The Story of Childhood (40 page)

Ollie does a big burp. Lauren's rested him on the sofa, and he's trying to sit up but can't quite. He rolls over on to his front instead. She was trying not to get pregnant. She laughs again. ‘Not as much as I should have! I was on the Pill, but I forgot to take it. I never even wanted kids. I don't want any more. I just wanted to do normal things, travel, do my job first.' She hasn't travelled much, though she did go to Malta with her netball team for a competition. They won. ‘I wanted to live somewhere, anywhere that wasn't England. My auntie lives in Oregon, Portland, but I've never visited because it's too expensive. I'm still going to college though.' She repeats it like an affirmation.

She sent the application off to Stockport College this week. She chose it because it's got a crèche. She's applied for the English language course. It's about how language evolves and how babies learn to speak. It'll be useful because she wants to be a primary school teacher. That way, she'll get all the same holidays as him.

Lauren isn't sure what advice she'd give to someone who found herself in her position. ‘I don't really have a right or wrong on abortion. I think it's every person's choice. Everyone's different. They might not have the support I've got. It's hard work. But as they get older it does get better, and little things that they do make it worth it. Like when he first rolled over. But it is hard. All these girls that get pregnant on purpose. I don't know why they do it.'

She doesn't know people like that personally, but there was a programme on TV about two teenage sisters who got
pregnant deliberately. It was probably because they were lonely, or for attention. ‘You get some people who are just really obsessed with babies,' she notes with derision. Lauren doesn't like the phrase ‘teenage mothers'. ‘It's a bit of a cliché. People have this really bad perception. I did, really, until it happened to me. I thought, they're stupid, it's their own fault. You get it from media. They always put it so it looks bad. Nobody agrees with it really.'

People seem to think that teenagers can't look after babies, she says. ‘But they don't think that about a first-time mum who's thirty. They get it all wrong. They think that if you're fifteen you can't look after yourself let alone a child. A woman of thirty could have a baby and cope worse than I have, but some people would think that she was more right than me just because of her age.'

It is widely assumed that a young mother will be a bad mother, or at least that early motherhood is bad for teenagers. Certain newspapers delight in highlighting atypical cases of twelve-year-old pregnancies and fourteen-year-old abortions as evidence of the country's moral unravelling. The distillation of the feckless council-estate teen is Vicky Pollard from the comedy series
Little Britain
, who swapped her new baby for a Westlife CD. Since the 1980s, when the Conservative government specialised in attacks on young mothers, there has been the impression that the country is facing an epidemic of teenage pregnancies.

Certainly the rates are comparatively high, though it is worth remembering that, in 1970, teenagers were twice as likely to become mothers as nowadays. Despite the shock-horror headlines, the teenage conception rate dropped by nearly 10 per cent in the five years since the introduction of the government's Teenage Pregnancy Strategy in 1999.

The rationale for the strategy, set out in a paper from the government's Social Exclusion Unit, aimed to demonstrate that a woman's life chances, and those of her children, were adversely affected by early motherhood. Teenagers in deprived areas are both more likely to become pregnant and less likely to consider abortion. The majority of teenage mothers do live in poverty. They are more likely to be unemployed, to suffer from depression and to become dependent on alcohol or drugs. But so are their childless peers. It is typically poverty, not early motherhood, that truncates life chances.

Clearly, helping more young people out of poverty is a laudable objective. But it is worth assessing whether this altruism is at all motivated by adult distaste for teenage sexual activity, or by a conviction that children are not capable of looking after other children. Vicky Pollard is compelling precisely because she plays on fears of a rampant underclass.

If the decision is made freely, and properly supported, there is nothing essentially wrong with having a baby before you're twenty. Granted, not every teenage mother is as capable and undiminished as Lauren, nor do they all have her support network. But, instead of condemning the root causes – like social exclusion, poor sex education or lack of opportunities – it is the young women themselves who have been continually vilified by the press and politicians as slags or scroungers, despite there being no evidence that teenagers get pregnant to procure better housing or benefits.

