YOU DON'T KNOW THE HALF OF IT

You probably realise your teenage kids aren't exactly angels. But do
you really know what they get up to? Are they taking drugs, having
sex, shoplifting? We commissioned an ICM poll, asking parents about
their children's bad habits. Then we asked the kids themselves for
the truth. To introduce the results, Polly Samson and her 16-year-old
son Charlie come clean

Polly and Charlie Samson The Guardian (UK)

The mother

Like many parents, I wouldn't honestly expect, or even want, to be
dazzled by my teenager's halo, so when I filled in the survey about
Charlie, I knew that a saintly clean sheet would be an unlikely
result. The boxes I ticked, probably like most participating parents,
reflected what I hoped as well as believed he had experienced.

At my most optimistic, I imagine my children will try most things -
but just once - because there are activities I regret missing out on
during my early teens. Shoplifting, for example. I was surprised that
65% of parents didn't think their children had shoplifted, because I
assumed that most kids would give it a shot at some point. I would
hate to find myself doing a Winona now, but I yearn to try my sleight
of hand and it just isn't age-appropriate. So, off you go, children -
but remember, only steal from large conglomerates and not from small
businesses.

In fact, when I was Charlie's age, I wouldn't have been able to tick
many of the boxes in the survey myself. And I don't think that's
because the times have changed, because I remember feeling miffed
about the credit I didn't receive for my relatively good behaviour at
the time - my parents clearly believed me to be something of a raver
("If I ever catch you with drugs, I'll march you straight to the
police station"), but the reality was nothing more alarming than the
underage Bacardi and Cokes in the one pub in town whose rheumy-eyed
landlord enjoyed the company of children.

It was a strain carrying around this perceived disapproval, wanting
to scream, "Don't you realise how lucky you are?" I made a point of
telling them true stories about my more wayward friends, who did
terrifying things like losing their virginity at the age of 11 with
the 12-year-old super-stud from our class. I particularly enjoyed
throwing in the grisly detail: "And it was by the water jump on the
racecourse."

We know that the things we do rub off on our children. We read books,
they read books; we despair about global warming and so do they; and
what a credit to us they are when they bother to switch out a light
as they leave the room. It's harder to accept responsibility for
their vices, however, and that might explain why only 9% of parents
face the fact that their children smoke (and is probably the reason
that my mother never questioned the improbable quantity of cigarette
packets on her monthly grocery bill).

Smokers are born of smokers, and by the time I had children I was
addicted to opening the third packet of 20 each day and had failed
utterly and miserably to kick the habit. However, the thought that my
children would smoke, too, made me stop (although I do smoke the
occasional joint, not so much to get stoned but just for the sheer
nostalgia of inhaling). Given that children mimic the good and bad
habits of their parents, it may seem odd that I don't hide my
occasional joint-smoking from Charlie, but I do think he's a rather
peculiarly reasonable child - and we have an unusually candid relationship.

He's not perfect - I wouldn't want him to be - and his 15th birthday
party certainly removed any rose-tinted vision I might have had. I
emailed all the parents in advance to let them know that we'd decided
to provide a limited amount of beer and wine, on the condition that
nobody brought spirits. Rather you than us, came most of the
responses, bar one mother who replied, "You mean to say you are
giving alcohol to the children ?"

As it turned out, the lovely children hid the vodka - many, many
bottles of vodka - in the hollow legs of the tables. Two hours in and
the pizzas we had supplied reappeared in pools all over the house. A
boy in a white shirt had vomited so much that he resembled a painting
by Jackson Pollock; several girls had to be walked around in the cold
night air to keep them conscious. Out of my peripheral vision I
witnessed Charlie smoke a joint, swig vodka from the bottle and snog
a variety of girls. It was not the best night of my life, nor of his,
but it did provide the groundwork for the honest relationship I
believe we have built since. At the end of the evening, I was amazed
to see his formerly barely conscious friends one by one spring to
their feet and switch identity - Keith Richards to choirboy - in the
click of a car door. "Yes, thank you, Mummy. I had a lovely time."

Several days later, Charlie and I struck a deal on the dope smoking:
"If you give up, I will." Now we tell each other if we succumb,
though since it's usually me, I could do without the feeling that I'm
stuck in an episode of Absolutely Fabulous.

