Raising teenage girls and boys

[Isitfridayalready]

Feeling a bit depressed after a conversation with my mother. I was talking about the possibility of having another child and the different challenges of raising a male or female child (specifically, I adore little boys and every child I love apart from my DD is male, but I worry about raising a little boy alone in a world where there's so much MRA propaganda readily available to young men on the internet and so many dodgy messages about sex and consent out there). My mother's attitude is that she always worried far more about her son than her daughter because boys are so innocent and some teenage slapper might have got pregnant just to trick him and he wouldn't have been able to do anything about it?

Is it unreasonable that I'm tired to my very soul of all this shit?

(For the record, I knew a couple of girls at school who got pregnant at fifteen or sixteen, and they've only just clawed back a life and qualifications for themselves. The fathers of their babies were never involved at all, to my knowledge).

All of the girls I know who got pregnant in their teens did so because of men in their twenties and thirties. It didn’t matter if the girl was married in an Islamic or gypsy ceremony, or not; the man was always a grown adult and nearly always left the girl not long after the birth. This was in the 80s and attitudes from older people were the same as your mum’s - that the ‘boys’ must have been tricked or coerced or didn’t realise ‘what a slut / waste of space the girl was until after they got married’. So fucking sad.

My mother's partner doesn't even have any contact with the child he fathered at sixteen. The child's mother has (I presume) been there for the long-run, as she didn't give the baby for adoption. I don't think my mother is capable of seeing this other than through the lens of "poor man, how terrible to be " trapped" at sixteen".

Some women do get a bit desperate to hold onto men at all costs and often at the expense of common sense / their own self-respect. She probably says this to herself to justify what a useless dad he is.

I'm sure that's part of it, but, to be honest, she was like that long before she met him. When my sibling and were teenagers, she wasn't at all worried about me (because bad stuff doesn't happen to teenage girls unless they're the wrong kind of girls) but she would never shut up about her fears that some devious sixteen year old girl would impregnate herself for the sheer pleasure of having a baby before her life had even begun, with a boy too young to be earning a steady wage.

Sorry. I'm a bit tipsy and desperate, which is my usual state after lunch with my parents, and I know you guys talk sense on this board so this is where I ended up!