Odds are, they will have a boyfriend anyways - that young man just won’t have any sort of relationship with you and your daughters won’t trust you to back them up when breakups or challenges occur (not even on the level of pregnancy, just the mundane “OtherGirl was talking to him, what do I do!” variety). There’s handholding and kissing and hide-outs at school aplenty for a young teenage couple to have fun in. There are ways to ditch chaperones, or simply lie to you about who is and who isn’t there (unless you plan to follow your kids around everywhere they go?)
You pretending that they are not normal, sexual beings won’t help them when the time comes for them to explore their sexuality. Instead of being taught that it is normal, and how to be safe and responsible, you will teach them to hide, be ashamed, and are depriving them of the support and knowledge children need in order to turn into well-adjusted adults. By making these choices for them you are depriving them of the value of learning how to make choices for themselves (earrings, really? In what world are earrings controversial?) By treating them like children until they are 18 you are actually preventing them from being responsible adults once they are 18.
They might be your kids, but this approach isn’t parenting, IMHO.
It’s overdone but so is the men are totally stupid and white men are especially stupid.
The rules of commercials. A minority woman is smarter than a white woman. All women are smarter than men and minority men are smarter than white men.
Of course there have only been on or two TV series where the man is capable of raising kids without the help of a relative or friends (My Two Dads, Full House)
Not at all. It’s not the same experience, but it’s also a difficult experience, and one that I would hope parents of sons would be equally keen to avoid. Yes, for some teen dads, it’s not a particularly difficult experience, but for my son, it certainly would be. There’s no way in hell I’d allow him to just see the kid now and then and chip in a few bucks when he feels like it. I will do everything in my power to raise him to understand that if he ever becomes a parent, he is duty-bound to be the best parent he can be, no matter what anyone else says. He can’t get pregnant, go into labor, have an abortion, or breastfeed. But he is equally responsible for everything else that kid needs, for the rest of his life, because that’s what being a parent means. And I seriously don’t want that to happen while he’s a teenager, so I’ll be just as concerned about him becoming a parent as I would be if he were a girl.
That’s *exactly *my point. We live in a world where many people don’t consider a father to have the same child-rearing responsibilities as a mother, and I think that’s correlated to the fact that some parents feel it’s not a big deal for their sons to become absentee fathers. And I see evidence of this attitude when I hear parents worrying about daughters becoming pregnant a lot more than they worry about sons getting someone pregnant. And that’s what bugs me about it.
Actually, I read that in the exact opposite way. She took control over her own choices until she was ready to make them on her own terms without a bunch of double-standard hyperbole parental static clouding the issues. She basically took dating off the table until she could make up her own mind about her own rules. Wish I’d thought of that.
FTR, I am annoyed by this sort of comment as well, mostly because you don’t ever hear it from moms about their sons. And it also assumes that girls do not have sexual feelings or thoughts and would not otherwise explore or discover their sexuality unless pushed into it by some boy. Newsflash to dads who think this way: I have a surprise for you. Sometimes girls are the sexual aggressors.
Men find sex enjoyable. Men want their sons to enjoy things. Thus, men don’t mind their sons having (safe) teen sex.
For hundreds of years, men were conditioned to want virgin daughters, for various reasons. I think that social norm just hasn’t been eradicated from modern thinking.
I can see where the Dad acting to authoritative can be a problem, but otherwise I certainly would embrace it!
In my dating experiences, if the guy is accepted too easily by your family, he may take dating you for granted. This sounds cheesy, but its absolutely true!
I personally enjoy meeting my date’s parents and feeling a bit intimidated because it gives you a sense of accomplishment once your in with them, and it enables you to be proud that these people have standards!
I’ve definitely been on dates where my parent has become friends with the guy right off the bat, and then the guy thought it was ok to be too casual, and it became really annoying, you have to show the guy that you have standards, and having a tough dad is an excellent way to show that
Well – it’s hard to determine causality, right? I mean, it could very well be that the parents’ worrying is because of these attitudes, not as an offshoot of these attitudes. (That being said, I actually do agree that it is for the most part an unthinking offshoot of this different attitude towards fathers and mothers, and that does annoy me.)