And these prejudices can also inform the public service provision they receive. In a poll conducted in 2004, the YWCA found that half of education professionals thought that young mothers were not interested in education, though their research shows that having a child of their own makes them more determined to gain qualifications. Lauren didn't need any
persuading to get back to school. Indeed, she didn't miss out on any of her education because, with her usual precision, she gave birth during the summer holidays.

Ollie saw his dad yesterday. He's got his own flat now, but Lauren insists he has Ollie at his mum's. Otherwise she'd be ringing up every five minutes to check on him. He'd be sat there and spark up a cig or something. He's dead dopey, she says, still half-indulgent. There's nothing special between them now, just ‘Hiya', just keeping the peace.

Lauren first went out with him when she was about twelve. Then she didn't see him for ages. And then, when she'd just turned fourteen, she saw his brother at a party and got his number again. The next day she dropped her phone down the toilet so she went to his house to say she couldn't call him; he invited her in and that was it.

‘He was dead nice. He used to take me out every weekend. He used to buy me little things, cards. But then it was, like, I'd have school the next day and he thought it didn't matter. We were totally different. I'd say a word and he'd be, “What are you trying to speak posh for?” and I'd be, “I'm not.” So we just drifted apart.'

But there's one thing she knows, no matter what their relationship is like: he will be a really good dad. Lauren still sees her own father, who moved out when she was nine, regularly. ‘Aweh,' Ollie calls. She holds him to her and kisses his neck. She whispers: ‘Big love, big love.'

Before having Ollie, she'd never even held a newborn baby or changed a nappy. ‘But if you don't do it, there's nobody else to do it for you, so you just learn. And then they start crying and you learn what different crying means and you get used to it. Because nobody knows, do they? It's just like trial and error.'

Her mum has let her find it out all by herself. ‘When he was born, everyone was like, “Oh, you'll be taking over, you'll be looking after the baby all the time,” but she's never had him in her room at night, not one time,' she says. ‘She's let me do it myself, the hard way, but it's a better way. She was seventeen when she had me so she knows what it's like.'

When I next visit, it's still raining. Lauren started Weightwatchers last night. You sign up, they weigh you and then work out how many points a day you're allowed. You follow the points, and lose the weight. Lauren is allowed twenty-two points a day. You pay a fiver a week. And then when you get to your target weight it all changes and you start eating a bit more but not too much so you don't put all your weight back on.

She went with a friend who's a year older than her. ‘She needs it more than me. I was twelve stone thirteen pounds. I was shocked! But before I was pregnant I weighed about eleven stone. I want to lose at least a stone,' she says. Like all of Lauren's intentions, her capability is never in doubt. ‘I ate like crazy when I was pregnant. I ate for triplets. And now he's getting older I'm starting to think about me again. They say it takes a year for your body to get back to normal.'

Lauren is in the living-room with Danielle. Ollie and their mum aren't home yet. They're watching MTV. They both like rock, but Lauren's tastes aren't as heavy as her sister's. Danielle wears the moshers' uniform of black and boots, a very teenage way of dressing that screams a statement but hides your shape. She gets called names for her outfits at school, and Lauren worries about that.

Danielle adores her sister, and doesn't bother to hide it. She's always trying to get Lauren to sing. Her friend is starting a
band, and she wants her sister to record something and send it to him. ‘It has to be punk,' she challenges, ‘Green Day or something.' All right, yeah, she'll try it. But she's used to singing ballads, Sinead O'Connor or Shania Twain. Before Lauren got pregnant she sang in pubs for a company called Natural Talent. She says she's an exhibitionist. She'd love to go back to it now, but with having him and school it's too much.

It's parents' evening tonight, but Lauren isn't nervous. ‘I've never had a bad parents' evening. They always say good things about me.'

