It’s a fact of teenage upbringing that few parents of teens are prepared to admit. Yes, teenagers have a peculiar smell. But is that any reason to send them packing off to boarding school, at the very point where they’re about to mutate into interesting young adults?
When my 11-year-old son announced that he wanted to go to boarding school, my friends were aghast. I suspect images of the Spud movies were racing through their minds.
The thing is, I know something they don’t. While their children are all around the same age, I have an older son, fully in the throes of puberty, and I know that my sweet-smelling, cuddly little boy who wants me to read to him each night will turn into a very large, pimply, and let’s be honest, smelly teenager who only really needs me to feed and clothe him.
There is something about a teenage boy’s smell that defies explanation. It starts with the smelly feet (we are talking serious toe-jam here) and then slowly starts to envelop his whole body with unspeakable odors coming from all pores, not to mention intestines.
I have taken to placing scent infusers in his room and am entirely grateful for Brut deodorant which goes a long way to smothering smells that not even a twice-daily shower can eliminate.
Apparently this phenomenon does not just affect teenage boys. As a friend and mother of a 14-year-old daughter reliably informs me, if her daughter is cooped up in her room, chatting to friends through cyber-space, and the windows are closed for too long, it becomes a health hazard to enter – something like the experience of airline ground staff who open the doors of the Boeing that has just transported 500 passengers in a capsule for 12 hours over the Atlantic.
I want to suggest, therefore, a scientific hypothesis: that the smell of a teenager is a biological, evolutionary process designed to separate them from their parents – and perhaps their mother in particular.
As my friends will all too soon discover, as much as they love their sons, a time will come when they do not relish the idea of a cuddle quite so much, and the fact that their teenager is avoiding them is not as big a deal as they think it will be.
Given that I know my second-born will soon start this evolutionary phase, just aggravates the fact that he does not always lift the seat when urinating and seldom remembers to pick his wet towel off the floor – which makes boarding school seem like a rather viable option.
But for those of you who are yet to embark upon this phase of parenting, I also want to tell you that while your child’s body may start transforming in remarkable ways, so does the brain. And this is the wonderful part – if you are ready to have a relationship with a young adult.
My older son has developed a wicked sense of humour, a strong moral view point and is not afraid to debate and challenge the status quo. This has its challenges, but sometimes I watch in awe as this person I gave birth to, whose shoe size, weight and clothe size now surpass mine, turns into an independent, critical thinking individual.
Our household has also had to undergo a shift to adjust for the arrival of another adult, because my son is certainly no longer a child. In the end I decided that boarding school would not work for me, not because I will miss my cuddly and sweet-smelling baby boy, but rather because I will miss the young man that he is about to become.
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