Pendragons Princess

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1079262/The-mother-gets-13-year-old-behave–giving-cigarettes.html

By Luke Salkeld
21st October 2008

Teenager Sam Holt’s behaviour would leave most parents in despair - drinking, smoking, taking drugs and having sex.

But the 13-year-old’s mother thinks it is ’sweet’ rather than shocking.

Tracy Holt even rewards her daughter with cigarettes on the rare occasions when she does behave.

Miss Holt, 43, knows Sam drinks but is just relieved that it’s not more than a couple of cans of lager a night.

And she decided not to get angry about her daughter losing her virginity at 12, instead insisting that Sam uses contraception.

Miss Holt, a jobless single mother with two other adult children, told Closer magazine: ‘I don’t see the point in punishing her.

‘If I ground her, I’m just punishing myself because I have to put up with her in the house. Instead, I reward her good behaviour by giving her cigarettes. If she’s bad, she goes without.
‘She’s a little comedian. I let her get away with a lot of cheek. It’s sweet.’

Giving out cigarettes as a reward ‘works’, she insisted.

Miss Holt said: ‘There are a lot worse things she could be doing.

‘We’ve all got to die sometime. I haven’t got cancer from smoking so she’ll probably be all right anyway.’

Recalling the moment Sam blurted out that she had lost her virginity when she was just 12, Miss Holt said: ‘I thought it was a joke, so I laughed. I was disappointed. No mother wants to know her 12-year-old is having sex but I’m glad she told me. I didn’t show I was angry and just kept it to myself.’

Miss Holt blames teachers at Sam’s former school for being ‘too soft’. She said: ‘Now she is at a special school where there are fewer kids in each class.

‘Hopefully these teachers will be stricter and she will finally get the discipline that’s needed.’

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Here we have another unemployed parent from across the pond (is she a neighbor of the Cromptons?) who thinks that rewards for offspring include alcohol and cigarettes. In Great Britain, the legal drinking age is 16 even though persons cannot purchase alcohol unless they are at least 18 years of age. Clearly Tracy Holt is unaware of the health consequences of smoking, especially at such a young age for her daughter, but why should she care? Poor Sam does not have a father figure to teach her better, since Mom is the only one who is anything close to a “parent” for the 13 year old girl. Punishing for misbehavior is after all pointless, according to Holt. While it is better that Sam be on some form of contraception than risking pregnancy or an STD, it makes me wonder how much further the mother will go to allow her child to do anything she wants to. I never rebelled like that; I had other ways to rebel that were safer to my health (like changing my religion at the age of 15, which did not please my parents, and they did not think that any better than engaging in risky sex, drinking, or smoking (!).) In a way, I am amused at how Sam admitted to losing her virginity at the age of 12. When I was 12, in junior high, the girls believed that boys were cootie-infested creatures who carried diseases for which there was no known cure. How times have changed since then, and I’m only 41.