This is good info, thanks.
So after the age of 13, your kids had no rules at all? They could just do whatever they wanted?
Do you have no rules at all? My kids had lots of rules.
Did I ever tell them, “You must do X” after they turned 13? Probably. But that was rare. Mostly I informed them what the rules were, rather than laying down the law, if you understand the difference I am trying to express. I told them what my expectations were, what my family and the school expected of them, what society at large expected of them.
I had pretty good kids, and that was generally enough.
We did have one incident where my son did something seriously wrong (that we hadn’t thought of to forbid, but he should have known better). He was playing with fire in the middle of the night, and could have burned down the house, and did scar the wooden floor of his bedroom. And instead of fetching us to help put it out, he hid.
He was punished for that. (Despite us not having thought to tell him, “don’t light a fire on your bedroom floor”.) My husband removed the door from his bedroom, and told him he couldn’t have the door back until he sanded and refinished the floor. And that couldn’t be done until it was warm enough to leave the windows open for a week while the polyurethane dried. So he had to change in the bathroom for a couple of months.
I also talked to him about fire safety, and about what are appropriate and inappropriate places to light fires. And he was brow-beaten for not having fetched us as soon as he realized it was out of hand.
So yeah, I guess we enforced a rule against lighting the house on fire.
But we never had to enforce rules about getting to school, or doing homework, or not sleeping around with 20 year-old drug dealers, because by 13 my kids understood those things.
No, I guess I don’t understand the difference between “In this house, the rule is, no dating any 18-year old felons” and “You are not allowed to date 18-year old felons.”
If she continues to date an 18-year old felon even after you’ve informed her, what will you do? Ground her until she turns 18? Kick her out of the house? What is the result of her violating the rule?
I understand the motivation behind it, but it can back you into a corner when you don’t actually control her actions and location 24/7.
But that seems to apply to almost anything, which just results in not having any rules.
“My friends and I are going to drink on the back porch. If you try to stop me, I’ll just do it when you’re not around, so you might as well let me”
“uh…okay”
Something just seems wrong with that. To be honest, I think I’ve done the Authoritative approach, and hopefully stuff like this wouldn’t come up. The rules I have are pretty simple “Don’t destroy anything. Try not to hurt anyone. Accidents happen, so make sure you let me know, not so I get mad, but so we can deal with any aftermath (usually Kool Aid on the carpet)”
I kind of see the point of “Can’t watch them 24X7” , but still having trouble seeing the results I guess.
Perhaps that is the nature of hypotheticals.
In an ideal world we would be able to take the experience of 30 odd years as adults and magic that wisdom into our kids’ domes. Instead, we have to use a voodoo combination of teaching by acting (i.e. I don’t treat waiters & such like trash because my old man treated them respectfully) and orchestrating choices in front of the kid that skew toward positive feedback with the ‘right’ selection (i.e. Brush your teeth and hop into bed and we can do a tell story, or you can just go to bed). They get conditioned, for a time, to doing what you ask as long as you keep your end of the bargain, and you become seen as a credible, reliable, likeable person. The relationship is a lot less dictatorial and much more cooperative. Kid, and you, end up doing stuff to help each other out. My 18 y/o still gets, “Hey, I have to get to work so before you get into your day will you unload the dishwasher and get your laundry going?” It’s presented as a favor, not a command. I get what I want, and the kid gets the positive feels from helping out by providing minimal effort. The specter of ‘what if he doesn’t?’ isn’t even a thing–he’ll do it because he likes having clean clothes and he likes me making his dinner, and he won’t get either if I’m mad about having to clean the kitchen or am doing my laundry (adults have seizure rights on all utilities and television).
And to answer manson’s question about the 18 y/o felon and my daughter–I’d be taken completely off guard and would stop short of breaking out the ether to keep her in, and that’s only because I don’t have any ether. I’m not perfect or omniscient, and I’m sorry if I came across that way. But also, the odds of my girls making that sort of choice were so remote, that wasn’t worth worrying about. Hoover Dam is pretty solid, but if a decent sized meteorite splashed down into Lake Mead the pressure wave would probably blow out the dam. That doesn’t mean Hoover Dam isn’t fantastic, it’s just not foolproof. Same with parenting. Some methods are better than others, and some kids respond better to different methods.
That’s a really great post, thank you.
Well the first one lets the kid date the felon so long as she leaves the house before going on the date, right. 
The difference I was trying to convey is the difference between guidelines and enforced rules. By and large, I tried to tell my kids what I thought the right thing to do was, but I rarely tried to force them to do the right thing once they became teens.
