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Girls Calling Boys
When Boy-crazy Teens Drive You Crazy
By Laura Paul
When a girl has a mad crush on a boy, evidence can inevitably be found on her notebook – her first name written with his last name or a hyphen joining her last name to his.
Eventually, however, it goes beyond the notebook. Boy-crazy girls might get up the confidence to send him instant messages and e-mails, and they might go so far as to record love songs and leave them on a boy's answering machine.
Even when it's not with a boy, most teen girls love to chat on the phone or on the Internet, but parents may want to have a heart-to-heart discussion about communication etiquette – especially when boys are involved.
Sue Blaney of Acton, Mass., the mother of two teenagers and the author of Please Stop the Rollercoaster: How Parents of Teenagers Can Smooth out the Ride (Changeworks Publishing, 2003), says her 16-year-old daughter is comfortable calling boys, and her 18-year-old son receives phone calls from girls – it's all part of the cultural and societal norm for teenagers today.
"I think girls calling boys today is just a normal part of their experience," she says. "Their culture is different than ours. Their expectations are different than ours. I think it's perfectly normal and acceptable for girls to call boys as much as boys call girls."
This might be a hard concept for many parents to get used to. Blaney admits that social norms were once very different. "When I was a kid, girls did not call boys," she says. "And also, it was more unusual to have good friends of the opposite sex. I think it's a wonderful thing that kids have more freedom and are comfortable choosing their friends and building friendships without the gender being one of the major determining factors of who their friends are going to be."
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