I’m a 5th grade teacher. One of the great things about my job is the time I get to spend just talking with the kids in my class. There is a group of girls in my class who take every opportunity they can to stay in at recess and talk. Some recent topics of conversation: The best colleges to go to to become a doctor. How real professional wrestling is. How the computers in our class are connected to the internet. What the internet is. “The Mummy Returns”. Alfred Hitchcock movies. The Russian Revolution. What people whose parents or grandparents came from Mexico should be called. What the biggest city in the world is.
I enjoy this part of my job, because I enjoy talking to people who are earnest and curious and open-minded, and that description fits 10 and 11 year old girls to a T. I just happen to enjoy the energy and inquisitiveness and innocence of children. I enjoy seeing someone having an epiphany, which happens every couple of days when you’re ten. No one questions a woman who enjoys the company of children. To question the same qualities in a man as being weird is sexist.
I once read a movie review in which the reviewer claimed to be made uneasy by the song “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” in Gigi, sung by an old man watching several pre-teen girls playing in a park. Until I read this, it had never occurred to me that this song could be interpreted in any way other than completely innocently. We shouldn’t try to impose our interpretation onto a set of facts that simply doesn’t support it.
But I have to be more careful than a woman in the same postion would be. All I have to do is think about Ray Buckey to be reminded of what can happen to an innocent man who is accused of misconduct with a child.
As for teenage girls, well, I am going to marry one this coming August (she’s 18). I thoroughly enjoy talking to her, but I must admit, it isn’t just the conversation that I am interested in with this particular teenage girl.
As for the situation in the OP, there’s nothing wrong with it. For adolescents to grow to be healthy adults, they need to have healthy relationships with adults of both sexes, and they need to learn how to have non-sexual relationships with members of the opposite sex. So long as you keep the topic on things that are appropriate, there is no harm here.