ABSTRACT

At the end of her school day, 15-year-old Marie came to the adolescent walk-in centre and said she had no intention of returning home. She wanted to be put up for the night and a place to be found for her, as soon as possible, in a hostel. It is a crisis not only for the teenager, male or female, directly involved, but also for the parents, in that it turns their whole mind-set upside down. The tacit and unconscious consensus around a shared latency period breaks down, and the classic pattern is reversed: the children are now in the bedroom and the parents are on the other side—but just on the other side—of the door. The pill and voluntary termination of pregnancy have made somewhat null and void any lingering fears of unwanted pregnancies and the social disgrace that once attached to unmarried mothers.