Bloody kids

A year ago or thereabouts, when he started working with us, I regarded him as a man-boy, half grown with some potential, but lots of maturing still to do.

Then he proudly announced that his girlfriend was pregnant and like everyone I struggled to be sure how to take this. He was still a puppy, but eighteen years old; that's old enough to drink, drive, smoke, and be sent to Iraq to shoot people. Difficult under the circumstances, to think it absolutely wrong.

So we all held our peace and thought and were rather touched by the enthusiasm. I had a conversation with him not long before the baby was born; he was unhappy that his girlfriend was so fixed on moving into their own (council) flat NOW rather than continuing to live with his parents and make some long term plans. He seemed to be growing up and sensible to the responsibility he was about to take on.

Then the baby was born and to see him with his son was quite lovely. But the baby was a little ill here, and a little ill there; in hospital a couple of times. One of those things of course. Since then things have happened to make me think quite a bit.

On Friday the newish father was agitated. He'd confided in someone that he'd been playing with his son and 'hurt his arm'. He feared that he might have pulled his shoulder out. The story seemed a little disjointed but I put it down to hearing it at second and even third hand.

Then it turned out the baby had cried through the night and the parents were only now getting around to making a doctor's appointment, and that dad was anxious that his own mother not find out what had happened.

Then it emerged that the incident had happened not the previous night but a couple of days earlier. And the baby was still distressed. And the baby had not seen a doctor.

The baby's now been taken to hospital by his paternal grandmother, finally taking a grip on the situation, and a broken arm has been diagnosed; social services are now involved and no one is entranced by a nineteen year old being a father any more.

Except the problem isn't nineteen year old men becoming fathers. There was a time when nineteen was positively middle-aged in human terms, and there are some parts of the world where even today life expectancy isn't much better than that.

The problem lies in the business of being a teenager. We've deferred adulthood with the relatively modern construct of teenager-dom. Now we're extending the franchise deeper and deeper into our lives. Quite when we're actually required now to grow up is obscured to so the very least, and now it eats into the very thing it had been developed as a buffer for, to shied from encroaching responsibility.

These days no person is obligated to pay his or her own way in the world, to provide for ones self, to be self-sufficient, self disciplined. No one has to grow up, to any extent at any time, and take care of ones self. Being grown up isn't actually about being old enough to drink or drive or smoke or gamble, but sadly the message seems to be that if you can do all those things then you've made it.

Well in 1855 my eighteen year old great great great (G3) grandmother was married in Wiltshire to a bloke from Gloucester she'd been introduced to by her step-mother. The step-mother had been born in Wales and married twice before marrying my ancestor. The second of those two marriages had been to a man from the same village as my great great great grandmother's husband.

With in a year she'd had her first child, by the time they arrived in Australia in 1861 she had three and another on the way. She went on to have a baker's dozen in total, all surviving infancy and childhood, even amid the rough-and-ready conditions of the Ballarat goldfields.

No, there's nothing inherently problematic in early parenthood.

The father of my G3 grandmother was the son of an 'agricultural worker', and his antecedents were entirely in that mold going as far back as is traceable. These were 17the, 18th and 19th century equivalents of medieval peasants, lacking capital or qualifications.

They tended to marry early and breed enthusiastically. His very young mother was illegitimate born and the daughter of a very young woman who herself was illegitimate. The record is unclear earlier than that.

But things didn't turn out too bad in the long run. Or maybe I've just explained an awful lot.

The thing that matters most is that the baby is fine, and he probably will be. Quite how that will happen will become clearer over the course of this week.