the morning after - that jaded feeling

Okay, now that I know where my middle son is, I'll share the Hackneyest - or else just most hackneyed - part of last night's story.

At the time that giant 14-year-old was getting beaten up and concussed outside my window, I had no idea where my 15-year-old was. Well - I'd rung his friend Scott, who said he'd seen my kid in the park with a bunch of friends I don't have phone numbers for - and have never met, the usual story - and I guessed he was still with them. They were with a kid I have met - who, ever since his family moved to Bristol this summer, just comes back to London and stays itinerantly at his friends' houses, dossing here and there for up to a week without making much of a fuss of where he is, & then goes back to Bristol so his mum can, presumably, do his washing and see if he's eaten anything.

So I uneasily decided not to worry, though of course the point is that my kid should have rung me. This morning his dad, my ex (unreachable last night) gave me a mobile number for Itinerant Boy. I rang; Itinerant Boy told me there'd been some "mass mugging" in Clissold Park yesterday,"loads of kids were getting beaten up". As if that has anything to do with it. My son came on the phone next and tried on the one hand to tell me his friend has exaggerated the story vis-a-vis violence, and on the other to say he couldn't possibly ring me because his friends have all lost their phones. And we're talking on Itinerant Boy's phone? And he's in a house, you know, those things with phones in them?

The next thing is that I'm overreacting, that I'm somehow saying I don't "trust" him, whihc would be definition be WRONG of me, and that it shouldn't be a problem if he doesn't call me for one night. Anyway, everybody does it. Nobody's parents ever know where they are.

I'm famous for ringing parents of these vague, spacey kids. The parents I've spoken to, with one or two stellar examples (like my phone friend Barbara), have been pretty vague and spacey too. Most give at least lip service to the concept of knowing where your own kid is, but they fail utterly to connect that concept to the parents of kids who are at their houses. Forget 'all kids belong to the whole society'. I grew up in a neighbourhood where any mother in the street had a right to tell you off, or indeed to give you some homemade oatmeal cookies. These parents I speak to can't even take responsibility for kids sleeping under their own roof.

One of the parents in my life is a TV personality, from a reality programme which I won't describe here because it would be obvious who she is. Let's just say she clearly thinks she can tell other people how to run their lives. Anyway, at the time I spoke to her, her kid was 13, had a 16-year-old girlfriend, & had recently disappeared in the middle of the night and come back home at 3am having had his phone stolen. But she's laughingly sanguine about it, saying "Oh, my husband sounds a bit more like you, I'm sure I'm one of these 'permissive' Stoke Newington parents' (tinkle tinkle)! She has an "absolutely marvellous" male Swedish au pair. She gives me a helpline number 'Because it sounds like there's a problem in my relationship with my child', and goes off to make homemade Danish pastries (I swear this is all true) for the five or so kids dossed at her 4-storey gaffe. She says, "Do feel free to call again! It'll be my husband, though, as I'm going to be mostly in LA for the next three months..."

Back to last night. Kid Number One, well, I don't even know what he looks like any more. I put a new duvet cover on his bed in September 4th and it hasn't been slept in yet.

What is it with all these kids? They're wonderful kids. They look after each other in the park, they listen to roots music, they're sweet and gentle and so, so drifty. They have NO responsibilities. My kid refuses to wash a dish. If I ask for a lightbulb changing there's a huge row. Itinerant Boy carries his writings around in a cigar box, and sneaks furtive glances at my poetry shelves when he's here, asks if he can have a bath, and doesn't wash a dish either. Their schools seem to require nothing of them, and they pass their GCSE's without having ever done any systematic work in the two years. Then, having been told to specialise since the age of 13, they're set loose with no general knowledge and no work habits in a system where 'A' Levels are optional - which means it's also an option for the school not to have you there if you're an angry, rebellious, underperforming teen. There are hardly any jobs. Thus Kid Number One, kicked out before Christmas in his first term, lay on his bed for six months and has been "out" for four. Talk about angry. Talk about intractable! Anyway, he'd dropped all his academic subjects. Missing the induction week of his new course so he could go to Amsterdam instead, he said (over the phone): "I don't know why you're getting so stressed out! No one cares. It's FINE! "

There seems to be no role for you if you're 16, unless you are someone who suits a particular kind of academic routine. And we, the so-called grown-ups, are failing them badly. Grown-ups make the world, right? We should be providing our kids with a structure in which they can be teenagers without fucking up totally, or I mean being fucked up. And what do we do instead? We're helping them.

So, let's talk about this recent media shenanigans about "childhood being poisoned." There was a letter written by several major writers for young people, including most of my kids' favourite authors (back in the days when they used to read). You can read about it at Dave Hill's blog, here. I agree with the authors of that letter, I really do. And I know who I blame.