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I’m certain she spent most of her life completely sleep-deprived, but as a child and teenager and even well into my adult years, I never found her too tired to listen to whatever I needed to talk about, no matter what hour of the day or night. I know she was the same way with all eight of my brothers. There are multiple mentions in her journals of getting a postmidnight call from one of her children, even when we were well into our adult years and living on our own.

My mother’s wisdom about when we needed mothering the most always trumped any exhaustion she was feeling herself. Her being available to talk to us anytime we needed was a comfort, but it was also a checkpoint for all of us. There was no question of doing anything even somewhat dubious when we were out for an evening as teenagers, because my mother was so present when we got home that it would have been impossible to escape her watchful eyes and ears.

Her favorite creature from the animal kingdom was always an owl, and we all understood why. She was not only wise, but very little went unnoticed when it came to the lives of her children. Like a mystifying plate spinner, my mother could keep all nine of her kids together, but separate, each spinning to his own personality. If one of us started to “tilt” even the slightest, we got a good dose of attention from her. She and my father had a partnership that survived twenty-five consecutive years
of teenagers, from the time my oldest brother, Virl, turned thirteen in 1958 to the time Jimmy, the youngest, left his teen years behind in 1983. I sometimes wonder which was tougher: twenty-five years of teenage children or twenty-two consecutive years of changing diapers.

At thirteen, I took a giant step into a new social world in which everyone was at least ten years older than me. This was when the music industry, which was very much a man’s world, was acknowledging my first gold record, “Paper Roses.” I was Grammy nominated in two different categories, Best New Artist and Best Country Vocal Performance. Here I was, a young kid nominated with Bette Midler, Barry White, Maureen McGovern, Tammy Wynette, Olivia Newton-John, and Roberta Flack. These were artists who had built a career, lived life on their own terms, and had adult social lives as well. Backstage during one of the shows, Sly Stone, of Sly and the Family Stone, invited me to join the party going on in his limousine. I think I mumbled something like, “Thanks, but I can’t. My mother and father are standing over there,” which I’m guessing got some mileage in Sly’s limo later, but he was kind enough not to laugh right in my face. Various show business consultants, managers, publicists, and agents offered advice on which hot, single, up-and-coming actor or singer I should be seen with out on a date in order to get a lot of media attention and boost my career. As exciting as it was to consider the possibilities—and even though by age twelve, I felt like a grown-up—I was nowhere near ready for a romantic relationship! I can thank my mother and father for counseling me and demonstrating to me
through their relationship that my goal should be real romance, and not just acting on a passing desire.

Before I lost many of my journals in my house fire in 2005, I had copied something that my mother had handwritten and tucked into my journal when I was a young teenager. This was in the 1970s, a time when previously set standards of social behavior were the target of a lot of ridicule. The TV show
Laugh-In
with Goldie Hawn dancing in a bikini with words and racy images painted all over her body was a giant step away from Sally Field’s
Flying Nun
. The “Free Love” sexual revolution of the sixties had set the tone for the seventies. My mother’s words gave me a feeling of security and helped me to plot out a map for where my boundaries would be in my dating years. This is what she wrote:

“
Sweetheart, I come from a different era—my mother never spoke of such things. But with the changing times I feel these things need to be said. So how about we don’t talk about it, but I will write it.

“A young woman should hold herself as a precious jewel. Enjoying life, friends, boys, dating and the opportunity to find life’s companion should be a delightful and fun time for you. There are many activities that allow young couples to get to know one another, but dates should never end in physical intimacy. In the sharing of her body with every boy she dates, a girl devalues herself in her own eyes and the eyes of others.

