I am sorry you feel that way.
Note also I didn’t say that this is the way the world should be. I said that is the way the majority of our culture is.
The vast majority of violence and abuse in the world is done by men. Daughters will mostly date men. Therefore, parents will have more emphasis on protecting their daughters.
I know that doesn’t line up with your sexist/evil patriarchy view of the world, but oh well.
Well, with your extensive experience as a father to a daughter, I’m sure you think “Not letting your 14 year old daughter date an 18 year felon” is controlling jerk behavior. I happen to disagree.
What about taking drugs? Am I allowed to forbid my kids from taking Ecstasy and going to orgies/raves? Or is that controlling jerk behavior too? :rolleyes::rolleyes:
You think parents should worry about their sons being raped as much as they do about their daughters being raped?
They should probably spend a little more time worrying about their sons being rapists.
I’m finding the OP and some of the replies oddly stereotypical. Some girls are “mama’s girls.” I was one, and so is my daughter. Her dad was somewhat disengaged: I was the one who laid down the law. Same with my son. There are lots of single parents out there who are filling both roles.
And what about same-sex couples? You think all the same-sex dads have an equally protective relationship with their daughters but not their sons, and vice-versa for same-sex moms?
Of course this varies somewhat by culture, but even then, there can be differences between how protective a father is toward one daughter and how protective he is toward the other(s). Kids’ needs and personalities vary.
So true! When I was in high school, I was routinely allowed to stay out as long as I wanted. (which was rarely super-late, but the rule was “let us know when to expect you”.) When I visited colleges, I went to some on my own (for overnight trips) and my father sent me on an errand driving a medical sample out-of-state for him as a side-trip visiting one of them. I also had “adult” responsibilities at home – my dad was deathly allergic to bees, and he showed me where he had put syringes of epinephrine (this was before epi-pens) and instructed me on how to inject him if he needed it.
In contrast, he was very protective of my little sister, and insisted she be home by 10PM. She was basically never treated as an adult. My mother finally had to lay down the law, point out that he and she had stayed out later than 10, and over-rule my father to let my sister have a normal social life. Our experiences were extremely different.
Sorry, had to actually work today. I really don’t want to minimize the deviant with the candy van because although the particulars are campy I can read it as code for any number of really dumb choices a 14 y/o can make. And my oldest, although an upstanding 23 year-old woman now, was a major pain in my ass when she was 14. Looking back, I think the hardest thing about parenting is understanding they are going to do what they want to do–just like we did–and the louder you shriek “No!” at them, the more they’ll want to do it. Really all you can do is try to instill some confidence in them while they’re young, so that when they’re wrestling with the dumb choice they at least don’t make decisions to get the approval of someone else. The rest is paying attention and maintaining credibility so you can walk them through the potentially stupid thing. And a huge chunk of luck. I could be wrong, but any reasonably attentive parent won’t be taken by surprise if they get confronted with a Mr. CandyVan scenario.
So what about drugs. Same as above–explain the drawbacks, acknowledge the good bits, keep an eye on how it may be affecting the kid’s life and intervene when necessary. Above all, recognize the kid will do it anyway if they want, and do what you can to make the experience safe from dangers and the law. If that means at home, then grit your teeth because that’s what it means. Orgies, raves, pool parties, school, malls, friends’ houses…all are places where kids are known to 1) take whatever drugs they want and, 2) screw. Solution: education and birth control. Both daughters were HPV vaccinated and armed with IUDs by the time they were 14. They asked, and they received. The boys…we did what we could for them, short of vasectomies (which my bio son has wanted since he was 17). But all that is just MY idea of being a protective parent. A parent can’t kill all the wolves in the woods to keep his family safe, but he can sure as hell arm his family and teach them about wolves.
Sometimes the truth is misogynist and paternalistic. Doesn’t make it fair, necessarily, but facts are facts.
Yes, I agree.
Thanks, this makes a lot of sense. But if your doorbell rings, and your 14 year old daughter answers it, and then says “Hey Dad, my friends are here to take me to the drug orgy, see you later!” you just say “Ok, have fun. Remember what I taught you!” or you say “Yeah, I don’t think so”?
Well, in my household we would have said, “ha ha, good joke, have fun”.
Honestly, if your kid says that, it’s probably too late. If you say, “I don’t think so”, your kid will likely find a way to do it anyway. I have lots of friends who sneaked around their parents’ restrictions – don’t you? I think good parenting is more about teaching kids that it’s a bad idea to go to that drug orgy on a school night than about barring the door.
And some kids are more inclined towards that than others. Some of it is luck of the draw. Teaching the horny kid who likes drugs about safe sex, and getting her an IUD, and teaching her about which drugs have we dangers, and why she should have friends with her when she experiments might be the best you can do for her.
We need to hear from our resident “Southern Belle”, Beck. She could give us the daughter side of things.
She always talks about her “Daddy”. It’s really kind of sweet, actually. No, really. That’s just some dirt in my eye. Or the pollen. Yeah, its the pollen. That explains the runny nose, too.
I’ll bet she was his Priness.
Where is she when we need her?
I knew a girl (from when I used to run cell phone store) that was having sex with her 20-something y.o. boyfriend when she was 14. I meet her when she was 15 and had a new 20-something y.o. boyfriend because the first one was in jail for drugs and assault. At 16, she broke up with her new boyfriend and when her old boyfriend got out of jail, she took up with him again. Thankfully, within a couple of weeks he was sent back to jail because he stabbed someone!