I don't think that what works with Charlie will necessarily work with
my three younger children, at least one of whom has a particular
glint in the eye that tells me I won't always have the luxury of
feeling this smug about the reassuring honesty of my offspring and
that it may well be time my own occasional foible goes underground,
or that I stop altogether.

And just as I won't necessarily want to be as open with my more cagey
children as I am with Charlie, I'm not sure how much I'll want, or
need, to know about their teenage kicks. Enough to believe that they
are not in mortal danger, I suppose. Judging by some of this survey's
results, that is no mean feat. Teenagers are more of a mystery than
ever before, mainly due to the mobile phone and MSN messaging. This
survey will prove most interesting to parents who would formerly have
been able to monitor their offspring's behaviour by hovering around
the family phone gesticulating about the phone bill while in reality
taking the opportunity to tune in to the nefarious plotting. My
11-year-old already shrinks the computer screen when I walk in when
he's messaging, which I'm told is typical, so it's no wonder so many
parents are in the dark.

But even with my potentially sneakier younger children, I still hope
I'll know them well enough not to be one of the 65% of parents who
wrongly assume their teenagers have not tried drugs. I would prefer
not to think about it too much, and the ideal is that they stay in
optimum health, but I would find it more alarming to be the parent of
a child who never would.

I am always fascinated by the four daughters of friends, three of
whom I've witnessed during their teen years driving their parents to
drink with their often exceptionally wild behaviour, including
episodes of cocaine abuse and an unwanted pregnancy. What interests
me, though, is that the daughter who worries them the most - in fact,
the one who throws them into despair - is the eldest who, now in her
late 20s, has never had any sort of lost weekend, doesn't drink, has
never taken drugs and, as far as anyone knows, has yet to experience sex.

There is an inherent problem with the age range of this survey,
because it is impossible to consider the behaviour of most 11- and
12-year-olds in the same breath as that of 15- and 16-year-olds. My
11-year-old son, for example, would be appalled if someone thought he
might have taken drugs or had sex. He even objected the other day
when I suggested he offer his piano teacher a glass of wine: "But
won't she think you're an alcoholic if you keep giving her wine?"

Charlie has asked me to fill in the survey as if I were a
16-year-old, and I wonder if that's because he thinks he doesn't know
me as well as I know him. I think he'd be surprised by my moderation,
perhaps even a little disappointed. Internet porn? Nope. Ketamine?
Nope. Shoplifting? Regrettably, nope. Unprotected sex? Well, he
wouldn't be here if I hadn't.

Looking at the survey makes me realise anew just how little I did
experience, and now that I'm a reasonably responsible mother of four,
it's too late: perhaps I should have spent less of my teens trying to
please my parents and more time pleasing myself. I'll just have to
fantasise about old age, which by then will be the new teen age. I'll
shoplift to my heart's content and I'll have all my friends to stay.
We'll smoke opium all week and drop ecstasy on Saturday nights just
to tell each other how beautiful we really are. There's just one
problem: Charlie says that if I do, he won't bring my grandchildren to see me.

Polly Samson

The son

So, teenagers lie to their parents and parents lie to themselves.
What's the story? Actually, this study suggests parents lie to
themselves more than their children do.

In my view, one of the most worrying findings is that 44% of kids
have communicated with strangers online and, not only that, the
majority did so with their parents' full knowledge. On questioning my
11-year-old brother, I was pretty shocked to discover that he had, in
fact, talked online to strangers and seemed fairly unaware of the
dangers in doing so.

My mother and I filled out the survey in separate rooms, me listing
my experience of smoking (no), alcohol (yes), drugs (yes), sex (oh
yes), internet (yes), truancy (where do you think I found the time to
write this piece?) and shoplifting (no) - in short, the seven deadly
sins - and she calculating how much of a sinner I'd been. On
comparison, I discovered she was, eerily, almost 100% right,
estimating my alcohol intake slightly lower and my drug intake
slightly higher - and she thought I'd taken magic mushrooms! - but
otherwise spot on.

Among my friends, those with the most domineering parents tend to
spin the most elaborate lies and usually get the most trashed on
whatever they can snort, smoke or drink. At the other end of the
spectrum, one of my friends has a seemingly rosy relationship with
his mum - "Yeah, we're really close, I tell my mum everything." This
picture of domestic harmony is shattered when he adds, "Then I laugh
in her face 'cos she can't stop me!" Clearly her laissez-faire
attitude drives him to distraction. Indeed, she is so disengaged that
when we returned to his house at four in the morning after a bout of
heavy drinking, she didn't even question his claim that we had been
at an all-night tiddlywinks marathon. I doubt her reaction would have
been any different if he had claimed we'd been out shooting heroin at
the local needle exchange. Paradoxically, she works as a social
worker specialising in family strife. If she had been a participant
in this survey, I don't think she would've had a clue what he really
gets up to.