“Take time to enjoy the innocence of youth. Kids today are doing everything backwards. They start at the most intimate part of a relationship and then try to become friends afterwards.
It cannot work this way! All too soon the world will intrude, and life will become complicated with mortgages, bills, jobs, children and all that adulthood encompasses. There is plenty of time to find that one man with whom you feel you want to spend the rest of your life. Do not rush into physical intimacy or it might very well rush you into adulthood before you are emotionally or psychologically capable of handling it. I love you. Love yourself enough to say ‘no.’ Remember, you might be dating someone else’s husband. Mommy”

Now, she wasn’t telling me to “Watch out for married men!” even though it might read that way. My mother taught us the Ten Commandments as very young children, and as we became teenagers, she would explain the tenth commandment of “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” as a perspective on what we would eventually want in a marriage. She’d say, “Don’t you want to feel like ‘the only one’ for your spouse, to know that you have their unconditional love which can only be built first on a deep friendship and trust?” Rushing into an intimate physical relationship is usually from lust alone and doesn’t give you the solid structure of mutual respect that keeps a relationship alive; only time can tell if you have found your true love. “Dating someone else’s husband” was her way of telling me that I would only recognize the man who should be my husband if the aspect of physical intimacy wasn’t overriding my heart, if I wasn’t confusing lust for love.

When I was nineteen, I met a young man who I thought was the right person for me. He and I were even engaged and making our wedding plans. I had ordered invitations and had
decided on my wedding dress. A couple of months into the engagement, I realized that the marriage would have been a mistake for me and that time had given me the grace period to figure that out. But I was worried about telling my parents I wanted to break off the engagement.

I will never forget my mother’s reaction when I apologized for already placing orders and prepaying for items that couldn’t be returned. She hugged me tightly and said, “That’s the best money I ever spent on you! It was an investment in your self-worth. You now know how important you are and why you need the right person in your life.”

I thought it was a powerful message that was direct enough for teenagers going through struggles with self-esteem to grasp, and I have repeated it to my own children.

My own daughter was briefly engaged to a young man. She had picked out her wedding dress and was happy and excited for her future. But, just like me, time gave her some insight into the differences between them that she could tell would make the relationship unsustainable. I told her my story and shared the same words of wisdom that her grandma had given me. I was so happy that she had the self-esteem to stick to her values and good judgment. When the time comes, she will give the same advice to her children.

As a mother, the best I can do is teach my children to have self-worth and values, because only these will help them navigate the expectations of our increasingly fast-paced society. My mom always said, “People change, truth doesn’t.” I’ve been within earshot of junior high girls talking about their sexual
encounters. I know that they think they are so grown-up, in the same way that I did at twelve and thirteen. Yet I can only imagine the emotional turmoil their experiences will create sooner or later, let alone the physical complications and risks.

It’s pretty obvious that kids today are under incredible peer pressure for social acceptance that we probably can’t even imagine. My parents would switch off the TV if they didn’t want us to watch Goldie Hawn dance in a bikini on
Laugh-In
. It’s not so simple today. Even the clothing ads at the bus stop and on the home page of Internet servers have images that are sexualized beyond anything that existed in our world thirty years ago.

Teens now even have the constant social pressure that bombards them from their own phones. More than 75 percent of teenagers have cell phones, so it’s almost impossible for them to go out on a date to get to know someone, one to one, without everyone in their world also knowing about it. As my high school son tells me, you can’t even say hi to a girl in the school hallway without someone texting about it.

It’s not easy to keep up with this whole other world of social networking that our kids have grown up with as part of their day-to-day lives. If I have an Internet question about downloading a file, or linking to a site, or even viewing a video, I can usually count on my kids to know how it’s done. (Cookies used to be something you baked for someone to be nice!) Even my fourth grader has more computer skills than I do! Our parents might have had to monitor what rock band we wanted to buy tickets to see in concert and what teen magazines were brought in
the house, but how can we possibly try to “edit” what our kids are doing on the Internet when we can’t even keep up with the technology? Also, according to Nielsen Ratings, the Internet is used by more than 500 million people every week! Really? Imagine our parents having to “check out” who we were spending time with when the possibilities are so overwhelming. One of the guests on my
Marie
talk show who researches usage of the Internet by children put it this way: “Giving a young teenager unsupervised access to the Internet is like giving them the keys to a Jaguar and sending them out on the freeway before they know how to drive.”

