Jodie Oddy and daughter Taylor “butt heads about social media”
Jodie Oddy talks to Avery Editor Sarah Hausler about social media, trolls and bullying, and raising daughters in a world which has changed so dramatically since we were teenagers.
It’s 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon and Jodie Oddy has already been awake for more than 12 hours. As she sits on a stool in her kitchen, with her ‘just woken up and not yet happy to speak’ toddler in her lap, a hairdresser sets to work on her hair. Around her, a pair of stylists are re-arranging her living room for the photo shoot and somewhere down the hall, her teenage daughter is surreptitiously GHD’ing her pre-school daughter’s long wavy locks.
Jodie simply takes it in her stride. Just another day in the Oddy household.
Many of us know Jodie as the effervescent radio host and television reporter. It’s easy for us to forget she is also a mum, intent on raising happy, confident and resilient daughters.
Certainly, at today’s photo shoot, Jodie is seamlessly merging her two worlds. There’s media personality Jodie, one half of Mix 102.3FM’s top-rating breakfast radio show with her co-host Mark ‘Soda’ Soderstrom, and regular television presenter for Channel 10 news and The Project. But there’s also the other Jodie. Wife to ice hockey champion, Greg Oddy, and mother to their daughters, Payton and Summer, and to Taylor, her daughter with previous husband, former Australian cricketer Greg Blewett.
That’s the Jodie I’m most keen to meet today. The regular Adelaide mum who, just like thousands of other mums across the state, has a million hopes, dreams and fears for her children, and desperately wants to make the world a safer, better place for them to inherit.
As it is with parents these days, the conversation quickly turns to the subject of social media, and the intrinsic danger it poses in a teenager’s world.
Well aware of the dangers of social media, bullying, online predators and trolls, Jodie is upfront about the rules governing social media when it comes to 14 year old Taylor.
“The best way to keep her safe is to monitor, monitor, monitor,” says Jodie.
“We don’t really fight that much, but social media is the only thing that we really butt heads about.”
“But whenever we have this discussion, she says to me ‘you’ve equipped me well enough to be able to deal with these things’, so hopefully that’s the case.
“There’s been a couple of times where she’s tripped up and I’ve been very assertive in my reaction to that,” she says with that famous grin.
“We don’t really fight that much, but social media is the only thing that we really butt heads about.”
Clear household guidelines on usage and curfews are Jodie’s keys to eliminate as much mother-daughter drama as possible. She is privy to all social media passwords and occasionally conducts “spot checks” on Taylor’s devices at any given time.
“I think Taylor perceives it as an invasion of privacy, where I perceive it as just keeping her safe,” she said.
With the rapid-fire changes in technology and communication in the past decade, today’s parents are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to supporting their children through the murky waters of social media usage and safety. Never before have a generation of parents had to deal with Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat.
In this new media landscape, Jodie is open minded about the best ways to parent with regard to these topics, where there are no ground rules already set in place.
“Unfortunately the nature of that is that things are going to go wrong, and all we can do is learn from that,” she says.
A big believer in learning from your mistakes, this is also a core value she hopes to impart on her daughters.
“Given my life and experience, my first message to them is that it’s okay to mess up – we’re all human,” she says.
“I don’t mind what they do, as long as they tell me. I want them to know that I trust them, and that it doesn’t matter if they veer off path, as long as they tell me.”
She is also hopeful of fostering close bonds with her younger daughters, Payton, three, and Summer, two, as they move toward their teenage years, just as she has with Taylor, 14.
“It was different with Taylor and I when she was young, as we were on our own, so it was just the two of us,” Jodie said.
“I think that will make our bond down the track all the more stronger. I single-parented her for six years or so. She was my little buddy and it was just her and I against the world.
“I feel like we’re closer for that.”
While issues of bullying, “sexting” and domestic violence abound in a world where women are still hugely vulnerable, Jodie is hopeful her generation of parents can help this generation of teenagers to navigate the world safely. With changing the world such a mammoth task, Jodie knows it’s up to all of us to individually do what we can to raise resilient, capable and well adjusted children.
“I think one of the greatest things we can teach them is to be comfortable in their own skin,” said Jodie.
“I haven’t necessarily had that in my own life, and I’m trying to find ways to impart that message onto them.
“Because it hasn’t been my experience, it makes me even more determined to make it theirs.”
No stranger to bullying herself, Jodie specifically recalls a time she felt so defeated by the bullies, she began self-censoring her on-air persona in an attempt to avoid criticism. Of course it didn’t work, and all she achieved was the feeling she was no longer making good radio.
“You just can’t be vanilla in my job,” she said.
“But that’s okay, because I don’t want to be vanilla.
I’d rather be true to myself and be who I am. If that brings some trouble with it, then at least I can say, ‘well that’s me’!”
In a world where public speaking outranks death on the list of most common fears, it’s impressive to consider just how much self-confidence it takes to get to this point. To be able to share personal stories and opinion over the airwaves every morning, and maintain such a ‘take it or leave it, this is who I am’ attitude is no easy feat.
But while Jodie says she can now assuredly ignore the trolls who criticise her personality or opinions, comments about her appearance remain an Achilles heel.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it,” she says of the vitriol directed at her and her female colleagues for their physical appearance.
“I try not to read it, but every now and then I’ll stumble across something and I think, ‘If you ran into me on the street, never in a million years would you say that to my face’, so I don’t know why people think that’s okay online.
“I’m not asking anyone to judge me on the way I look. My job is about what I’m saying and the people that we talk to.
“Who cares what I look like? It’s no-one’s business what I look like.”
In the media industry, where appearance is paramount, Jodie knows too well the full impact of image based bullying on her contemporaries. She recounts a story of a high profile female friend she “almost lost”, after she spiralled into a significant depression following extreme bullying.
It is for this reason she won’t be encouraging her daughters to move into a media role, despite the level of success and satisfaction she’s had in her own career.
“I would discourage my girls, in this day and age, to do anything in the limelight,” she said.
“You just get torn down, and it’s not nice to be on the receiving end of that.”
Naturally protective of her children, Jodie says her public profile makes her even stricter with regulating Taylor’s social media usage. She’s cautious about how often she herself puts her daughters’ images out into the public arena.
“I would discourage my girls, in this day and age, to do anything in the limelight”
“I’m very wary of using their images online, where it’s open for people to make comment,” she said.
“I want to protect them from that. You can have a pot-shot at me for whatever reason, but don’t attack my kids.”
Despite these drawbacks, Jodie relishes the privilege of her position. With her words reaching the ears of up to 300,000 listeners each week, Jodie sees this as an opportunity, and indeed a responsibility, to make a difference and “do something worthwhile”.
This is the impetus behind campaigns such as the Zero Bullying Pledge, which she and Soda launched earlier this year, to encourage young people to take a stand against bullying.
“I think you get to that stage in life, when you get a little bit older, that you start to think a lot more about other people and how you can help them,” Jodie says.
“You find a bit more purpose I guess, because quite often you’ve gotten to where you want to in your career and I think it’s a natural inclination to be a bit more empathetic and to try and see what you can do for other people, rather than for yourself.
“I don’t think I’m alone in that, but that’s the stage that I’m at anyway.”
