I realize my opinion puts me outside of the mainstream (how can boys and girls get to know each other without dating????), but I just keep watching what goes on in teen "relationships" and I have to say what we have in todays dating scene is just not healthy and productive. I am not even talking about the kids "hooking-up" and having sex even in their early teens, I am talking about kids who just spend so much time being "in love" and mooning over the flavor of the month they have decided that they are going to marry some day, even if they are only 14 right now. I homeschool, so most of the kids that I observe are homescoolers, and fortunately the homeschooling community tends to be more restrained in the area of dating. Yet, I see kid after kid lose interest in their studies, their career goals, and their outside activities because they have "fallen in love" and want to spend their time with that special someone, to whom they will not even speak in six months after they break up.
We don't forbid our kids to date, but we do talk with them from an early age about how dating is a waste of time. So far, our kids have been content to go out in groups and not get serious about anyone in their early to middle teens. They seem to understand that serious dating as a teen is very time consuming and takes away from more important things at this time in their lives. Of course, I still have a 15 year old and 11 year old. There is lots of time for me to have to eat my words.
A friend of mine, who also hates the whole early teen dating thing, thinks that parents are so relieved that their kids are normal (read: not gay) that they are happy for their kids to have boyfriends/girlfriends at 12 years old. How sad that they can't just be kids and be friends without worrying about who likes whom, who is speaking to whom and not, and who can flirt with whom without making their best friend mad.
I am so glad I am not a teenager.
---Katie
4 comments:
Katie,
Glad to see you on the blogosphere. NickQueen.com alerted me to your new blog and I hope to come back often.
Concerning your post on "Teen dating...," I can relate in that I was one of those teens who put off all things while I was "in love." Luckily, I married the girl I have been dating since 16 years of age, so I wasn't so far off. Looking back though, how stupid was I to take this sort of approach to dating. I have noticed that this seems to happen among men more than women. Would you agree? I just remember my wife (back then - my girlfriend) thinking I was a little out of whack for acting the way I did. She was more mature than me and didn't fall into that same trap.
Hi, found your blog through "New Christian Blog showcase." This is a great post. I am only fairly recently out of my teens (by a few years, anyway, just turned 23,) and I found that dating WAS a waste of time. I didn't have a "flavor of the month" per se, I wasn't constantly dating someone, but I saw the pain all my friends went through that WERE always in and out of "relationships."
I see it more with girls, but that could be because I understand them better...
I *always* had a crush on somebody and spent lots of time daydreaming about him, talking about him, writing his name all over my notebook, agonizing over when I might see him again - I just wish I had put my energy into more productive things. I was shy, fortunately, so I did not date a lot or have any really serious boyfriends before I met my husband. What I see now is girls who spend months dating this guy, break up, spend months dating that guy, break up, and so on. Each time they are sure they are in love and their lives center on the guy. That has got to get hard on one's heart.
It was like that when I was a teen. It was actually pretty cool. Of course, I wasn't a Christian, so the whole pressure-of-sex question was irrelevant.
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