Have a row with your teenager every day,” urges a headline in one of this
week's papers. Thank you, I will. Actually, I already have. This very
morning, as it happens, there was a brisk skirmish on the landing and a
rather more protracted set-to in the car on the way to the bus stop (always
my preferred setting for a barney, because the teenager in question is a
captive audience and I don't have to keep interrupting my rhetoric with
cries of “Don't walk away!” “Don't turn your back on me!” or - most
undignified of all - “Don't play with the cat when I'm shouting at you!”).
And when he gets back from school (which will be any moment, so you'll have to
excuse me if I break off to shriek between paragraphs), I have a couple more
juicy bones to pick, one on the subject of the extensive collection of crisp
packets, Wagon Wheel wrappers and discarded sherbet fountains that I've just
discovered under his bed, and the other involving a letter from school about
a detention that he has been given for missing a detention...
According to a paper in the scholarly journal Personal Relationships by
Tabitha Holmes, a specialist in adolescent development, arguing is an
excellent way to strengthen links between adolescents and parents. “Conflict
is known to be positive for adolescents, teaching them healthy identity
formation, social-cognitive skills and complex reasoning”. Myself, I thought
that was what I sent my adolescent to school for. Though naturally I am
delighted to know that when he next accuses me of being scarier than Anne
Robinson in a bate, I can reassure him that I'm just sharpening his complex
reasoning skills. But while Miss Holmes is persuasive on the benefits of a
good row for the young, she doesn't say anything about the effects of
conflict on the parents.
What with having to get our careers established and then the frightful
difficulty of finding a chap who is willing to marry and/or impregnate us,
the modern mother tends to put off childbearing until her mid to late
thirties. Which means that our children begin their adolescence
neck-and-neck with mummy's peri-menopause. This is Nature's way of telling
us that teenage pregnancy, far from being a dire social ill, is, in fact,
the most sensible thing a young woman can do, for it means a) that you're in
your early thirties when the children's teens begin and thus have plenty of
energy for rowing with them; and b) that they are off your hands by the time
your Shirley Valentine years arrive, leaving you free to embark on
unsuitable love affairs without having to face the maledictions of your
teenage Savonarola every time you totter home a bit dishevelled and giggly.
I wish I'd thought of this earlier, for not only would it have provided me
with the makings of a stupendous row with my parents in my own teenage
years, but it would also mean that these days I wouldn't have to keep
lurching out of my corner like Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby.
Miss Holmes doesn't say so, but I have an idea that the conflict behaviour of
girls and boys is quite different. “If your teenager is rowing with you,
it's a mark of respect. They value you enough to tell you their genuine
feelings and thoughts,” she claims. Maybe. As a parent, my experience of
teenage girls is non-existent. But I was one myself, and that is enough to
make me very glad that I don't have to deal with a teenage daughter. It is
not my recollection that my teenage disagreements were animated by respect
for my progenitors. As I recall it, they invariably involved a
irreconcilable clash of tastes and willpower in the matter of make-up,
clothes, skirt lengths, boyfriends, and so on.
My son's arguing style is completely different. Even after I've said “No.
Categorically not. I'm not even going to discuss it. End of. Did you hear
me? Do you speak English?” etc, he just goes on and on and on. He doesn't
raise his voice or get cross (unlike me). He just carries on arguing,
agreeably but interminably. Sometimes, even after I've conceded the point
from sheer exhaustion, he continues to press his case. If he hadn't already
announced that he is going to be a sports writer when he grows up, I'd lay
money on his becoming a lawyer, a philosopher or a politician. Imagine being
trapped in a lift for a very long time with William Cash as he explains to
you the highlights of the recent discussions of the Select Committee on
European Legislation and you have a faint flavour of the quality of debate
in our house.
Part of me feels a sense of pride that I seem to have raised him to query
every proposition, from the moment he wakes up to the moment I go to bed
(“I'm turning the light out now, Alexander. Stop talking and GO AWAY”). Even
then I hear him in his room, arguing with Paxo on Newsnight. And part of me
thinks how incredibly restful it would be if he would just do what I said
every once in a while (“But why do I have to do up my collar button? Why?
What difference does it make? I can just push my tie up to cover it. Look,
you can't even see it's undone. So why do I have to do it up? No, really,
I'm interested, tell me why, Mum...”) It strikes me that it would be helpful
if someone were to lay down some rules of engagement for parents and
teenagers bent on enriching their lives with wholesome conflict. Tabitha
Holmes seems unaccountably not to have provided any in her paper, so here
goes:
1. If you are a teenager, avoid saying “Calm down, mater!” in the course of an
argument. If she then hurls a plate of pasta at your head, do not threaten
to ring ChildLine. Esther is a mother, you know.
2. If you are a parent in danger of losing an argument with your teenager,
your best tactic is to shout “WhadEVAH!”, then burst into tears, flounce up
the stairs to your bedroom, slam the door and turn on the music as loud as
you can. There's nothing like the sound of the Schubert Octet at a zillion
decibels to engender shock and awe in your average teenager.
Mismatch of the day
A high point of my Easter weekend is the Ashford Valley point-to-point at
Charing - to which, as West Ham aren't playing at home tomorrow, I thought
my son might care to accompany me. But unfortunately he has pressing
business elsewhere. What business can be more pressing than a
point-to-point, I wonder. Well, if I really want to know, he fancies going
to see Watford v Sheffield United. Should be a good game.
At times like this I wonder if I didn't take home the wrong baby from
hospital. Perhaps somewhere on the other side of London another mother is
gazing at her son's bedroom walls, papered with pictures of Denman and Kauto
Star, saying plaintively: “What do you mean, you want to stay in and watch
the racing from Haydock? I've got tickets for Watford v Sheffield United!”
If this sounds like you, do get in touch. Perhaps we could arrange to swap
sons - at least until the close of the National Hunt season.
Written off
A Times leader this week offered an unexpected vision of the writer Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry as a kind of airborne Postman Pat: “It should come as no
surprise that the childlike prose [of Saint-Exupéry's best-known book, Le
Petit Prince] came from a man who was not a professional writer, but a
postal pilot,” opined our leader writer, reflecting the popular view of
St-Exu as a one-book phenomenon. In fact he was both a professional writer
and a professional airman, having won the Prix Femina for Vol de Nuit, a
decade before Le Petit Prince was published. The claims of the German
fighter pilot, Horst Rippert, to have shot down Saint-Exupéry, which
prompted our leader, are well known but not established. His end remains a
mystery. The best homage we can offer him is to read his books: not just Le
Petit Prince but the great novel Night Flight and the magical memoir Wind,
Sand and Stars.
The best gift you can give your child is to bear him when you are no longer young. You will therefore shuffle off the scene and leave him all your money at a time when he is still young enough to enjoy it (in his fifties, for example, rather than his seventies).
And I should know...
ben foster, penley,