I just got a call from a friend whose eldest child is a 13-year-old boy. The day before she learned he had broken up with his girlfriend. She didn’t even know he HAD a girlfriend. Worse than having been kept out of the loop, her son wasn’t even the one to tell her. Instead, she learned about her son’s social life from a neighbor, who had heard it from her daughter.
The best advice I can give moms of young boys who are just beginning to pursue the opposite sex, is to befriend the mothers of the girls in your son’s class or in your neighborhood. Girls talk. Even if they don’t tell their moms everything about their own romantic lives, they have no problem telling them about someone else’s.
When my son was my in middle school, I drove him and another boy to a swim party at the home of a girl in their class. The mother of the girl greeted me at the door. She assured me she would be there to chaperone. But when another mother later went to pick up my son and hers, no adult answered the door. Instead our sons came to the door and ran to the car. They said the party was fun, but offered no other details.
It was weeks later when a mother of a girl in my son’s class told me that a couple of the girls had skinny dipped during that swim party. Obviously, her daughter wasn’t one of them so she told her mom. I was shocked, furious at the party girl’s mom, and forever made aware that I had a lot to learn – and it likely wasn’t going to come from my son.
How about your son? Is he more forthcoming that the ones I write about? Or have you just figured out how to pry the information out of him? Do tell!
