10 April 2025

Church and an all-girls school gave me great freedom to be uncool

Might we have been less competitive, less obsessed by body image, had our circle been diluted with boys?

You know you’re getting on a bit when you spend your Friday evening lamenting: the problem with kids these days… Last week I went for dinner with my friend C—, and over a curry we discussed – prompted, as is 95 per cent of conversation nowadays, by Adolescence – what future might await her young children, and how she can keep them safe. To what extent should she allow them to make their own mistakes, to find their own way? How much parental oversight is vital for well-being; when does it tip into the kind that spurs rebellion? These are not new questions, but the world has irrevocably changed since my parents asked them about me.

It is quite likely they never really had to: I was on the whole a self-parenting type of kid, keenly aware of my responsibilities to myself and others, always setting myself extracurricular projects, desperate to please my teachers – in other words, a bit of a loser. But “it was just in my nature to be well-behaved” is not the sort of helpful advice C— was after.

My experience of the online world was also radically different from the one her children face: much of my childhood was spent entirely internet free; then, when it did come, it was dial-up, and I had to fight for every minute I spent completing the “What house would you be in?” quiz on the Harry Potter website with my mother wanting to use the phone. Even when we got wifi, and my brother and I had our own computers in our bedrooms, the router was kept in my parents’ bedroom, and was turned off when they went to sleep. I was 16 before I had a smartphone, and with it the ability to be up to anything, at any time, without my parents’ knowledge. Still, my friends and I found ways to do damage: texting each other’s boyfriends; downgrading each other in our “top friends” on MySpace after some perceived slight at school. C— is a few years older than me, and so even this limited exposure to online adolescence is alien to her.

But the biggest difference between our two experiences of teenagehood is that C— went to a mixed secondary school (and now teaches in one), and so recognises the brutality and chaos depicted in Adolescence. I went to an all-girls school, which was, by contrast, a sea of tranquillity. It gave me great freedom to be uncool: to host murder-mystery parties where we took it in turns to dress up as the male characters; to cajole my friends into annual photoshoots where we all wore matching outfits, like those terrible, overexposed family studio pictures. My schoolfriends recall that with fewer distractions (read: boys), we had greater time to focus on our studies. Certainly, there is plenty of evidence that children taught in single-sex environments get better grades. But the answer to growing resentment and violence between the sexes cannot be total segregation.

The other great factor in my remaining fixedly on the rails, of course, was growing up in church. I often wonder to what extent who I am now was shaped by faith, and how much of my sense of duty, moral responsibility and guilt would have developed regardless. But I wouldn’t necessarily advise C— to pack her kids off to Sunday school. In fact, the impossibility of separating what I believe to be true and what I was taught was true has led me to feel that if I were to have children, I wouldn’t want to raise them in church.

C— and I ended our dinner with perhaps more questions than we began with. On my way home, I wondered for the first time how my group of nine schoolfriends might be different had we met at a mixed school. I have often reflected that our relationships seem to provoke in me greater agony and greater jealousy, as well as greater joy, than any others in my life. Was there something about the intensity of a girls’ school that forged that uniquely tender bond? Might we have been less competitive, less prone to comparison, less obsessed by body image, had our circle been diluted with boys? Would we have found each other at all? I like to think so.

[See also: David Hockney writ large]