Having kids at 14????
Yeah but no but
A Booker Prize-winning novelist celebrated for her ‘ability to inhabit her characters’ has revealed in an interview that she considers 14-year old girls to be mature enough to have babies. Yeah, right.
The novelist is Hilary Mantel. She is 57 and childless, having had, for medical reasons, an hysterectomy aged 27. She states in an interview published in The Telegraph that she feels she was “perfectly capable of setting up and running a home” at the age of 14, asserting that if things “had been ordered differently” she might just have fancied having a sprog at that age and says that she might then have gone on to “get my PhD” in her early thirties. Yeah, right.
I’m sorry that Ms Mantel had severe endometriosis leading to her hysterectomy at such an early age and I’m sorry that she feels her fertility was “confiscated” by the surgical solution of the day but 30 years ago serious ‘women’s problems’ were solved by whipping the womb out and spiriting away the unfortunate woman’s cervix at the same time. Fertility and the cervix – whoosh, gone in the blink of an eye.
If she hadn’t had her reproductive plumbing plucked out, Ms Mantel might have gone on to have some nice little kiddiwinkies in her early-, mid- or late-thirties. Or maybe she wouldn’t. For all I know, she may have been banging away nineteen-to-the-dozen for years hoping to get pregnant but was foiled by the condition which eventually necessitated her hysterectomy: or she may have been on the pill all the time so that a pregnancy didn’t interrupt her academic studies. It’s anyone’s guess.
As it is, she didn’t have any children and that’s why I find her statement about 14-year old girls having babies so incredible. I almost think she doesn’t have the faintest idea what she’s talking about. Ms Mantel may have an ‘ability to inhabit her characters’ but I’m not convinced she has even the vaguest grasp of how ill-equipped 14-year old girls actually are when they find themselves faced with motherhood.
If Ms Mantel had gone on to have children, she’d have spent a couple of decades sharing her presumably book-lined home with some of the most challenging creatures on earth. No doubt she’d have smiled indulgently when she found her favourite book’s pages covered in the glorious felt-tip swirls that children under ten do so well. No doubt she’d have chuckled indulgently over the loss of her latest draft novel, having accidentally pressed ‘delete’ rather than ‘save’ while rushing to attend to the unwiped bottom of a strident 4-year old. No doubt her parental pride would have known no bounds as she found a painting she’d been fiddling away at for weeks had been daubed lovingly with glitter glue. Hmm.
If she had had some kiddiwinkies at any stage, she’d have lived through the infinitely interesting experience that is motherhood. She may even have had her children late enough so that their surge into physical maturity coincided with a sharp drop in her own hormone levels and would have found herself to be possessed of much less patience and good humour than she expected, just when she needed an inexhaustible supply of both qualities.
Ms Mantel is seriously suggesting that our society’s ‘male timetable’ forces girls who have been teenagers for all of 1 year to ‘suppress’ their maternal urges and keep their hideous ‘jeggings’ tugged firmly up and their crop-tops tugged firmly down. Ah, the poor mites; all those reproductive hormones flying around, making them spotty and greasy-haired, when all the precious blessums want to do is to settle down with their 15-year old (equally spotty) swain and live in a grotty council flat once little Cydah is born.
If I’d had my kids when I was 14, they’d be grown and flown by now. I might even have been a MILF at some stage in their lives, systematically bewitching my son’s friends and my daughter’s boyfriends with my tattoos and my snake hips; I might have been on the Jeremy Kyle show; I might have been on my 8th or 9th ‘long-term’ boyfriend and my 18th year ‘on the social’; I might have had four or five children by different dads and be planning a few more; during all this, I might even have decided to “get my PhD”, but I doubt it.
Hilary Mantel doesn’t know what she’s talking about and I’m annoyed that my own daughter has leafed through the paper and seen her silly opinion reported there.
Unless Ms Mantel has been a full-time nanny, a ‘work experience’ co-ordinator or a specialist single-mum housing officer, then she’s come out with this jaw-dropping statement without knowing the first thing about 14-year old girls.
12, 13, 14 and 15-year old girls are silly. They are quarrelsome. They are prickly. They are self-obsessed and worried about everything from their weight to which shade of nail varnish they will be ordered to remove at school. “Nothing is fair” and very little is as important to them as pointing out that “Nothing is fair”. The last thing they need is to be encouraged into the bike sheds with a pimply oaf for a quick, contraception-free shag.
What 14-year old girls want is to have their every immature whim taken seriously and indulged. Give them the green light to get knocked-up and they’ll sit back on a sofa someone else has provided in a flat the State has paid for, all the while flicking the ‘Vs’ at their ugly fishwife of a mum who’ll end up looking after little Cydah.
I haven’t written a novel. I haven’t won the Booker Prize. I’ve only had 2 kids. What do I know?
Nothing, if you ask my 13-year old daughter.
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1
March 4, 2010 at 17:17 -
I don’t mind them breeding at 14, so long as they, the father & their parents pay for them.
And house them.
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2
March 4, 2010 at 17:53 -
Which reminds me of the old Weegie joke:
What do you call a 30 year-old woman in a shellsuit?
Granny.
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3
March 4, 2010 at 17:53 -
14-16 year old girls now a days aren’t in any fit state to look after children. However it wasn’t uncommon for girls as young as 14 to be married and having kids not more than 100 years ago. Society always changes.
