However ‘cool’ one thinks one is as a parent (am I saying I think I’m a ‘cool’ parent? Hmm, well, maybe I can be, but I’m using the term very loosely), there are times when we all get caught short and have to pause and review what we thought to be true, or let go of some belief or assumption we’d previously held about our child or about young people in general.
I told you that Jamie had been to Lyme Regis in August to stay with one of his school friends - creating a bit of a vacuum in my life. Well, eventually he did come home and I was able to resume my ‘normal’ motherly role letting him take up my time and energy with his needs, interests and desires (phew! breathe a sigh of relief….all that freedom can be a bit overwhelming after a while!)……making sure I have his favourite chocolate fudge brownie milkshake, driving him to obscure bike shops to buy a rare but absolutely necessary bolt, helping him with his paper-round, or fighting over the last age 15 long-sleeved school shirts with all the other parents in M&S the day before school starts – you know the kind of thing!
However, I’d just like to rewind to the journey home after I picked him up at the station after his time away. The usual conversation: Did you have a nice time? What did you do? Did you eat alright, sleep alright? During the somewhat monosyllabic responses and more determined interrogation from me for some kind of information, I was suddenly hit by a mystical moment of intuition! There was something he wasn’t telling me! Ok, so maybe not that mystical, we parents can be quite perceptive I know.
A moment’s consideration led me to the question I knew would get to the heart of it: did you meet any new people whilst you were there? Answer: yeah. Second question: Girls? Answer: (quiet and muffled under uncomfortable smile) yeah. Aha! That was what I’d suspected! I immediately turned into Interrogator Extraordinaire, Detective Tennison at her best! Who were these girls? Where were they from? When did he meet them? What did they do? And, as my grand finale……did one of them become more than a friend? In fact, I have to admit that I even succumbed to that incredibly embarrassing tendency that those of us who sometimes think we’re ‘cool’ parents have of using terms that were ‘in’ when we were teenagers. I asked him, and it makes me cringe now to remember it, if he ‘got off with her’! Bless him, he didn’t squirm or say ‘mum’ in that way, he just asked me what I meant, which was actually more embarrassing as I then had to explain what I meant!
Anyway, I got the information I needed and so began the process of eroding my assumptions about my son that I mentioned above and subsequently, as I will go on to explain, the erosion of my assumptions about young people in general.
One piece of information you need to know is that whilst he was in Lyme Regis, Jamie went in the sea with his mobile phone in the pocket of his shorts! (The second time this summer it has to be said – he also did it on holiday in Spain). When he came back he was desperate for the use of a phone so he could text ‘the girl’, so I lent him mine until I could afford to get him a new one.
So, first assumption: Jamie was not particularly interested in girls, he was too caught up in general ‘boy’ pursuits, riding his bike, taking it apart and putting it together again, and hanging out with the ‘lads’. When had girls arrived in his consciousness? Had I missed something? Been neglectful? Too caught up in work and single-handedly keeping us fed, clothed and housed? In my defence, I think definitely the latter.
But here he was, spending every minute of every day texting ‘the girl’ (luckily I have unlimited texts on my phone contract). And this is where my other assumption came in for a battering – an assumption based on my own level of sexual understanding and upfrontness when I was the age Jamie is now.
I’m going to have to make a shameful admission here: when I borrowed my phone back a few days later I happened to notice one or two of the texts she had sent him in the inbox and caught by the words used in some of them I had a look at a few more. I consider myself very open-minded but I was a bit taken aback by some of the words used and the fairly extensive use of sexual innuendo. I have to say, it wasn’t awful, but it was certainly to a degree of explicitness that I would never have engaged in with a boy when I was 14, particularly one I had only known a few days.
It certainly challenged my assumptions about ‘nice’ boys and girls. Here were these young people who would generally be considered quite respectable, engaging in dialogue that would certainly surprise many of the adults who knew him, his teachers for example. How could this be? What was going on?
It didn’t take long to come up with some answers. That evening Jamie and I were sat watching our favourite programme together, Friends – the endless run of repeated series on E4 – it’s a sad fact that we both love it! And with my now increased sensibility I noticed how often there are quite overt sexual references to things like ‘girl on girl action’, jokes that refer to anal sex and other sexual practices but all done in a jokey innocent way! It didn’t take me long after this to notice that this was also common on other, particularly American, programmes and that this was all before 9pm! After 9 it was much worse – on programmes like Big Brother, live comedy shows and overtly sexually based programmes like Sexcetera (don’t ask!). All easily accessible by any teenager with a TV in their room.
Maybe I sound a little naïve, (and I’ve definitely always been a bit of a romantic which I suppose doesn’t help), but I was beginning to fully awaken to what a sexualised culture we live in. I kind of knew this, you only need to look at the way many young women dress and even girls as young as 7 or 8 wanting to wear clothes that copy women’s sexually provocative clothing, but I hadn’t quite appreciated how much it has seeped into the simple ways that young men and women communicate and considered in this context, it’s really no surprise that they are much more casual about ‘sexy’ talk than my generation were.
However, I was to have my eyes opened even more when I investigated a little further. Are you aware of Sexting? Sexting is the practice of sending semi-nude, nude or sexually explicit pictures of yourself to others via your mobile phone. It is mostly, but not always, teenage girls sending pictures to boys and can also include pictures of sexual acts. These pictures often then get passed around and shared between many different people and even uploaded onto social networking sites. In one article I read, the author spoke to some teenagers and this was the comment of one of them: “It’s nothing to do with how you are brought up, it’s just out there now”.
According to this article 90 children in the UK have so far been cautioned as a result of posting sexual material of themselves or underage friends online or on their mobile phones. This suggests that it is a relatively small number of young people who will be affected by it, but I think it shows the kind of things that our youngsters are potentially going to be exposed to. Things that perhaps we are blissfully unaware of because our assumptions about their behaviour are based on our own teenage years.
I like to believe that every cloud has a silver lining and it has made me take steps to open up a dialogue with Jamie about sex and related issues, something I know I have been guilty of putting off. This is partly because I know that Jamie finds these kind of conversations uncomfortable (my eldest son, Dan, on the other hand, would gladly talk about anything), but also I know, because of being too caught up in work and single-handedly keeping us fed, clothed and housed………
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