Early teen questions from a mum

[QPMamma]

I have a 13 year old son. We live in London and he is in year 9. I am struggling with several things, one of them being that I find it hard to connect with other moms at the school (now secondary school) who are open and can talk about this stage and our feelings around things that come up ie house parties etc.

I do get the sense (and I can be guilty of this too) that parents don't want to be the odd one out so they let their kids go to whatever party etc that comes up, despite the unclarity around supervision. That said, part of the issue I am finding is that if you are vocal with other parents about wanting them to come home earlier or trying to get other parents on board about certain 'questionable kids' house parties, you and your kid get labelled as such and your kid becomes sidelined or doesn't get included in things big or small. Im finding this stage really hard to navigate without other parents to talk to and it is a time when this age seems to close up and stay more private, so there is that too. I dont know how to keep the conversation open so that at least I can feel I trust him enough to go to things and be safe.

What are your experiences with this stage? Any advise is welcome.

I think that you need to concentrate on the communication with your son and be less concerned about other parents.
Set your own ground rules and work with your teen to help them make good choices and how to keep themselves safe.
Parents talking to other parents about the organisation of their kids social lives is increasingly uncommon at this age.

Try the teenager section on here and also the secondary school or just search ‘teenage parties ‘ or ‘phones’ or whatever issue there’s lots of people going through similar situations .

Having gone through this three times I can tell you for sure that whatever you are thinking about something you won’t be the only one. Are you still in touch with the network from primary school , also try to attend school events where there are other parents , pick off just a few to try to get closer to, ask another couple of mothers for a coffee and be honest and say you are finding it hard to establish what’s ‘normal’ . Your ds will say no one’s mum does that but honestly they do and in my experience people are often very happy to chat as they are struggling too

I agree that parenting a teen can be quite lonely as other parents don't tend to talk about the difficulties, as much as, say, talking about toddler tantrums or babies not sleeping
It's partly out of loyalty to their older child I think and partly because it's wrongly assumed that everyone has a handle on parenting at this stage.

I would urge you to trust your instincts, stick to your own parental boundaries, and if your ds is sidelined because of that then I suggest that DC from those those families
were never going to be good friendship material anyway.
You do get parents who are trying a bit too hard to be achingly woke and who let their DC do pretty much anything.
I was never comfortable with that and I always rang other parents and checked up who was going to be there, whether or not alcohol was being served, what supervision was in place.
If people judged me for that I didn't care and I found after a while that DC of like minded parents tended to organise their own entertainment separately from the so called "popular" group. I had dds and I was still checking up to the age of fourteen or so. After that, I relied on my DDs to tell me what was going on.

Eventually though as your son gets older, you can't micro manage their social life for them but you can facilitate and influence a bit.
The best thing though, as a pp said, is to maintain a good relationship with your son,
keep the lines of communication open, and
instill common sense and self esteem in him so that he has the confidence to not be a sheep when necessary and to say "no" when everyone else is saying yes.

I got to know my dds friends by inviting them to our house a lot and allowing my dds to develop their own friendship circle from there.

Thank you