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4
March 4, 2010 at 18:44 -
“However it wasn’t uncommon for girls as young as 14 to be married and having kids not more than 100 years ago. Society always changes.”
Too true
That’s because the average life expectancy was far lower than it is today, so they were pushing them out mid teens, so they could have a pop at raising them before shuffling of in their 30’s. Plus in those days teenage boys were expected to work from around 14 as well. Perhaps we should consider that too.
The only 14yr old girl I know treats her mother like a slave while she sits around complaining that her new phone is now the wrong sort because it’s not touchscreen, and her new DS isn’t the one with the camera. She is forever off school with some ailment or other an the only thing I think she has achieved in the last 2 years is the gaining of about 5 stone.
The thought of her having a child in the next few years fills me with dread (although tbh I can see it happening) -
5
March 4, 2010 at 19:09 -
“However it wasn’t uncommon for girls as young as 14 to be married and having kids not more than 100 years ago. Society always changes.”
Yes, but, less than 100 years ago 14 year olds were in full time employment, and less than 100 years ago 15 year old boys were so eager to go and fight in WW1 that they lied about their age. The school leaving age was raised to 15 in 1939 .
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6
March 4, 2010 at 19:54 -
Isn’t this where we’ve got it all so wrong?
Its surely proper that we support infants totally, and then slowly removing that support as the child grows while hopefully becoming more independent. I think anyone would recognise this statement as parenting?
And yet, the State flips this around almost. Supplying ever greater intervention, benefits and ‘help’ as the child matures. Is it any surprise therefore that many grow-up to believe that a council house, kid and young persons pension (benefits) are the pinnacles of achievement?
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7
March 4, 2010 at 19:57 -
@Bristolmoose
The 14 year old of your acquaintance will doubtless ‘graduate’ school with fistfuls of A* GCSE’s and a chip on both shoulders.
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8
March 4, 2010 at 20:16 -
Sounds like the Rose-Tinted musings of someone who hasn’t had children, hasn’t had to give anything up to look after them, hasn’t had the sleep deprivation of the first few months…..
I wasn’t that well equipped emotionally to deal with kids in my late 20s, let alone my teens. I did better than most at coping, even when dealing with a disabled child, but parenthood is never, ever easy.
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9
March 4, 2010 at 20:24 -
‘What do I know?
Nothing, if you ask my 13-year old daughter.’Take heart, you will be amazed how much you will have learned by the time she is in her mid twenties.
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10
March 4, 2010 at 21:16 -
The State wants us tied to it’s apron strings.
Girls having children at 14 is not really a problem. The State making everyone else pay for it is. Sharing the responsibility across everyone else means that the teenage mothers do not see it as a mistake until it has already happened.
It doesn’t help that to some people the value of a child has been diminished by the State’s actions. They are a means to a council flat. They are a source of income. They are a fashion accessory. A pet. A punchbag. A plaything.
The Fabian mentality of everything being ‘right’ because they say so has put a lot of children into misery and because they are so wedded to procedures and processes they have no intention or ability to end this. Worse, those lives blighted by the welfare culture serve as ever greater justification for the State trying to muscle into every avenue of our lives.
Who would have paid Hilarity Mantel’s bills when she was 14? It was her choice to be ‘educated well into her twenties’ at a time when a lot of people weren’t, and there was nothing to stop her seeking to adopt children.
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11
March 4, 2010 at 21:41 -
The vast majority of 14 year old girls that I have come acriss cannot look after themselves, never mind a baby. Just ask their mothers.
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12
March 4, 2010 at 22:22 -
13
March 4, 2010 at 23:53 -
@ Thaddeus
Very droll.
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14
March 4, 2010 at 23:57 -
“English Viking March 4, 2010 at 19:57
@Bristolmoose
The 14 year old of your acquaintance will doubtless ‘graduate’ school with fistfuls of A* GCSE’s and a chip on both shoulders.”You’re probably right.
As I gather, all she needs to do is turn up at the exam and be able to write her name correctly. She’ll probably get “extenuating circumstances” marks for coming from a single parent family, some more for being obese and the rest because she doesn’t have a PS3 or the right trainers.
Although she will probably have eaten the chips.
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15
March 5, 2010 at 06:19 -
Did Ms. Mantel actually get around to suggesting how these 14 year old girls would fund this life style. Or how useful it would be to society?
I could have run a household containing children when I was 14. What am I talking about, I did. But it wasn’t much fun, which is why I hotfooted out of the door as soon as I was legally allowed to.
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16
March 6, 2010 at 08:46 -
I suppose, in a way she’s right about the male world bit.
I read once there is a link between preceived safety in a country and the average age of marriage and pregnancy. The safer a country the later people marry and have kids, the less safe a country the earlier. For example, in a time of war people marry earlier. That’s her male timetable link.
There is also a similar correlation with female education. The better educated the female population the later they marry and have sprogs.
These both explain why the UK has such an abysmal teenage pregnancy rate: violent, unsafe society and a dumbed down education system.
Brown’s Britain
I was 20 when I married, my wife 17. Had our first sprog 3 years later, she’s now left home (uni) and I’m still only in my early 40’s. And no worries about becoming a grandfather because she feels safe and is well educated. It’s great.
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