No Easy Answer to ‘Mom, You Won’t Tell, Will You?’

A 15-year-old girl tells her mother that while she and a friend were at a party, the friend, also 15, went into a bedroom with a 19-year-old man and had sexual intercourse for the first time.

The West Los Angeles mother’s natural impulse was to alert the girl’s parents--good intentions that were instantly dashed by a threat. The daughter warned that if her mother told the girl’s parents, she would never confide in her again.

“I was in a real conundrum when the information she told me wasn’t about her, but was about someone else,” said the mother. “If the tables were reversed, I would want someone to tell me. Yet my daughter was threatening me that if I told, she would never trust me again.”

The mother had no clear answers. The teen feared she would be labeled a “rat” if her mother said anything, that her peers would know she was the one who told. The mother found herself weighing her obligation as a responsible adult against her relationship with her daughter, a relationship of profound openness and deep trust.

We asked sex educators, psychologists and sociologists to weigh in on this mother-daughter predicament, one that is fairly common although the details vary, they said. All agreed on one universal rule: If the information is about a friend in imminent danger, such as a suicidal teen, someone driving drunk or a friend whose drug use is dangerous, confidentiality must be broken. But situations such as this one involving the betwixt-and-between mother are much dicier.

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Parents should never do anything behind a child’s back, said Ellen Rosenberg, a sex educator in Long Beach, N.Y. But they should break the silence.

“You can say ‘I know what we have talked about and I don’t want to break your trust,’ ” said Rosenberg, author of “Get A Clue! A Parents’ Guide to Understanding and Communicating With Your Preteen” (Owl Books, 1999). “ ‘But I want to talk about options, because I don’t think that silence is an option because I am worried about your friend.’ ”

Alternatives include anonymously reporting it in a letter, telling a school counselor, urging the daughter to encourage the girl who had sex to go to her parents or suggesting the daughter tell the friend she confided in her mom out of worry, said Rosenberg.

In self-defense, parents can tell their child: “I can’t promise that I won’t say anything before I hear what it is,” advises Rosenberg. “If it is a dangerous situation, I can’t promise I won’t act on it. But I wouldn’t do that without discussing it with you first.”

A parent’s first obligation is to the parent-child bond, said Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociologist. “As unattractive as a younger girl going to bed with an older fellow is, it is not life and death,” said Schwartz, author of “Ten Talks Parents Must Have With Children About Sex and Character” (Hyperion, 2000). “But if you break that daughter’s trust, then what happens the next time something really big happens?”

It is a gamble--will she trust you again? “Next time it might be her life that is at issue,” Schwartz said. “Do you or do you not want continued access to the deepest and most important issues of your child’s life? That is the decision the mother is making if she breaks that trust.” The mother should say something only if she can get her daughter to release her from “the promise,” added Schwartz.

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Sol Gordon, professor emeritus of child and family studies at Syracuse University and author of “Raising a Child Responsibly in a Sexually Permissive World” (Adams Media, 2000), thinks the mother should not tell.

“It could be a single event, one mistake, and it could explode into a bad situation,” explained Gordon, who added that the girls’ friendship would probably be over, and the girl who had sex could be thrown out of the house by her parents. “The mother has no right to assume she has any role,” he said. “A much more responsible role would be for the daughter to have an intimate conversation with the girl who had sex and find out how she feels about it. Did she think it was a mistake? Did she use birth control? Let the friend [who had sex] have a part in it.”

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For the mother involved, it was a delicate judgment call only she could make. The self-centered decision would have been to tell the parents, she said, because it seemed morally correct and because she hoped a parent with information about her daughter would do the same.

“I decided what was most important was that I keep my daughter’s trust,” said the mother. “I told her that I would not tell this time, but that if it was literally life-threatening next time she told me something, I would tell. The act was over. The girl was no longer a virgin and that wasn’t going to change. Of course, the parents eventually found out.”

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Birds & Bees is a weekly column on relationships and sexuality. Kathleen Kelleher can be reached via e-mail at kellehr@gte.net.