Julie Myerson - why am I not surprised that a book has materialised concerning her own son's drug issues?

[glasjam]

Read this is in today's Observer www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/mar/01/julie-myerson-novel-drug-addiction

Does anyone else have the uncomfortable feeling that I have on learning that she is writing about her son's drug problems? I know that writers often mine their own personal experiences for material but I think she's putting her literary endeavours ahead of her son here. From what I can gather, he is still young, his drug issues are ongoing, and although he is out of the family home, surely this is risking any possible future reconcilliation? I also baulk at the way she "weaves historical research about Yelloly with her disturbing account of her son's ejection from the family home" It just smacks of middle-class-writer angst.

My cynicism is further fuelled by my very strong suspicion that Julie Myerson is the author of Living with Teenagers - but that's another story...

He sounds frighteningly able to cope to me. . I do think he sounds like an arrogant pain in the arse, and completely in denial that he may have been behaving in a rather anti-social fashion, (which would be normal, let's face it.) The streets are littered with homeless teenagers who've been slung out by less intelligent, less educated less (supposedly) emotionally well-equipped parents than these, for similar misdemeanours. I think the shock is not he went off the rails but that we would expect a more intelligent response and a more reassuring outcome from people like that.

I must just say though, if his problem was really as bad as she says it was, all the drugs advisory family support agencies tend to advocate cutting addicts off, which forces them to face the reality of the situation on their own. They say that to offer them constant support is to facilitate their habit, keep them in denial and so continue/exacerbate the problem. Tough love.
It's a horrible choice.

Sorry bagsforlife, my saying he seems able to cope, was in response to the previous post, not yours!

If it really was terrible then yes you cut them off otherwise they steal, take stuff from home, sell it, then if they're female sell their body etc.

At 13 he was unhappy at school apparently and she says hanging around with chidlren out of school from other schools. Why? Why didnt' she know where he was? I've had 13 year olds. They don't really have the chance to do that - you take them to school, you collect them or if they go on their own the school lets you know they aren't there. You tend to fix their friends, drive them to their friends at weekends, you become a weekend driver. 13 is pretty young to go off the rails.

What as a family they need to do now is try to keep up some contact. He has found himself a music course and taken out a studen loan. Perhaps they could offer to pay the fees direct to the institution which he then could not use for drugs assuming he takes them at all. He's still quite young and they are adults. They are the ones needing to make the peace offering.

Exactly Xenia. At 13 YOU as parents sort it out. He was obviously unhappy at school. This doesn't just happen overnight, going 'off the rails'. There are plenty of warning signs before it gets to the point of no return.

They have absconded responsibility and are now paying the price. It is very sad, and very, very distressing for all concerned.

Agreed Xenia. Though perhaps living in central London as they do, and sending him the local state school there was little need to do the fetching and carrying if he could go places on foot, or tube. Hard to imagine for me as we live at least 10 miles down a country lane from anything my teenagers want to do, but I'm grateful for that as it means they don't go anywhere or get home again without my knowing about it, and being in reasonable control of the time and place. But I can imagine the battles if we lived somewhere where it was easy to just walk out of the door on a whim.

It sounds to me as though these children have been indulged as intellectual equals at too young an age, with few boundaries and they've been flailing around like unstaked saplings!

Yes, agree TiggyR.

Well that's another issue. It's ometimes self indulgent of parents to remain in central London and send their teenagers to the local state school. Schools are very different from in the rest of the country. Either you pay or move out is the usual middle class idea. But we can't kbow as we we're there. I just get an impression that they may be weren't that good with dealing with adolescents.

Ah Libby Purves in today's Times... "To throw him out physically yet reatin publishing rights in his troubles is disgusting"

She also makes the valid piont that the boy says his parents agreed to take out from the book the reference to him supplying drugs to his siblings which he says is untrue and that seems to have remained in the book excerpts which have been published so far.

Yes, in central London children have more freedom to travel by themselves, and that is true for both state and private options. In fact the dc that go to private or selective state often have further to travel and don't get home till later.

But it's not really an issue if you're on top of what's going on for them dd1 is usually back by 4.45, 5 at the latest, and if she turns up significantly later than that I'm on the phone to her to find out where she is. That is relatively easy to pull off if you're working from home as the Myersons clearly were. If we had the kind of full-time jobs that kept both of us out of the house until much later, than I think we would have made some kind of alternative arrangement in place it's not much fun for a 12yo or even 14yo to come home and spend hours alone at home, and really an invitation to go off and spend time hanging out in places unknown with persons unknown doing gawd knows what.

And the notion that any sane parent who found a lump of cannabis in a CD case in their teenage child's room (as detailed in Sunday Times) would just put it back and say nothing -- well, words fail me, really. She doesn't say how old he was at the time, but clearly under 15. How on earth did she imagine it was going to pan out?

