I now swear by Taylor Swift

After a lifetime of avoiding the mainstream, Amy Fleming has grown to love the pop phenomenon, courtesy of her 11year-old daughter – and it’s been a liberating experience

- Amy Fleming

I have a big fat confession to make. After a lifetime of eschewing the mainstream, I’ve become an unlikely Swiftie, and I have my 11-year-old daughter to thank for it.

If you’d told me 10 years ago that I would get swept up in Taylor Swift mania at the very peak of the pop star’s global dominance, I would have shaken my head disdainfully. I was a contrarian; a forever surly teen who only relatively recently grew up enough to openly enjoy firework displays without cringing at all the oohing and ahhing. I was a shy outsider with a preference for scrotty, small music venues. But when my daughter, now almost 12, started playing the Swift classic “Shake It Off” around the house a year or two ago, I found myself appreciating what this woman was singing. (Haters gonna hate, slutshame and all the rest, but I’m just gonna shake it off, and do what the hell I want and need, essentially.)

I definitely didn’t only start liking Swift’s music because I wanted to be down with my kid (this is absolutely impossible, which all parents must accept). In fact, as a protective parent – and I wish I didn’t have this fuddy-duddy reaction as much as I do – I’m just as likely to skew quietly cautious of what she’s consuming. But with Swift, the opposite happened.