My friend's mother is not alone in this. I suspect it's a lot less
painful for a parent just to accept their child's lies than it is to
accuse them of dishonesty; and often the lie is to spare the parent
embarrassment. Although it's against my interests to say so, it
probably is better that the parent knows what's going on with their child.

The survey shows that around one in five adolescents admits to
shoplifting, but only 8% of parents seem to be aware of their
children's light-fingered practices. I've stolen only twice, both
times from my parents. The first item was a large bottle of vodka
carelessly left in temptation's way. Upon discovering the theft, they
accepted my ridiculous explanation that I'd drunk the missing
half-litre, and even seemed pleased that I felt able to confess. In
actual fact, the vodka had been integrated into an explosive mixture
brewing among the smelly socks and other undesirable oddments under
my bed. My parents realised their mistake when, in a fit of pure
teenage rebellion and stupidity, I detonated the lethal concoction of
alcohol, fertiliser, weedkiller and various substances liberated from
the school chemistry lab. As I ran around the house with my hair and
eyebrows on fire, screaming, at least they knew the time and effort
put into my education had not been wasted.

The second theft involved alcohol, too, this time a bottle of cooking
wine that I smuggled into school for a clandestine party. It ended in
disaster, thanks to the crushing disciplinary regime at the college
and the insistence by my parents that, instead of replacing the
cooking wine, I cough up UKP100, the cost of a bottle of wine
sufficiently marvellous to negate the stress I'd caused.

This survey shows that more than a quarter of teenagers admit to
drinking in a normal week - on average, five units a week, though
this is likely to be concentrated in binges rather than the odd pint
with the family curry. Parents, on the other hand, thought that only
19% of their kids drank in an average week. Well, there's plenty of
time for sobriety in later life, and getting drunk is a major teenage
pastime, essential for lowering our inhibitions and providing an
excuse for our behaviour the night before. It's all too easy to
obtain large quantities of alcohol. In my experience corner shops and
supermarkets are the most likely to accept your ID without checking
the date of birth written on it. Failing that, a fake driver's
licence, realistic enough to convince the local barman if not the
immigration authorities, can be found on the internet for as little
as UKP10 under the guise of "novelty identification".

As a child of liberal parents, incidents of real dishonesty such as
this have been the exception rather than the rule for me. At least
one of my parents has been there and back with drugs, and they leave
me little to rebel against. They've always told me the truth and
given me reasonable advice, and because of that - nothing to do with
those classes at school ("Just Say No!" Gosh, thank you, PC Cake, for
that invaluable advice) - I tend to avoid drugs. The survey reports
that 13% of kids aged 11 to 16 have at some point taken drugs, and
less than half their parents know about it, the drug of choice in
most cases being cannabis, with 25% of those admitting to taking
drugs using skunk, the super-strong cousin of marijuana.

Cannabis used to be more than a drug, it was a lifestyle choice - you
were either turned on or you were a square; but today it's become
just another way of getting wasted, making it that much harder for
parents to know if their kids are using it. I was 13 when, with my
older half-brother, I smoked my first joint, and I'm certain my
parents were unaware.

The increased availability of cheap marijuana means that, where
alcohol isn't readily available, cannabis is often seen as a viable,
and more portable, alternative or even a superior option. Most of the
wild-side walkers will be among the older participants. In fact, a
recent EU survey showed that 42% of all 15- to 24-year-olds admit to
smoking cannabis. Cannabis today is far stronger than the mild toe
fluff smoked in the misspent youth of the parental generation. As a
direct result of regularly smoking large quantities of skunk with a
high psychotropic content, two friends I've known since toddlerhood
have been brought to suicidal depression; one was so scarred he is
nowa day patient in a mental-health unit.

At my school, a co-ed in the countryside, cannabis and alcohol are
the main drugs of choice. Both have been used at some point by most
of my year - everyone wants to be a rock star, and cannabis is smoked
more in the hope of tarnishing some of that shiny private-school
persona and gaining cool than it is for the actual effects.