Exactly Frogs.

I saw her on the BBC this morning and was so unsurprised that her main concern was for how she was being portrayed in the tabloids.

I have to agree with Libby Purves on this one.

My dh described her as querulous.

It must take a tremendous amount of self-absorption to be so surprised at the reception to this 'story'.

I agree with frogs too.

An earlier post wondered whether the children in LWT had been treated as adults before it was sensible or appropriate to do so. Certainly, when JM was writing about her (then) tiny children in the Independent a decade ago, she seemed the archetype of the doting mother who watches her child felt-pen on your curtains and then observes proudly that Fenella has always been so gifted in the expressive arts.

With trepidation, I have to disagree with Xenia. Scanning the horizon here, I can say that paying or moving out is not the usual middle class idea in London. It's not rare, but it's not universal either and probably not even the majority view. Other options are making the best of it, by finding a school with a critical mass of middle class families, and its near-relative, paying a premium for a house near a decent school.

Yes, I agree with that and his problems in part came from being in a state school he wasnt happy with and hanging out with children more like him from private schools. My teenagers were in private schools with school days which went on to after 4, who would over 2 or 3 nights a week be going sport adn then get a late coach home here by about 6 and then do homework or did supervised homework at school. It's a very different life than just let out of school at 3 frmo a local state school with not much to do.

Not sure that state school students have a monopoly on going off the rails. In my experience (and that of DH who used to work in one of the top private schools in the country in London), the private school children had access to so much more cash - and therefore drugs - than many of their state school counterparts. They were also just as unsupervised in as much as they had to make their own way home after school.

Oh and I work in the state sector where there is just as wide a range of after school activities on and parental input.

I honestly think that you have a very skewed view of the state sector.

Xenia - will you stop with the idea that children in state schools have no extracurricular activities and nothing to do after school. It is so very untrue. My daughter's school which is a very bog-standard comprehensive has loads of after school activities, there are many different sports, an orchestra, several choirs, a science club, a surfing club - and lots of the year 10 and 11s do extra GCSEs after schools in things like astronomy as well as art and music. And they do have homework too - and the school does provide an afterschool homework club.
And I know a lot of state schools offer even more.
So will you stop it NOW please.

So, is Xenia saying that it was the contaminating influence of public school boys and girls wot sent him off the rails??!!

Exactly LadyG!

They do Lacrosse at the comp I teach at and they all get bussed in and straight home. If not, they get dropped off my their parents in mahoosive 4x4s with personalized number plates (this is Cheshire after all ).

this is so not a state/private school thing. This is about kids who are insufficiently occupied and don't have enough parental supervision, who are lacking in direction and in parents who actually talk to them and try to help them make sense of what's going on around them, so that they can make sensible choices about who they want to be and what they want to do.

I know quite a few from Westminster who fell into exactly this category. It's a parenting issue, not a school choice thing.

Absolutely. There are just as many privately educated teens who are just as bad. JM says in the excerpt from her book he got in with a load of rich kids from Kensington or something. He obviously was unhappy, but he probably would have been too at a private school, probably would have been even worse, rebelling against the 'toffs' and trying to be 'edgier' than them....God, doesn't bear thinking about.

It is a parenting issue. No question.

The girls at our local comp - the one my daughters will probably go to - are madly busy all the time with everything from music to maths club.

I think Xenia is referring to what the boy said in one of the interviews which is linked here, earlier in the thread.
(Though I'm quite sure she doesn't need me to say this!)

Honestly, the more I read about this in the paper, the more it makes me feel really, really sorry for the boy.

I try not to judge other people's parenting but, tbh, find it hard not to, when this story is so ubiquitously present in the papers. And I find myself agreeing that the children, it seems, were just given too much self-responsibility, far too young.

I had a lot of friends whose parents were counter-culturalists of the 60s and 70s. Listening to their stories I have sometimes wondered if (some) adults are squeamish about the "power" as parents they exercise over their children. They have an overly-negative view of the boundary-setting/enforcing aspect of parenting. This combined with a desire to foster "autonomy" in their children, leads to an abdication of some quite crucial aspects of the parent role.

Obviously, I have absolutely no idea if that was the case here. Though it is what I used to think when reading LWT, where the writer hogged the "poor little girl, protect me from nasty teenagers" role for herself. (I thought it was so weird I couldn't read it.)

I suppose it's just a general point that raises itself in my head as I come across this really awful, awful experience, yet again.

And I've now decided that writing about it, when she is in such a powerful position, is a kind of theft.

MI -- in any school there will always be maths club refuseniks who prefer hanging around in the local parks drinking, snogging and smoking. That will be the case everywhere from Eton to Grub Street secondary modern. JM's problem is that she wasn't around or engaged enough to have much sense of what her son was up to, and try to influence it.