Dear ones, while Lisa’s children are already at the end of puberty, mine are 14 and 11 years old and in the middle of it or just before it. And so a whole new set of issues is opening up for me again, we have to renegotiate boundaries, make new agreements and find out what feels right for whom. At a dinner with friends who also have teenagers, I once again gained a new insight into how differently issues are handled in different families.
Example: going out in the evening: Everyone agreed that the children should not be out alone in the evening. Even letting two girls travel on the Berlin S-Bahn at midnight didn’t feel good, but if it was a group of 10 teenagers, it was conceivable again. Some parents track their kids on their mobile phones, others think it’s too much surveillance. Some generally always pick them up in the evening, others are more relaxed. I listened intently and don’t have much of an opinion on all of this yet, because our 14-year-old doesn’t go out in the evenings yet.
Of course, I also thought about what it was like in my own youth. I grew up in a medium-sized Bavarian town where you could get to everything by bike. I was always out and about in groups, had a nice circle of friends where I was sure to have a beer or two too many, but no hard drugs were consumed.
Of course, I’ve also had experiences that I wouldn’t find funny with my daughter. I once drank so much alcohol myself that I threw up in the bushes and didn’t really remember how I got to my friend’s sleepover party. There were definitely also pushy guys who had a hard time understanding that we weren’t interested in them. I was also at some party and didn’t know how to get home because my lift had just left without telling them.
We didn’t have mobile phones back then, no internet, no social media, our parents only had a rough idea of where we were and in unexpected situations we had to find a solution quickly and couldn’t call our parents. In hindsight, I think I was often luckier than I was smarter, especially during the times when we later hitchhiked and dived into clubs. I never got into a seriously dicey situation.
When I look at myself, I think I’m more likely to be a cautious mum when it comes to going out, that I’d rather pick up than lie awake at night wondering if some idiot on the tube is getting too close to my child. I think I would always say: „Take a taxi“, because I would be worried that the passenger was driving too fast or had been drinking alcohol. And yet I know that of course I can’t protect my children from everything that can happen at parties and in the nightlife.It’s probably much more important to make your children strong enough to deal with dicey situations. That we teach them how to defend themselves, where they can get help.
Since many parents of teenagers are now reading here: What are your rules for going out in the evening? What time do your teenagers have to be home, do you always pick them up? I look forward to lots of comments on how you manage this.