In fact, my mother smokes more pot than I do, and I often find myself
having to play the drug police. The worst part about her habit is
that she hasn't learned simple drug etiquette: when smoking a joint,
it is terrible manners not to share it, something she doesn't seem to
have quite grasped. As cannabis becomes increasingly socially
acceptable throughout society, perhaps, just as parents are
encouraged to demonstrate responsible drinking to their children,
they should encourage responsible smoking. The open relationship I
have with my mum regarding our occasional indulgences actually helps
us both curb our intake as we discuss the similar negative effects it
has on us. Pretty liberal though my parents are, I still can't quite
imagine us trading recipes for hash brownies while sharing a family
joint before dinner.

Most teenagers will smoke cannabis if it's there, so why not just
accept it and help them do it in the safest way possible, rather than
forcing them to lie to indulge their curiosity? I have noticed that
my mother's joints tend to appear when my grandparents come to visit,
and I get the feeling part of her still smokes it to get at her
parents as she mischievously passes the lit spliff to my grandmother
who, in her 70s, has too much bravado to refuse. There's nothing
quite as surreal as your stoned grandma telling you for the third
time in 10 minutes about the time she had tea with Ho Chi Minh.

The thing that surprised me most when reading the survey was the
proportion of kids who'd had unprotected sex: 51% of those who'd lost
their virginity hadn't used protection. I conducted my own thoroughly
unscientific survey and found that only two out of the 20 or so
people in my class had had unprotected sex, probably due to the
graphic images of the effects of syphilis on the human genitalia
shown to the school during a seemingly innocent lecture on modern
Catholicism. Though relatively few, more parents than I'd have
expected think their children have had unprotected sex: with the
increased anonymity surrounding teenage abortions and sexually
transmitted disease clinics, there is less need for the parent to be
involved when sex goes wrong.

If the participants had been older, I think the results of this
survey would have been more dramatic. Looking at my 11-year-old
brother, it's impossible for me to conceive of him touching any of
the drugs listed in the survey, smoking or even drinking; and if,
aged 11, I'd been part of the survey, I probably would have made a
pretty dull statistic, too. My first joint was at age 13; first
cigarette, 14; first ride on the proverbial train of love, 16.
Thinking about it now, I did talk to strangers online, although I had
full knowledge of the dangers and found baiting paedophiles in online
chatrooms, then posing as a member of the police, a rather amusing
game for a while.

In all, teens commit 10% of antisocial behaviour, yet in opinion
polls they are cited as the main cause. It seems to me that the
so-called degradation of the morals of adolescents and the rise of
uncontrollable hordes of "feral youth" are just desperate attempts to
live up to the expectations of our elders. Charlie Samson Gilmour

Teen survey results

Drugs, cigarettes, drink

Of the children who have tried drugs, 65% of their parents believe
they haven't taken drugs, or don't know.

Of the children who smoke, 52% of their parents believe they don't,
or don't know. (Among the smokers, the average number of cigarettes
smoked per day is 7.)

Of the children who drink, 45% of their parents believe they don't,
or don't know. (The average alcohol consumption per week among these
child drinkers is five units.)

Sex

Of the parents who say they are the ones who first taught their
children about sex, 58% are wrong, according to their children. (They
mostly say they learn from their friends.)

Of the children who have lost their virginity, 50% of their parents
believe this is not the case, or don't know.

Of the children who have had unprotected sex, 83% of their parents
believe they have not had unprotected sex. (More than half of the
children who have had sex have had unprotected sex.)

Online

Of the children who have communicated with strangers online, 46% of
their parents do not think they have done so, or don't know.

(15% of children have talked about sex online. Few - 3% - admit to
meeting a stranger they encountered online, but only 1% of their
parents believe such a meeting took place.)

Of the children who have looked at pornography online, 60% of their
parents do not think they have done so, or don't know. (By the age of
16, at least one-third of children have looked at pornography online.)

Bad habits

Of the children who have shoplifted, 65% of their parents do not
believe they have done so or don't know.

(By the age of 16, half of children have played truant, and a fair
number of parents - 61% - are aware that they have.)

. ICM Research interviewed a random location, quota sample of 1,038
people, half of whom were aged 11-16; the other half were one of
their parents who lived in the same household. Interviews were
conducted around the country and the results have been weighted to
the parental profile of eligible parents. ICM is a member of the
British Polling Council and abides by its rules.