Comprehension questions and tasks. 1. Do you think that the institution of arranged marriages works efficiently?

1. Do you think that the institution of arranged marriages works efficiently? Why? Why not?

2. Most Americans would consider the system of marrying complete strangers to be implausible. What about us?

3. Could you imagine yourself getting married on the basis of a photograph and one phone conversation?

4. Discuss with your peer-students the issue “Marriage for love, marriage for convenience”.

No sex please, we’re parents

By Maureen Freely

Sometimes, when you are alone in a room with a boy, and it’s after midnight and the door is closed… and let’s say your head is spinning because there was more than fruit juice in that punch… Oh, God. Where was I? Oh yes. As I was saying. Things happen sometimes. It’s natural. It’s only human. But take it from me. It’s not worth it. So don’t let it happen, OK? ”

That was what my uncle said to my cousin and me when we were in our late teens and packing our bags to go off to university in the 1970s. It was the only time a member of my family ever tried to brief me on the facts of life and human nature. And oh, how we sniggered when he left the room. What planet did he think we lived on? Thank God it wasn’t the same one we lived on. If he had any idea…

Since he didn’t, we made sure it stayed that way. Behind closed doors, we let things happen. When things went wrong, we never dreamt of telling our ignoramus parents. But times have changed. According to a survey published by the NCSR, most of us think that parents should, and must, play a leading part in their children’s sex education. Seventy five per cent of us believe that the UK teenage pregnancy rate is the highest in Europe because too many parents don’t.

Study after study has shown that early sex education does not promote early sexual initiation. Well-informed teenagers tend to start later than teenagers who are in the dark. Most of us believe that schools should play a bigger part in their enlightenment. But we do not want them to act in loco parentis. In surveys, we make it clear that we want to be involved, too.

And forget birds and bees. The age of double-speak is over. Thanks to us, it is now an open topic. Thanks to us, there is sex talk in every newspaper, every book, every advert, soap opera, film and song. Which is why sex education is no longer just about do’s and don’ts. It is also about images and messages and role models, and how they affect you.

The first and the most important fact is that teenagers – even teenagers who can talk openly and even thoughtfully about sex in the abstract – do not like their parents knowing anything about what they are getting up to themselves. It’s not necessarily because they have things to hide. It’s most likely to be because they are tired of their parents interfering in every little thing they do. They yearn for privacy. And if they can’t get it by honest means, they do just what you and I did when we were their age. They lie.

No parent ever really knows how much their children know these days, or how they came to know it. No two schools seem to teach it in the same way, and no school seems willing to let parents in on the secret. My son’s school was no exception. All I know about its PSHE programme is that, during our ill-starred chat, he said that we didn’t need to have the talk because he had learnt “everything” at school.

From the shame in his voice I deduced that I had spoken too soon. There must be nothing worse, I think, than a parent who assumes that you’re having a wild sex life when really it’s a desert out there and you are beginning to worry that you will die a virgin. Anyway, that’s why I decided to put off our next serious chat until I knew there was a girlfriend in the picture. So you can imagine my surprise when he pranced into the kitchen several Sundays later with not one, but two half-clad teenage girls. My mother was visiting at the time. She almost swooned.

I took my son aside and asked him why he hadn’t troubled himself to inform me that he was “having friends to stay”. He looked at me as if I was asking him about the mating habits of sea lions. He said: “Why would you want to know about something like that? ”

I remember asking myself if I should be saying something to the girls’ parents. I didn’t. My excuse was that I didn’t know who was who. This is a typical cop-out, I have discovered, with parents of sons. They are much more comfortable about having their son’s girlfriends to stay the night than they are about their daughter’s boyfriends. This means that girls spend more time at boys’ houses than the other way round. And that makes it close to impossible to know the first thing about what your daughters are getting up to. A dangerous dilemma: we all know that girls need to know more than the importance of condoms. But where to begin if they won’t even look you in the eye?

Whatever you do, never do what I did. According to my daughter, the very worst thing that any mother can do is to trick a poor, unsuspecting 15-year-old into going with her to a crowded café for hot chocolate, then launch into a sermon-cum-information session peppered with so many racy stories about what she got up to when she was 15 that the whole café falls silent the better to hear the juicy details.

I’m inclined to think that it works both ways. She’s my daughter, and I have mixed feelings about her being other things to other people. So I can’t help sending out mixed messages. Sometimes, I have to ask myself, am I the best person to be advising her? What good will all my fine theories do if I never give her a chance to practise? And what am I going to do with my younger daughters, now eight and ten. Sometimes I have to close my eyes, think of England, hope for the best… and close the door. (Abridged)

From The Times, August 2003