Verity Johnson: The trials of parenthood

Children are exposed to much more information at a much younger age these days. Photo / iStock

"Mum, what's a condom?" I asked, chewing on a tablespoon of chocolate Nesquik powder. Mum looked at me like she had the time I'd told her I always stuck my fork in the toaster to get out the crumpets.

"Uh, where did you hear that word?" (Parental evasion tactic one.) "Someone was singing a song about it at Brownies." "Ask your dad." (Parental evasion tactic two.) I returned in two minutes, having been unable to prise anything out of Dad except hysterical giggles - he'd long told Mum that she shouldn't send me to Brownies.

"Mum, Dad won't tell me." "Ask your brother." (The last resort.) But Simon was in one of his, I'm-Too-Grown-Up-To-Talk-To-You moods and told me to get stuffed.

"Simon won't tell me either." "Uhhhhh, Google it." So I Googled, "what do I use a condom for?" The first result was "gay sex". This didn't help me much - now I had to Google that, too.

On reflection, Mum telling me to Google condom wasn't probably her most sage advice. It would be up there with her insistence that drinking salty orange juice would cure my sweating problem. But I can understand why you wouldn't necessarily want to explain contraceptive methods to a squeamish tween.

This is the anecdote that runs through my head every time someone says something like, "Oh, I'd hate to be growing up in this day and age." I don't agree with this statement anyway, but more importantly I think it misses the point.

Never mind being a young person, I'd just hate to be a parent in this day and age.

As I was growing up, my parents never really had to have many difficult conversations with me. Well, they didn't often have to have the cliched ones involving birds and bees and hetero-normative narratives. But anyway, they managed to glide through my, and my brother's, childhood without talking much about sex.

I don't begrudge them their delicately forgetful approach. I imagine it would be excruciatingly embarrassing to have such conversations with your kids. And it worked out fine. The condom incident was the only time when I really took to Google to find something out. And that was only because I was fascinated by the idea that something could be so secret that neither my mum, nor dad nor brother would explain.

But for most of the time, their reign of silence meant I didn't know what salacious concepts I should be asking about. And I was just before the computer revolution fully developed, so I didn't have the chance to be exposed too widely to potentially scandalous dinner conversation topics, either.

I didn't know what to ask, and so they didn't have to tell me.

But my generation is probably the very last that can remember a childhood without the internet. Teenagers right now won't remember a time when there wasn't a computer in their house. So, as a result, they're exposed to much more information at a much younger age. That means they're going to know what to ask their parents about. They're going to know that condoms, threesomes and heroin addictions exist - and they're going to ask about them.

For God's sake, our generation's tween heart-throb, Justin Bieber, just produced a new video for his What Do You Mean? single, and it looks like a soft porn flick with product placement. I bet parents have already had to explain to bemused tweens why kidnapping your girlfriend isn't a stellar seduction technique.

Now that kids are exposed to so many more embarrassing or sticky subjects, it puts parents in a rather interesting position. Are you going to tactfully avoid all difficult questions, knowing that if you do so your child will just Google them and expose themselves to the cesspit of the internet? Or work on the basis that if they're going to find out, you'd rather be the one who told them? At least that way they avoid all the mad, bad and weird stuff on the net. But it does mean you're going to have a lot of open, frank and more-than-a-touch embarrassing conversations.

What's the alternative? I suppose you could wrap your kids in gladwrap and then put them in the fridge until they're 18 ...

Either way, I don't think parents have it any easier than teenagers in this new, information-soaked age. The new situation doesn't leave much compassion or consideration for parents who find conversations like these difficult or impossible. So don't feel sorry for young people, feel sorry for parents who now have to explain much more than the stork.