourselves take a lot longer. There's a lot more you have to do. There's a lot of prerecords and everything else. So there will be a few other things that we've definitely got in the pipeline. And then we're just, we'll see where we go from there. But at the moment it.
00:50:23
Speaker
it's sort of still entertaining and it's not too much of a chore so no we enjoy it so yeah if anyone wants to check out the website that kind of gives you a bit of insight into who we are and what we do and yeah you can find any links to all the other stuff that we've done. I will put all those links into the show notes so anyone that's listening and wants to go and check those out just scroll down on your app once you finish listening
00:50:45
Speaker
Danielle, thank you so much for being so generous with your time and your information about your family and even your son's time. Tell him thank you again for me. I shall. That's not a problem at all. Really lovely talking to you. Nice to talk to you too. Thank you so much for listening. I really do appreciate it.
00:51:10
Speaker
Thank you to everyone who's already rated and reviewed the podcast. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Amazon, it would mean the world to me if you could leave a review. It really helps get the word out, as well as making me very happy to read what you have to say. If this episode strikes a chord for you, please share it with anyone else you know who might be in the same boat and hit subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.
00:51:34
Speaker
If you have a story or suggestion for something you'd like to see covered on the podcast, you can email me at teenagekickspodcast at gmail.com or message me on Instagram. I am Helen Wills. I love hearing from all my listeners. It really makes a difference to me on this journey. See you next week when I'll be chatting to another brilliant guest about the highs and lows of parenting teens. Bye for now.