I know all this because she’d hang around the store and tell me what she was up to, treating me like the parent she didn’t have. Her Mom and Dad ignored her and can’t believe they didn’t know what was going on to some extent they live small close (Filipino) community and the Mom was a waitress a a local restaurant (people talk).
I meet them once when they came to the store for their daughter (their only child) to buy a phone for her and gushed about what a good girl she was.
I never saw them again after that, but when they called and their daughter said she was at lingyi’s store by herself or with her friends, all was good. Oh…and they lived just a few blocks from the store so she could have come and checked up on her and me at anytime.
BTW, absolutely nothing ever happened between us and there was no thought of anything ever happening. I treated her like the daughter I never had. She would tell me these stories and I would just shake my head and tell her that she had to expand her dating choices in age (someone closer to her age and outside the community) or even better, not worry about having a boyfriend until she finished college. Sometimes when she’d tell me something that she knew I wouldn’t like, she’d ask me: “Are you mad?” and I’d answer “No, but I’m disappointed”, to which she’d say “You know that hurts more!”. My response: “GOOD! So don’t do it!”.
I lost contact when I closed the store and she was 17. The last message I got from her said that she married a guy in the military and she was very happy and moving to the mainland, and was grateful for all the guidance I gave her.
I’m busy.
When my father started telling me to not smoke, I cut him off with “three years too late, Dad; I already decided I wasn’t going to do it, three years before it was legal for me to do it.”
You think if I’d decided to smoke rather than not, and whether it was tobacco, weed or “other”, he could have stopped me? HAH! I wasn’t even interested in drugs yet I knew perfectly well who sold (heck, one of the biggest pushers in town happened to live across the hall from us; my biggest motivation to avoid drugs was that I hated the way he looked at me :p).
There’s a model of parenting styles that reflects a lot of the discussion here.
There are two dimensions: Strictness, and Warmth/Respponsiveness. This, obviously, gives you four styles: Uninvolved, Permissive, Authoritarian and Authoritative.
Uninvolved are horrible, negligent parents who don’t show any warmth and don’t set any rules. Let us not speak of them.
Permissive parents are very responsive to their child’s needs, but too much so as they don’t set any rules or boundaries or attempt to assert control over the child’s behaviour. This I think is the spectre in some people’s minds when they imagine a parent letting a 14-year old head out the door with a 20-year old criminal.
Authoritarian parents absolutely set boundaries but they don’t show warmth and they’re not responsive to their child’s needs. This can go one of two ways - either a very obedient child, or a very disobedient one. Again, this reflects the view in the thread that says if it gets to the stage where your daughter thinks that dating a 20-year old is a good idea, you’ve got problems that can’t be solved simply by forbidding stuff.
Authoritative parents both set boundaries and show warmth. Unlike Authoritarian parents, they’ll do things like explain the rationale behind rules, and even negotiate with the child about what the rules should be. But it is a negotiation, not a surrender, because unlike Permissive parents they will set clear expectations and boundaries for behaviour - once they’ve been argued from a 9pm curfew to 10pm, they will absolutely hold the kid to that.
Authoritative is of course the dream, where you have an open, trusting, honest relationship with your child AND know that the boundaries you set will be adhered to because not only does the child know that rules are rules, they know why the rules are there and they respect you. How you achieve this is very much left as exercise for the reader…
LOL
This reminds me of when Dad “taught” my brother how to drive at 15. My brother got in and knew how to drive. He told my Dad he’s been driving his friends cars since age 12!
Thank you; you’ve just given me the vocabulary I needed to describe the difference between my Dad and an authoritarian parent. I’ve often put it as “he wasn’t an authoritarian, really; authoritarians aren’t open to counter-proposals and negotiation.” 1.Bro and Mom describe him as being authoritarian, but 2.Bro and I know he was frustrated by their own inability to stick to what, to him, was an agreement and to them, imposed rules; to this day neither one is good at keeping agreements. If they spontaneously say “I’m going to do X” they’ll probably, eventually, at some point in time, do it (hopefully before other parties run out of patience), but if you ask them to do something and they agree it’s a coin toss.
There’s another type but I think it’s linked to mental imbalance: the parent whose rules and behavior change depending on the phase of the moon, the time of day, the last meal they ate and whether they need to fart. The Unreliable parent. It’s like a crash between the Permissive and Authoritarian parents where you never know which one you’ll get.
Sure - these are behaviours, not personalities. I will admit I drift around it a little, depending on my mood and a vague sense of how annoying the kid has been lately. I suspect you get more significant shifts when e.g. Permissive parents suddenly find their kid has crossed a line they didn’t know they have, and they have no tools but to go full Authoritarian in response.
(And of course, over time the style should shift. There’s a definite role for Authoritarian parenting for toddlers, for example, who won’t understand explanations about e.g. road safety; ultimately you need to become Permissive as your child reaches adulthood and it’s not your place to set boundaries any more. Managing the transition is the tricky bit).
With toddlers, we told them what to do first (possibly physically enforcing the edict) and then explained why. As the kids grew up we switched more towards “why”.
I think some of the differences in this thread have to do with the appropriate age to give the child more autonomy. And the best answer probably depends on the child. But we tried to give our children substantial autonomy after they celebrated their bar mitzvah, around 13.