Dealing With Teen Dating

When teens start to date, parents start getting anxious. For any number of reasons, teenage romance can cause parents to go at each other's throats and struggle to affect the behavior of their children. The educational bureaucracy focuses on teaching safe sexual practices in attempts to bring down disease and pregnancy rates among teenagers. Although disease and pregnancy rates have been steadily declining in recent years, the anxiety around teenage romance seems to remain at a high level.

This phenomenon has been going on for centuries. "Romeo and Juliet" tells the tale of young love attacked by angry parents. Although the book is commonly assigned in high schools, few seem to remember the end of the play, in which the teenagers end up dead and the parents are distraught, all their efforts to break up the relationship having backfired utterly.

Once the process of puppy love begins, any hard-and-fast opposition to the relationship from parents is likely to backfire completely. Part of the problem that parents face is that once your children have started dating, any of your efforts to change their behavior are probably going to be too little, too late. Children take their cues for what a romantic relationship should be like from their parents. If their parents had a mutually abusive relationship, the children will likely end up in similar situations. The best way to prevent teenagers from getting in to trouble with love is for the parents to create a solid foundation of values for the child to work from. Parents can't manage how their children conduct their relationships like Soviet central planners setting wheat production levels. Positive values need to be inculcated from early childhood.

Labels: dating, dating relationships, family relationships, teen dating