Talk time

When a father wants to talk to his son, it's best if he does it by mobile

I hesitate to tar all young adults with the brush of apathy, hostility, rudeness and poor hygiene, but I'm agog at news that 16,000 teenagers could be bothered to get out of bed last week to respond to a survey asking what their problem was exactly. In my experience, a simple inquiry about whether our eldest young man's hours on the phone might be more profitably spent learning a few words of GCSE Spanish is greeted these days as though I have asked him to walk to John O'Groats and back wearing a humiliating brand of trainer.

Less surprising was that the most popular answer to what the 'problem' was turned out to be 'moody parents'. There may be something in this. Because (returning to my own slightly unworldly problem of expecting polite answers to polite questions) I do recall being a bit moody the other morning when I opened the post and found that someone had inflated our phone bill by £80, by calling a single mobile number 43 times in the past three months.

'Is this you?' I asked my wife (because I do so hate grown-ups who immediately jump to ungenerous conclusions about young people).

'No,' she said. 'It isn't.'

Hmm. OK. Well, I suppose you do read about cyberthieves stealing your identity and spending all the money in your bank on phone calls to 15-year-old girls who live near enough to speak to in person (or at least shout to, if you stood on the roof and employed the same abrupt bellow you reserve for ridiculous parents who pour too much milk on your Special K). Cybertheft it is then. Certainly I laugh at the notion of the culprit being our own teenager, because we know a song about not calling mobile phones without the express permission of whoever pays the bill, don't we?

Under cross-examination, though, it seems he has forgotten that song and now sings a different one about never having enough credit on his phone because we don't give him enough money and incorporating a chorus pointing out in an unnecessary hissing way the hundred obvious reasons why the other person can't be contacted on a landline for God's SAKE.

Another new song he knows is 'All my friends think you're weird.' I am coming to the conclusion that they may be right. I have long been of the opinion that no depiction of hell's inferno of varieties is so baroque that it can adequately prepare you for parenthood, but what I didn't know was that after the first 14 years you might as well forget all you've learnt. My weirdness (for the purposes of this tragic fall, I have taken on the appearance of a small dog yapping at passing aeroplanes) is the product of a sudden gulf between my firm pronouncements and the extent to which they can be dismissed as the ravings of an old man who goes round telling everyone he's the president.

A young person may be made to account for his atrocities (and even apologise if he's in a hurry to do something more interesting), but you can't make him believe you are not an obstacle to his legitimate self-determination.

But what if he's right?

Although I was once a teenager myself, my own parents were stupendously accommodating and seemed to let me do whatever I wanted. Accordingly, I never took drugs or got into trouble with the police or got expelled from school. I did smoke and sometimes drank cider behind the garages and slept out in the summer with my friends on the pavilion roof in the park, and raided apples from people's gardens to make giant pies when our mums and dads went away for the weekend, leaving us with instructions not to burn the house down. But damn it, I'm still here and in paid employment.

My wife (who, to her credit, saves her weirdness for me) has drawn up a new set of rules governing use of the phone, spelling out the limits of our endurance like a bridge of words spanning the gulf between our opposing ideas of what the real world looks like. It's good to talk, as the old BT slogan used to go. It's listening that's the problem.

· A collection of Phil Hogan's columns, Parenting Made Difficult, is published by Piccadilly Press at £7.99.

Today's best video

Today in pictures