Lauren's mum returns with Ollie, but leaves him sleeping in the hall. Lauren says she got most of her ideas about sex from magazines and her mates. She's always been able to talk to her mum, but for some things it's a bit uncomfortable. She's the magazine queen. She started off on
Mizz
when she was in Year 7, and then
Bliss, Sugar, J17
. She thinks they're helpful. ‘I'd rather the information be there than not at all. It should be there because a lot of people don't talk to their parents and feel more comfortable reading about stuff like that in magazines. I think they're really good, them magazines. And it's just one page [about sex] then the rest is different hairstyles and all them embarrassing stories.'

Lauren didn't get more than a biological cross-section during sex education at school. ‘Honestly, it was like the drawing – this is a woman, this a man – and we had about two lessons because they had to speed it on that quick. We had PSHE (personal, social and health education) in Year 7 and then they got rid of it in Year 8 because they didn't have anyone to teach it.'

‘I just think that they should teach the facts, not “don't do this, don't do that”,' she says, ‘and early enough, when you're about eleven or twelve. You need a confident teacher, because if the teacher's embarrassed then the kids are going
to get embarrassed. And you should split up the boys and girls, so you feel more at ease.'

Lauren's experience of sex education is not unusual. In February 2005, a report by Ofsted found that provision of Sex and Relationships Education (SRE), a component of the non-statutory PSHE curriculum, was poor in many schools and non-existent in others. It particularly criticised the lack of trained staff, with classes seen as an add-on and directed by form teachers rather than specialists.

Despite the widespread anxiety around children's sexual activity, and the fact that most parents say they want more, not less, sex education, it is still not compulsory in our schools. All the curriculum requires is a basic biology lesson. Anything else is optional, and – oddly – decided by the school's governors. Provision has certainly advanced since the moral fundamentalism of the Thatcher years, and policy has attempted to respond to young people's well-documented requests for greater emphasis on feelings, relationships and values.

But New Labour has been reticent in addressing the spectrum of sexual relations. Official guidance remains defensive, and based around a heterosexual and reproductive model – understandable given the right-wing media's delight in exposing oral-sex lessons for ten-year-olds and the like. Although very few do, the fact that parents retain the right to withdraw their children from sex education is symbolic of the general view that young people are incapable of taking moral decisions themselves, and that the private sphere of the family remains the best place to receive sexual wisdom.

While the average age for first intercourse in the UK is sixteen, significant numbers of younger teenagers are becoming sexually active. The Family Planning Association has called on the government to make teaching of PSHE a
legal requirement from primary school onwards. But this will require a fundamental change in the way that we view young people's sexual potential.

Children have the capacity for arousal and orgasm from birth, but continue to be regarded as asexual until puberty. Adults are highly resistant to the fact of children's burgeoning sexual knowledge, though the bulk of research shows that from an early age young people have an active curiosity and awareness about sex and sexuality. As the feminist sociologist Stevi Jackson argues, it is one of the first arenas in which children begin to question conventional definitions of right and wrong. But their capacity to manage this exploration is rarely acknowledged, and often stymied by adults' own evasiveness and repression around sexual matters.

In her book
Childhood and Sexuality
, Jackson suggests that there is such a thing as childhood sexuality, but that it exists independently of sexual knowledge. ‘If sexuality amounted to nothing more than a series of physical sensations and patterns of behaviour, an outpouring of sexual energies, then it would be possible to argue that children are sexual. If … it is something more than this … that must be understood in human and social terms, a sexually aware child can only be described as potentially sexual … It follows that there is no reason why children should not be sexual. Their sexuality lies not in a lack of capacity, but in a lack of opportunity; their inability to make sense of the world in sexual terms derives from ignorance.'

Jackson concludes that it is sexual ignorance, not sexual knowledge, that is most damaging for the young. ‘In attempting to protect children from sex we expose them to danger; in trying to preserve their innocence we expose them to guilt. In keeping both sexes asexual, and then training them to become
sexual in different ways, we perpetuate sexual inequality, exploitation and oppression.'