Why Do Some Parents Tell Their Kids They Can’t Date Until Marriage?
The charcoal grill smoked in the corner of our backyard last Saturday, and Mara wiped ketchup off her 12-year-old’s shirt while we talked about her oldest, Lila, who just turned 16. “Jake from math class asked her to homecoming,” I said, remembering Lila gushing to my daughter after school. Mara laughed and shook her head. “Lila knows our rule: no dating until she’s ready for marriage. I told her homecoming’s fine as a group, but one-on-one dates? Not happening.”
I’ll admit, my first thought was that sounded extreme. I grew up in a house where casual dating in high school was allowed, even encouraged, as long as grades stayed up. But as we talked longer, I started to understand why so many parents land on this rule, and it’s not just religious conservatism or a desire to control their kids, like a lot of people assume.
Mara grew up in a small town outside Toledo, and her parents had the same rule for her. She broke it when she was 15, started sneaking around with a 17-year-old on the football team. Ten months later he broke up with her for a senior girl, and she skipped a whole week of school, too sad to get out of bed. Her GPA dropped from a 3.8 to a 2.9 that semester, and she almost lost the spot she’d earned in a summer pre-college program. She had a pregnancy scare her freshman year of college, right after starting a relationship with a guy she met in her dorm, and almost lost her academic scholarship over the missed classes while she sorted it out. “I don’t want Lila to waste three years of her life crying over someone who won’t even be in her life after high school,” she said, flipping a burger on the grill. “When I was her age, I changed everything I liked, everything I wore, everything I cared about to fit what my boyfriend wanted. I didn’t figure out I loved painting until after I graduated, when I didn’t have someone else telling me it was a stupid hobby.”
I’ve heard almost the exact same thing from Raj, a dad I know through my kid’s soccer team who isn’t religious at all. He grew up in Los Angeles, his parents were liberal artists who let him date whoever he wanted whenever he wanted. He started dating at 14, lost his virginity at 16, and spent most of high school and college jumping from one serious relationship to the next. “I never learned how to be alone,” he told me over coffee a few months ago. “By the time I got engaged at 24, I realized I had no idea what I wanted out of life, only what my ex-fiancée wanted for me. I broke it off, and it took me three years of being single to figure out who I was. I don’t want my daughter to waste that much time.”
A high school counselor friend told me recently that she’s not surprised this rule is still common. More than half of the teens she sees for weekly counseling are struggling primarily with romantic relationship stress, more than grades, friend drama, or family tension. Early romantic relationships, especially exclusive ones in middle and high school, take up so much emotional space that it’s hard for teens to do the work of figuring out their own identity. That’s the core of what these parents are pushing back against: they’ve lived that distraction and heartbreak, and they want to spare their kids that.
The biggest mistake parents make with this rule is just laying it down without explanation, which almost guarantees kids will sneak around. But the parents I know who do this well don’t do that. Mara doesn’t forbid Lila from spending time with boys. She lets her text, hang out in groups, go to movies and bonfires with a mix of friends, so Lila still gets to build connections and figure out who she likes, without the pressure of an exclusive one-on-one relationship. Raj has an open deal with his 17-year-old daughter: if she ever feels like she really likes someone and wants to date one-on-one, she just has to come sit down and talk with him and his wife first. They’ll go over boundaries, what she expects from the relationship, what risks she’s taking, and then they’ll decide together. It’s not an iron rule no matter what, it’s a default that works for their family right now.
Last week, Lila came over to pick up my daughter for a group trip to the movies. She was wearing scuffed white Converse, carrying her paint-stained sketchbook covered in Studio Ghibli stickers, and she mentioned the boy from her art class gave her the blue scrunchie on her wrist. She laughed when I asked her what she thought of her parents’ rule, and said it’s actually kind of a relief. All her friends are stressing about when their boyfriend will text back, or if they’re pretty enough for their next date, and she doesn’t have to carry that. She’s got a portfolio put together for art school applications, and she’s training for a 5K with her youth group, and she gets to like who she likes without changing anything about herself for someone else.
There’s no one right rule for dating, of course. Some kids date in high school and figure out what they want early, and come out of it fine. I still haven’t decided what I’ll do when my 14-year-old daughter gets her first date request. But I get it now, why so many parents land on this. It’s not about being strict or old-fashioned. It’s about parents bringing their own hard lessons to the table, and trying to give their kid a few more years to be themselves before they share themselves with someone else. There’s no guarantee it’ll work out perfectly, but it’s hard to fault them for trying.
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