I’m almost 42 years old, and I think my 66 YO dad would still try to kick my husband’s ass if he ever hurt me (which he never would.) 
He loves my husband, but he loves me more.
This is a question that was implied in the OP and I am curious about: All other things being equal, are you (fathers) more protective of your daughters than your sons when it comes to things like getting too serious romantically with boyfriends/girlfriends, getting into trouble with drinking/smoking/drugs, etc.? If so, why?
MilliCal is 10. I have no idea, right now, how I’m going to be as a dad when romantic stuff comes up.
We have been very free in telling her about drugs, sex, and the like. She owns two books on sex that she read with extreme interest, but it’s still an academic subject to her.
She is frighteningly bright – she was answering all the questions on Teen Jeopardy this week – and reminds me of me, in many ways. My romantic life was virtually nonexistent through out high school and undergraduate college. I wouldn’t wish this on her.
That’s why I started this…I’m trying to understand the logic behind it. I don’t think it’s so much of “scaring boys into being nice to you” and your father not trusting your judgment as much as it is chest thumping, to let the kid know, “I’ve been where you are, I know what you have in mind, and I will be there if you hurt her.” Like Ivylad said, he trusts our daughter, he just doesn’t trust the boys.
It’s not like the dad is going to challenge the kid to a wrestling match and if he loses, he doesn’t get to date the daughter. I think it’s more of a “I’ve got my eye on you, so behave.” Shagnasty, does that sound about right?
Speaking as a former teenage boy, I would see these things as a challenge to be overcome. Just so you know.
Now, speaking as a father of a 12 year old girl, I am very relieved that she is fairly naive about such things. Neither myself nor my wife (her step-mother) had normal childhoods, so our expectations of what is normal are skewed.
She’s a smart girl, pretty, but kinda geeky. She’ll do ok.
My concern is that she’ll learn her behavior from her mother, who goes through boyfriends like a cat in heat, and has has always treated sex as some form of validation. This keeps me up at night.
My oldest son is 10, and well on his way to dorkdom. I am of mixed feelings about this, but will be sure when he gets older to make sure he knows how to treat a lady, and hopefully he will get that. It worked for me, at least.
I’m a prosecutor, and I know of another prosecutor in a nearby county who has a good one for the boys who come a-callin’ for his teenage daughter. He basically tells them, “Kid, I’ve been putting murderers in jail for many, many years. So by now, I’ve learned how to kill someone and get away with it.”
I am SO using that when my girls hit their teens.
I’d love to be a fly on the inside of the car window afterwards.
“Um… does you dad like have this real small penis or something?”
I realize this is a lot of internet heroism, but if you actually were like this with your daughter’s boyfriends, you would never get to meet them in the first place.
I have one daughter, now aged 26 and a high-school teacher. She has three brothers (two older, one younger), so she always had a pretty good idea about what boys were like to be around. She was always pretty sensible, too, right through her teenage years (unlike a couple of her brothers, who were harder to handle at times). So I was never protective, and never worried particularly about her.
It helped that we were close friends with neighhbours with children about the same age. (One family right across the road, the other accessible through a large gap in our side fence / their back fence). One family had three girls and one boy, the other hand two boys, and they grew up almost like siblings. Of course, that meant that my daughter and the girl almost the same age (they went to the same childbirth education class when their mothers were pregnant with them) actually were the pair of the ten of the them that didn’t get on in the teenage years, thought they are more like friends now – but that’s a bit like how sisters can behave. One great advantage of this arrangement was that the group had five or six parent-like figures around. (The number changed because one set of parents divorced during this period – which was perhaps in itself useful, because they could all see what going through divorce is like, while not being too painful because the environment remained relatively stable).
So if the typical father is over-protective of teenage daughters, I’m not a typical father.
My dad has some seriously weird Puritanical hangups about inter-gender relationships. While he’s not afraid to make some off-color jokes around me, he would just about curl up in a corner and die if I ever told him something about my personal life. He might talk to my mom about it in private but he just does not want to know about me and boys. Last time I broke up with a guy I told him “Dude won’t be hanging around anymore, and I don’t want to talk about it,” and that was the end of it.
I do have an older brother and plenty of male cousins, and I think it relieves my dad that he knows I’d go to them about such issues before I go to him. He’s also pleased that I’m a black belt in karate.
As for other “protection” stuff - like fixing stuff around my house or slipping me a $20 every so often - yeah he’s pretty big on that. He loves it when I call him my handyman (or these days, more like my Eldin) and I have to push him away when he wants to pay for home repairs.
Yesterday he called me from the store and asked if I wanted anything and I mentioned that I hadn’t had deli salami in a while, and he came over with a bag of several fresh deli meats and Ju-Ju Bees. That’s my daddy 
Fair enough, thanks.
Yeah, it kind of skeeves me, too. I mean, I know mostly it’s joking/in fun, but still…if you’re telling your teenage boy to go for it and your teenage girl to keep it locked up, isn’t that most of the problem? Better to educate males and females to be open/honest/non exploitative in relationships, IMHO.
All through highschool my father wasn’t all protective. Didn’t have to be. He was and still is a police officer for the town I grew up and went to school in. He has a reputation of being stern, strict and an ass. So there was no dating in high school. No one wanted to deal with him.
Though come college when I moved to NH, there was a local guy that was constantly hanging around my work. He would always come in and bother me. Sometimes even taking a look at the work schedule and hanging out every day that I was on. It freaked me out enough that I mentioned it to my father, the next day I found out that he had called the local police department and requested extra patrol at my workplace.