As a mother, I feel my own particular pressure to try to grasp what my kids are going through, especially since I never had most normal teenage experiences. I never went to a public or private school. I never played a team sport, joined a club, tried out for cheerleader. I didn’t get to attend a prom or take a field trip with my peers. I admit that with my older four children, I was often playing “catch-up” with what a typical day at high school was like for them. It appeared to me that their school day consisted of lectures, getting homework assignments, and then returning home to complete them—very different from the way I was educated by a tutor on the set of a TV show or through independent correspondence courses—all this on top of having to memorize 250-page scripts every week for the show or while traveling from concert to concert out on tour.

My teenage challenges were much different from what my own children face. My mom was a very good template for how a
woman should treat herself and allow herself to be treated by others. My father was a good role model for my brothers as to how a man should treat a woman because of the way he treated my mother and me. My parents also set strict boundaries on our dating lives. We couldn’t date at all before age sixteen and then could only go out on double dates until age eighteen. There were no exceptions to these rules. My mother would tell me that dating one to one would only lead to a physical relationship that we weren’t emotionally mature enough to handle. Most of my double dates consisted of one of my brothers and his date occupying the front seat of the car and me and my date in the back, being watched in the rearview mirror. This was not often my idea of a great time, and I think it was intimidating to the poor boys who asked me out and made some of the dates seem awkward at the beginning. Dates were always a structured, planned occasion. Just for a start, the boys I went out with had to have the courage to win over eight protective brothers and parents who kept a watchful eye, and when they rang the doorbell, the person who usually answered was DeVon. DeVon was our bodyguard when we toured and was often around day to day. The best way to describe DeVon is to say that he could have easily been a Samoan NFL player. His neck was the size of my waist, and when he did his laundry, one shirt and one pair of pants filled the washing machine. When I was first allowed to date, I was heartbroken because it seemed that the guys never showed up. I found out several weeks later that my dates fled the scene after DeVon answered the front door in his lava-lava attire and said, “What do you
want?” The boys would say, “Is this the Osmond house?” and DeVon would answer, “Do I look like an Osmond?” then proceed to slam the door in their faces! He and my brothers thought this was very amusing.

Double-dating gave me the time to ask myself, “What do you want?” just as DeVon had asked the boys at my front door. I had the time to actually talk to a boy and get to know him because I didn’t have to worry about feeling any pressure when it came to physical intimacy. My mother thought it was important for me to date a lot and not make any “going steady” commitments. She advised against dating only one boy. She thought that it would be likely that I would try to become what the boy wanted me to be instead of dating enough to figure out what I wanted in a relationship. I followed her advice. I had a lot of first dates and quite a few second dates. If I had a third date with a boy, that’s when my parents started to pay attention. Although this still embarrasses me to admit, as a young teenager, I kept an index card for each boy I went out with in a file box, hidden away in a drawer. On the card, I would describe his hair, his skin, what he wore, and what he talked about. Then I would rate him on his good night kiss. Embarrassing but true. The idea of sorting out my feelings on index cards makes me laugh now, but since I had no sister and no school friends, I didn’t have anyone to share my thoughts with about boys. I don’t know whatever happened to those file boxes. It’s a good thing Facebook and Twitter weren’t around in the late seventies. Good to note: Be careful what you write down!

I also learned a lot from group dating when I got an abrupt “wake-up call” from my brother Merrill about being respectful to a boy while out on a date. One evening I double-dated with him and his girlfriend and a boy they had fixed me up with. We started out having dinner at a restaurant. About twenty minutes into the dinner, I knew that this guy was not my type whatsoever. I could barely concentrate on anything he wanted to talk about, and he wasn’t at all amused by anything I had to say, either. I decided that his sense of humor had been surgically removed from his personality. After dinner, the four of us were supposed to go on to do some other activity, but I was dreading it, so I pretended that I had a bad migraine and needed to go home.