So I wouldn’t automatically become annoyed at parents worrying about daughters becoming pregnant more than worrying about sons getting someone pregnant. I like to think I would treat a daughter and son equally, and I’d be more worried about it because I’d be more worried my daughter would get stuck with a deadbeat dad than that my son would get stuck with a deadbeat mom because of these prevalent society norms. (Assuming keeping the kid in both cases, of course; if the kid was aborted or put up for adoption, I’d still worry more about the daughter because of the physical stuff.)
But it still annoys me a lot – and I think you said this above but I’m too lazy to find it – that it’s dads that tend to do this worry-about-daughter thing explicitly, and that get kidded about it, and not moms.
Heh. I never had to do this. SWMBO established house rules early and enforced them. If TheDaughter was going on a date, it had to be in a group and the driver had to come in and meet SWMBO and get the lecture about safety, etc.
Except…TheDaughter always managed to bring the driver guys in right after we got home from teaching Taekwondo. So they are sitting and listening to SWMBO, and staring like a deer in the headlights at that Black Belt instead of at her boobs. TheDaughter told us after she went off to college that she did it deliberately and we got a huge laugh out of it.
But those things that the male partner can’t do are pretty important, especially given how hugely disruptive pregnancy and early childcare can be for schooling. I don’t think you can just brush them aside.
Abortion also should not be brushed aside.
Do you think that a Dad who sees his kid once a week and contributes some money is an absentee dad? If the parents aren’t living together, that’s often the only practical way, or every other weekend; shared care is just not practical for many parents (or good for the kids). It doesn’t take an absentee Dad to do that.
But if a mom does that instead of the dad, she will get tons of shit for it. That’s the world we live in. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but it is. With all that, it’s not surprising if parents are more worried for their daughters than their sons.
Well, here’s the thing. Would this be true of your sons (if you had any) as well? Would they be allowed to have “girlfriends” at 12 or 14, would they be allowed to pierce their ears, or would they be allowed to go on un-chaperoned dates before 18?
If the answer to that is ‘no,’ then no, you don’t annoy me. You’re just being a good (if slightly overprotective with regard to the un-chaperoned dating age) parent. If the answer is ‘yes,’ then yeah. that’s the kind of thing that does bother me a lot. The double standard.
Yeah, I wasn’t allowed to have boyfriends until I was 16. LOL
Rules like that just made me a better liar. I’m much more manipulative and sneaky than I’d like to be, because I learned the skills in high school, while under the thumb of a head-up-his-ass overprotective patriarchal dad. It would have been nice if, instead, he’d taught me to value myself and stick up for myself and how to set and stick to boundaries. He was trying to teach me to unquestioningly obey, which was really useful for the authoritative guy trying to get into my pants.
I’m not brushing them aside; quite the contrary. Pregnancy and abortion are huge things for anyone, especially a teen girl, to go through. I’d hate for my teen daughter to have to go through either of them, and I’d hate just as much for my teen son to be responsible for someone else going through either of them. I am equally interested in preventing either situation.
I’m also saying that, in the entire life of the child, pregnancy and breastfeeding are just two small, brief components. Moms are the only ones who can breastfeed, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily do more work. Dads can do more of other things (all the diaper changing, for instance) to make up the difference. You’re totally right that if the parents aren’t living together, it can make it a lot harder for each to do their equal share. But I think it’s almost always possible. I’m finding it hard to imagine a situation where the baby can’t, for instance, be in the mom’s care for a certain period of time, and then in the dad’s care for an equal period. It may not be very practical, but having a baby when you’re a teen generally isn’t.
And yes, the teen mom is absolutely going to get more shit for it, regardless of what she does, than the teen dad. That doesn’t make me any more comfortable with the idea of my son becoming a teen father, and I don’t think any other parents should be, either.
This is what I’m saying. I’m not annoyed by this attitude, per se (depending on the motivation behind it). I’m annoyed when it’s only directed at daughters.
