How times change. When I was growing up, my dad embarrassed me by being old. By wearing jackets with leather patches, by having an Austin Maxi. And on special occasions, by picking me up from parties wearing his pyjamas under his coat.
Fast forward 40 years and that's the kind of behaviour kids seem to want from their father. What they definitely don't want is for you to try to look younger than you are by talking street, according to a survey-of-the-bleeding-obvious carried out by Online Opinion. Which is almost certainly the reason why you should. At least to them. Because embarrassing your kids is an important rite of passage. Or, to put it less grandly, one of the main pleasures of having teenaged children.
There's a danger, though. You know you're saying, "Chillax", "Wicked" or "I'm down wiv da kidz" with irony but others may not. In which case you can easily look like a dickhead. Or more of one.
So here's some basic rules of embarrassment. Don't wear any clothes that look like they belong to your kids outside the front door. Don't wear a baseball cap back to front: people will confuse you with William Hague. Give up the drugs: Keef stopped being cool in the 1970s – the last decade he can remember – and not even Keef wants to look like Keef any more. And above all, stop pretending you know what all the buttons are for on your mobile phone. You know you can barely send a text and so does everyone else.
Apart from that, anything goes. Innit?