It was weird for me when he did that. He was and still isn’t the type of lovey dovey dad. Rarely did he show emotion growing up, so when he did that… I was like, “Wow… he really does care about me…” It was a light bulb.
I didn’t realize people actually did that crap in real life. I thought it was a sitcom fiction. Learn something new every day.
It isn’t so much about sex although that could end up being a part of it depending on the circumstances. I am more worried about some teenage dumb-ass putting my daughters in danger. I have already lost one daughter and no punk dumb-ass is going to increase the chances for it to happen again. If you drag race with my daughter in the right hand seat and there is going to be more than enough major problems to go around. Drinking and driving - ditto. Presenting serious drugs - double ditto. You get the idea. I am not a bad-ass but I can be highly unstable given the circumstances and I am much bigger than most teenage boys. I have been known to fly off the handle for much less and I have a bad temper and a determined personality.
I am actually scared of my father-in-law in a way that makes me respect him. He is a 73 year old 6’1", 250 pound Italian American man that is a multi-millionaire who owns companies all over the world. He is a perfect Godfather figure. Even though my wife and I are only 34, we have been together 16 years and that is a saving grace. He has always been kind to me but he can be absolutely brutal to others that cross him. I am the father of his young granddaughters though so that goes a long way. Still, unfortunate circumstances a few years ago made me know for a fact what he was capable of even against me. After they were over, things returned to normal but any decisions I make involving his daughter makes me keep that factor forefront in my mind.
Ok, maybe I just don’t get all this BS because I didn’t really have a father figure at that age. But to me, this sounds like you don’t trust your kids to have good enough judgment to know what’s dangerous and that they’ll do whatever any boy suggests. Girls are too dumb to know better. It still sounds creepy to me. No offense if you don’t mean it that way, but that’s all that comes to mind for me.
Then again, all of my boyfriends knew that if they crossed me, I wouldn’t be calling my daddy to kick their asses: I’d do it myself, and I’d enjoy it. I have yet to have to do it, although I did occasionally have to put the fear of god into one or two of them.
I think it’s more that kids don’t have good enough judgment to know what’s dangerous and they’ll do whatever any friends suggest. Which, in my experience, is often true, especially if they want to appear grown-up and attractive to their friends. Boys and girls do equally stupid stuff in order to impress.
That is it exactly. I considered myself responsible and I did some extremely stupid stuff as a teenage boy that probably had about a 1 in 3 probability of death all totaled. A few friends lost with those odds. Car chases, drunken driving, drugs, and even simpler things like shoplifting tend to be hot ideas among friends as they start to blossom into freedom.
No, I don’t trust any teenagers to not do stupid stuff especially boys who tend to be a little late to mature. That is why they are teenagers instead of people that have years of adult lessons behind them. Some are much better than others but it is impossible for a 16 year old to have the life experiences necessary to make fully adult decisions and recognize the magnitude of individual risks. Parents are supposed to be the ones to help teach all kids so they don’t have to repeat every mistake by themselves.
Dad talked a good game about turning the hose on any boys who came asking for dates, but mostly he told me where to kick them and what to say if they tried anything I didn’t want, and recognized that you can’t raise a daughter the way he and mum raised me, and still expect her to turn to you for protection instead of taking care of the situation herself.
As for still taking care of me, hah. Last I heard from him was a lovely situation involving getting himself stranded in a foreign country and needing me to give him money. He’s called me once in the last five or six years for anything other than to ask me for some favour, and that was because I was in hospital and mum told him to (they’re divorced.) We don’t talk (silence is on my part) but if we did, I have a feeling I’d still be the one stuck playing parent to his irresponsible six year old act.
My brother’s a cop, and when my niece starts dating in the not-so-distant future, he plans to meet her dates at the door in full uniform, gun on prominent display. Mr. Kat and I have been trying to convince him that talking to people who aren’t there while cleaning it might be effective, too.
Like Cher’s dad said in Clueless, “If anything happens to my daughter, I have a .45 and a shovel. I doubt anyone will miss you.”
Being still within the “teenager” range by a couple months, hopefully I’m allowed to add my experience with my dad in here.
My dad talked up how he was considering making my boyfriends “drop their pants and submit to a medical exam” quite a bit. Thankfully he never got around to it. I know he’s still having issues with me having an SO, but I think he’s coping as well as can be expected. The fact that he likes the SO a lot makes it easier. My dad barely said a word around my ex; he was convinced that the ex “looked like he’d been hit in the back of the head with a mallet.” However, he’s still got a few issues with me and The Sex Thing; last time the topic came up, he mentioned my cousin’s hyperactive 2-year-old son and said, “I don’t know if you’re having the kind of sex that can lead to kids, but after you meet [your cousin’s son], you won’t be!” 
I’m not a Daddy. Can I post as an uncle?
I sincerely hope my niece gets some. Preferably a smorgasbord over time, as her interests and tastes change & mature. I hope she falls in love, also has some skyrockets, some with overlap.
I would be very unhappy if she were to end up in a position where she was trading sexual favors for approval, acceptance, et al. But if she’s doing it for her own sake & for her own reasons I am fine with her doing everyone in the state. (If she’s highly active I hope she uses the appropriate cautions to stay healthy and to become pregnant only in the time place and w/partner of her own choosing).