Would you be happy for your dd to have sex aged 13? You mentioned having multiple partners before your dd's dad
No! I know it hypocritical but I think kids are only having sex at that age if there’s something wrong (for me the something wrong was the culture around sex where I grew up and lack of any kind of conversation about sex at home).
What do you think could have been done to stop the kids on your estate taking drugs etc?
Fuck me, this is a massive question. I think it mostly boils down to poverty to be honest and cycles of exclusion so it’s hard to see where you start. Most families on the estate had problems (drink, drugs, violence, absent fathers etc.) Then the schools were shit because no decent teachers wanted to work there because it was mainly crowd control rather than actual teaching. All decent teachers left pretty quickly. Then there was just the culture which existed of toughness, gangs etc. which is hard to break. So where do you start- it’s a systemic problem rather than one individual cause. TBH, the only way that’d have got me behaving as a child was money and I think the same would be true for other people- being paid not to take drugs or to stick to curfew but that’d impossible to actually do. I also think there’s a lot to do with race/racism and how migrants were treated when they first came to the UK.
Would more youth clubs and things to do have helped?
No! The youth clubs were at the centre of most of it- it’s where drugs changed hands, where’d you meet boys etc. I think longer school days might have helped but not the youth clubs.
Where did you and your friends get the money from for the weed/ booze?
Just doing odd jobs for people – some were legit like babysitting but others weren’t so legal like dropping off packages here and there. There wasn’t really that much spent on boozer, no-one really drank that much it was mainly weed. When you did something for someone like dropped something off somewhere, we weren’t always paid in cash but you’d be paid in weed.
Did you not have a curfew from your mother?
Yes and no. I used to tell her I was staying over friends houses a lot of the time so she wouldn’t wonder where I was. That’s kind of what I mean about her being naïve. Other times, I’d sneak out after she’d gone to bed.
Do you think you would have had more children if you had had the first later?
Impossible to say really. I don’t think so but if circumstances were different, I might have done.
Do you have a good relationship with your child? Have you ever felt resentment about missing out on things?
Yeah, we do have a good relationship. Well, she’s 17 so it’s as good as it can be! There was a period when she was about 12 and we had quite a fraught time but I think that was just puberty!
I haven’t really felt resentment, no, because I look at my friends and I don’t see them doing all that much with their lives to be honest. Most had children at about 18/19 and didn’t really do much in the years between leaving school and having children so I don’t see I’ve missed out on anything.
My question to you is, how do you think your life would have been different if the father hadn’t stood by you?
I die a little bit inside when women attribute their success/happiness/stability to men but I’m about to do just that!
Me and DP got back together when DD was 7 and it really did change my life significantly. We moved to a nice area and started to live a stable –boring—life together. It was mainly for DD but we both benefitted from that as well because we’d both had quite unstable upbringings (him more than me). If he hadn’t come back to me, I think he’d be in prison or dead. I think I’d probably still be living in the shitty flat I used to have. I think I’d be struggling to keep DD on the straight and narrow. Although I would hope for better for her, I do suspect DD would have fallen in with bad crowds.
@annandale Yeah, it was normal at the time but thinking back it was just weird, and totally inappropriate, how every single girl I knew was on the pill by aged 12/13 