A father doesn’t have to be an insane control freak to be ‘involved’ with his kids. My dad wasn’t perfect, but he managed to be quite involved without the draconian rules Crafter_Man sees fit to impose.
My parents were unusual among their peers in that they spoke to us openly about sex and told us that we should do it when we felt we were ready. My mom bought condoms and made sure we knew where they were and that we could take one without question. We were allowed to take our boy/girlfriends into our rooms and close the door and we wouldn’t be interrupted. We could have them over even if our parents weren’t home. The rules applied equally to both my brother and me.
The end result of all this is that I knew my parents trusted me to be responsible. I didn’t become some sexually depraved nymphomaniac. Quite the opposite actually, both my brother and I were pretty relaxed when it came to dating and we waited longer than a lot of our friends. It was the girls who’s fathers had ‘forbidden’ them to date that were out having unprotected sex in the backseat of a car at 4pm.
Good for him, but making a different set of decisions doesn’t make someone an insane control freak.
We always seem to get this in threads like this one. It doesn’t match my experience, and I would expect that it doesn’t match the statistical data either. Daughters with involved fathers tend to delay first sexual experience, and are less likely to get pregnant out of wedlock.
Declaring the existence of rules to live by does not make a person involved in another person’s life. By that measure, me and the New York City Council are very involved.
I think this is the disagreement. You feel that by instituting rules, a father is showing they are “involved” with their daughters, thus such rules are a per se positive. I don’t agree that rules and involvement are correlated. Indeed, “involved” is a statement about the interest a father shows in a daughter as a whole person, in all her activities, needs, wants and hopes, not her mere status as a walking vagina that might get raped or pregnant. Rules that take no account of a daughter as a particular person, tend to put me in mind of the latter.
IYE - you aren’t a girl, and did you actually talk to most of the ones you know about this topic?
Speaking for myself and my friends - the kids with strict and controlling parents all had a serious pregnancy scare by the time they were 18, were much more promiscuous, took many more risks with drugs and alcohol and are less mature and responsible as adults (30) than those of us whose parents were less strict. And in at least 2 of those cases, I know for a fact that the parents assumed their kids were not involved in any of these things throughout their entire teen years. Teenagers can be very good liars - why put them in a position where they need to lie in order to deal with the realities of growing up and becoming adults?
Sure, there’s a difference between “controlling” and “involved” - and banning boyfriends, not “allowing” them to be together until they are 18, controlling clothes and piercings, etc are much more on the “controlling” side of things.
Involved would include such behaviours as frequent conversations about sex, about boys and girls, about physical desires and responsibilities. Being involved includes educating children and teens, rather than pretending that they aren’t in the process of growing up. Involved means supporting and advising teens throughout their decision making processes - rather whether they should dye their hair or not or take Advanced Math or Advanced Chemistry or whether they should be having sex. Controlling is making those decisions for them, without respecting or acknowledging their desires.
I’m pretty much the same as this. My older daughter is now 25, and I still struggle with my “no one is good enough for my daughter” mentality. I guess you could say I’m annoyed that you’re annoyed. It has nothing to do with the daughters choice; a father loves his daughter; and wants the best for her and its common to joke about it.
No, more probably because getting married as a teen is not nearly as common. The rate of teen unwed pregnancy has not decreased steadily since the '50s, if that is what you meant. It has increased a great deal, unfortunately, and I would argue that this is due in large part to the failure of fathers to be involved in their children’s lives.
The New York City Council isn’t your father, and you are not (presumably) a teen-ager for whom they are responsible.
But I am afraid I disagree with you - setting rules and expectations is part of being involved with your children’s lives. Isn’t that what Meyer6’s mother was doing when she gave her condoms? The rule is “no sex without a condom”. Crafter_Man has different rules, and different expectations, based (presumably) on a different understanding of what is best for his particular family.
It seems a little unfair to assume that disagreeing with your approach to child-rearing (if you actually have children) means you are an insane control freak, or are not treating your daughters as people.