That’s cool. The sucky thing about raising kids is, you can read and study and watch and learn from other people, but after hundreds and hundreds of years of parenting advice and “here’s what to do” and “don’t do this”, each kid is different. And we only get one chance to get it right for each child. If we do it wrong, there is no going back. That fact scares me every single day.
Well…
With the last of my minions graduating this very afternoon, I’m ready to be a grandpa. THIS time I’m SURE I can get everything just right. 
Don’t blame/praise yourself overmuch no matter how they turn out, they’re born with the temperament they have unless you’re really good or really bad. Best advice I ever got: “You can’t make them be you.” So just keep throwing experiences at them and see what they gravitate toward and take your cues from that. Also, noncompliant kids are a pain in the ass, but compliant adults are prey.
I don’t know, I feel like I get a bunch of chances every day to get it right. And when I realize I’ve been getting something wrong, I can change what I’m doing, and, when appropriate, apologize for my mistake in how I’ve been handling something.
And even in the macro sense that I know you mean, chances are very very low that I’ll get it all the way wrong, or all the way right. Probably I’ll do lots of things wrong, and lots of things right. And my kids will be great in some ways, and lacking in others. And just because it’s how these things work, the ways I’ll perceive them as lacking will probably be things that drive me nuts. 
My kids are still little, but at this point, they know they are absolutely loved, they know we have their backs, they know there are boundaries, they know they can achieve a goal with work, and they have two decent, but not perfect, role models. If we can keep those things in place, I think we’ll be in pretty good shape. But I’m also certain we have lots of big screw ups (and small victories) ahead.
Oh, and as for the OP question, it’s definitely patriarchy and misogyny. It’s odd to me that the people focusing on sex differences go right to rape. I don’t think any kid who is too young or immature should be having sex. If it wasn’t just about controlling women’s sexuality, there would be equal concern about boys having sex before they should. It’s not just about a kid being exploited by an older partner. So why only try to control whether/who a girl dates? (Answer: lots of outdated and wrong notions about girls’ worth and value to a family).
Dr. James Dobson once addressed this issue in one of his books. He pointed out that, while there shouldn’t be a sexual double standard, the reason one exists is because women generally have much more to lose in sex than men. Only women get pregnant, women are likelier to feel used, get physically hurt, etc. There are valid, practical reasons why parents are more concerned about daughters than sons.
Well, for starters, the first one doesn’t necessarily apply to that child and only applies in the house: who dates in the house? I thought the whole point was going out of the house! You’re not very familiar with rules-lawyering, are you?
And for seconds, there is a huge difference between “you can’t do this [because I say so]!!!” (three possible responses of which the third one has two possible follow-ups *) and “doing this would be really, really bad for these reasons” (if explained correctly, the response is “oooooh! Oh, OK!”).
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- Hold my beer. (Wheeeeeee!)
- Whatchabet? Put your money where your mouth is, c’mon, what, y’aint got no balls? (I got a couple of my college teachers to back up like this. Curiously enough, their male selves had less balls than my female self. Funny that).
- Oh OK. I can’t.
3a) Goes and does it as soon as the exclamation-signs person has their back turned. (Most likely response when we’re talking teenagers, as it’s the one that will really fuck up with the exclamation-signs person).
3b) Waits until the exclamation-signs person has had to beg for it. (I’ve done this one a few times in professional settings).
Well, I’ve tried very, very hard never to use “because I say so”. I hate that, hated it when I was a kid, and therefore wouldn’t subject my kids to that.
Wow, James Dobson, huh?
Well, those things are all part of the patriarchal system as well. Saying women’s sexuality has to be controlled because women “have much more to lose in sex than men” and then listing the ways that women’s sexuality is controlled is … circular.
In James Dobson’s world, women’s power must be limited and contained. One way of doing this is to impose double standards that disadvantage women. One way of doing that is to impose control over women’s sexuality by penalizing any sexual power or autonomy of women, creating narratives that support the patriarchy (women feel used because “men use women for sex,” etc.). It begs the question because it presumes the patriarchy, and then justifies the differential treatment by pointing out how women are disadvantaged under patriarchy. (Note, I’m not saying these are all conscious decisions that people are necessarily making now. The patriarchy has been built up over a very long time, and certainly a lot of it very incrementally.)
Well, in one critically important way, boys are more vulnerable than girls. Today, in most civilized nations (and in the state where I live) a girl who inadvertantly gets pregnant can get an abortion, and if she wants to carry it to term, she can give it up for adoption, or even abandon it in certain designated place (police departments, emergency rooms) and legally avoid the cost of rearing a child.
If a boy gets a girl pregnant, and she decides to keep it, he’s on the hook for child support for the next 18+ years. And he has no legal options to get off the hook (other than convincing the girl to take one of those choices).
Kids are expensive.