Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [26]
Chapter 4
BEST FRIENDS AND ROLE MODELS
Mothers and Loose Girls
My mother was my first teacher when it came to getting men to notice me.
Cicely’s family fit all the stereotypes of a normal, nuclear family. She lived with her younger brother, mother, and father in a middle-class home. Cicely’s mother had prided herself on making choices for her family that included sit-down meals every night, checking their homework, and always knowing where they would be and with whom. She and Cicely were extremely close, right up until Cicely turned fourteen. That’s when things took a turn. Cicely began to want to wear clothes her mother would not allow. She began to sneak out at night to meet boys, then come home with hickeys all over her neck. Her mother tried everything: reasoning with her, grounding her, sleeping in the living room so she would hear whether Cicely tried to escape through the front door. Nothing worked. Cicely, meanwhile, grew more and more resentful of her mother’s tactics. She felt increasingly isolated from her family, but got a sense of comfort from her friends, who understood her. Mostly, though, she got comfort from boys, who made her feel special in a way she had never felt before. When they didn’t call or liked one of her friends instead of her, she felt devastated, but that initial rush, that feeling that maybe this boy would love her, was worth it all.
Cicely’s story is probably familiar to many mothers with teenage girls. Their daughters are precious, lively, compassionate kids. Their mothers know how to reach them. They enjoy their time together. And then all of a sudden something switches. The daughter goes away. She stops communicating. When the mother tries to talk to her, wanting open discussion, the teen gets angry and stomps away. She yells, “You don’t understand!” and slams the door. But of course the mother understands. She understands better than anyone.
And yet, according to studies of mothers and adolescents, mothers understand less than they think. According to studies by James Jaccard, Patricia Dittus, and Vivian Gordon in Child Development, mothers tend to underestimate their daughters’ sexual activity.1 Most all the girls I spoke with affirmed this pattern with their mothers. Plenty told me that their parents would freak out if they knew the extent of what they did with boys—threesomes and oral sex, for instance. They’ve hidden hickeys and lied about where they were going and who they were spending time with. One said, “My mother thinks I’m such an angel. She tells her friends how sweet and smart and together I am. It makes me want to puke. She has no idea who I really am.”
Much research supports that a healthy mother-daughter relationship is prohibitive of promiscuity among teens. Adolescents’ perceptions of their mother’s disapproval of premarital sex and their satisfaction with the mother-daughter relationship are significantly related to abstinence for teens, less frequent sexual intercourse, and more consistent use of contraception among sexually active youths.2
However, in a survey of one thousand fifteen- to twenty-twoyear-old girls and one thousand mothers of teen girls conducted by Seventeen and O Magazine through the research firm Harris Interactive, only 4 percent of girls claimed that their beliefs about sex were influenced by their mothers, and 40 percent said that talking to their moms about sex didn’t really affect their decisions.3
All these mixed messages for mothers don’t help the already-terrifying process of raising teenage girls. Lydia, a self-proclaimed loose girl, told me that her mother relayed those mixed messages in the home. She walked around naked saying, “We’re all girls here.” She encouraged her daughters to feel comfortable with their bodies. But she also told them they should not have sex or lead on boys, who would