As mentioned in an earlier post, my older S is in a long-term relationship and they stay with us sometimes and we go on vacations together and rent a joint house or condo. It’s not awkward to us. However, my older S did live at home for two stints of 6 months each when he was younger and single. Definitely he never brought anyone home for a short-term “visit” and actually we never met any of his dates. We have only met those he is in a long-term relationship with. I’m not sure what all his dates involved as we didn’t interrogate him. I don’t think of S as the hook-up type but again, we don’t pry into that sort of thing and he is an adult. I think living at home did limit his romantic adventures, but that seems normal. Unless one lives in a separate apartment (like basement) in your parent’s house, it would seem difficult to bring a hook-up/one-night stand home.
I will certainly allow my adult children to live with us if needed. However, I do want them to move out eventually. Making life too easy may prolong their dependence. This is one area where I will choose to let them struggle in an effort to motivate them to save enough to eventually move out. As said before…they will find a way. I just don’t have to make it easy for them
I’ve heard of folks charging rent (and secretly putting it in an account that they are later gifted with when they move out, to help with moving expenses, deposits, etc). So far, S has had no issues paying all his expenses and thinking about buying a condo. D is still fully funded by us, but she is pretty careful with money.
My niece lived at home for her first two years of college. She definitely never brought anyone home. I don’t think my brother would have allowed it.She felt she was missing out on the college experience and transferred and is now enjoying a more traditional college experience.
Another neighbor had her college daughter living at home and the one night stand or weekend stand was not appreciated. They had quite a few blow ups over the situation. My neighbor said she wouldn’t have objected to a long term mate but she didn’t like the idea of a stranger in her house. My neighbor is divorced and has a long term friend who she has never had stay over night when her children are in the house even now that they are grown.
Another friend whose S lives at home has a steady gf and the gf stays over fairly often.
We didn’t have this situation but I think if it came up my decision would be based on if we still had younger siblings in the house.
Tbh, I’m surprised about some of the responses here on this thread, but as the saying goes, “that’s what makes horse races.” I can’t, however, understand the attitude that this isn’t a topic relating to college selection. The college years, whether kids were sexually active in HS or not, and whether they’re living at their parents’ house or not, are years where they are figuring out who they are as people and, yes, as sexual beings, lovers, and partners. For that matter, this applies equally to kids who aren’t attending college.
My perspective is that kids will find a way, but it’s a lot better and healthier if they don’t feel that they are doing something shameful that requires sneaking around.
They have to sneak around, we don’t want it in our face. We snuck around and it worked out just fine…lol.
I feel like sneaking around would significantly lessen the chance that a condom would be readily available. .
Anyway, I need to point out that most college students do not have one night stands. This thread makes it sound like an inevitability. . It’s not.
I think that many college students have one night stands. There is a great book on this entitled, appropriately, “Hooking Up.”
It is helpful to remember that historically the restrictions on sexual activity without marriage were based partly on the lack of birth control. Young women lived in residences with chaperones and front desks and had to be in by 9, no men in the room. Bennington College still has a room where the young men would wait for their dates, and play cards. They weren’t allowed near the women’s rooms. These moral limits also served to provide some structure to society, but they were based on biology if you will.
Enter birth control and all the confusion of the 60’s, free love and STD’s!! (And, I guess, Roe versus Wade)
In some ways this comes down to attitudes about sex itself now that pregnancy is not (always) an immediate danger: I
like Ixnay Bob’s attitude:" My perspective is that kids will find a way, but it’s a lot better and healthier if they don’t feel that they are doing something shameful that requires sneaking around. "
But not for any relationship that isn’t steady and consistent and at least seems serious.
Why sneak around? What’s in your face? They’re not going to have sex in front of you. I would assume, like the vast majority of people, it will be done discreetly as it is with any adults.
It’s a normal part of a healthy relationship and human functioning. At a certain age and at a certain point in a relationship, I’d be more concerned if my children were NOT having sex.
I love my kids and respect them as people. With that love and respect, I don’t expect them to go off having very normal intimate relationships in some awkward or unsafe places. In turn, they respect me and the rest of the family enough not to be indiscreet and make things awkward.
It really doesn’t have to be an awkward or even obvious thing at all. It’s all about normalcy and mutual respect.
@compmom would it surprise you to know that statistically, college students’ sexual patterns haven’t changed pretty much at all since the 60s. It remains relatively constant in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and today.
Hook-up culture IS A MYTH. End of story. Unless, of course, you want to say that hook-up culture has existed since this generation’s grandparents’ time (and likely even before then but of course we didn’t start surveying sex patterns until Kinsey-ish.)
Just some of the MANY articles that have come out against hook-up culture… using statistics rather than anecdotal reports.
https://newrepublic.com/article/114287/new-study-says-hookup-culture-myth
http://time.com/88092/hookup-culture-myth-study/
https://daily.jstor.org/campus-hookup-culture-myth-vs-realty/
We weren’t required to sneak around by either of then-BF’s now H’s, parents (or mine, but for other reasons we were rarely there). And we didn’t require it either. Like others say, we weren’t flaunting, and neither did my kids. People spend too much time dwelling on what others are doing behind closed doors, in my opinion.
romanigypsyeyes, all I wrote was that “many colleges students have one night stands.” Do you really disagree with this? I didn’t say anything about comparisons with other times.
I think it depends on what campuses we are talking about. The more elite, liberal campuses may have more of this because students are busy and ambitious and don’t want long term relationships, which take time and energy.
There may or may not be an increase in amount of activity, but I do believe the casualness of encounters has gone up. Of course, you are a young person and I am a much much older person so my perspective goes back to pre-birth control days.
Off topic so we can agree to disagree, and perhaps it just depends on the social and geographical context.
ps it literally took 10 seconds to find an alternative view http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=126813&page=1 I am not going to continue because we can all find studies that support our views, and I wasn’t arguing one way or the other initially, anyway
If this is a thing, I don’t think that’s the reason why. Plenty of busy and ambitious people make time for what’s important to them, and relationships are important to many people.
Just to throw my 2c in, I suspect the ‘hook up’ culture exists, and thanks to mobile apps it is easier then ever, it was a lot harder to ‘hook up’ pre the internet, that is for sure, you actually had to go someplace, meet someone, and then ‘hook up’ lol.
However, I suspect it isn’t as prevalent as claims are made, it makes for good media, but I wonder how true it really is. I think there are kids hooking up, but I think if the numbers have increased it likely is because it is easier, swiping a picture on an app is easier than getting dressed up (or not), go to a place, find someone, etc. My son goes to a music conservatory, so perhaps that isn’t the best indication, but being in the Boston area he has friends at Harvard the MIT and BU and BC and Northeastern, and he said he didn’t think it was a prevelant as the media makes it out to be.
As far as doing it at home when the kid is living there, we haven’t run into that, my s has had gf’s staying over, and to be honest it would be hard for me to tell them no sex, I might say if they are going to do it please do so in one of the other bedrooms (his bedroom is shares a wall with ours, which would be kind of uncomfortable), but it would be kind of hypocritical of me to make that rule for my son when I don’t have a problem with people not married having sex.
On the other hand, this also comes down to a matter of values, too. While I suspect even in the strongest “no sex under my roof before you are married” homes kids do have sex with their so’s, those rules are up to the parents. As far as objecting to hook ups versus relationships, my problem with that would be bringing home someone he/she doesn’t know and potential impact on the household, about safety, he could pick up a girl who was casing homes for someone else to rob, same with a D, how the heck do you know? It might be more safe if he hooked up with a fellow student, but the point being you don’t know that person, whereas with a relationship, that would likely screen out someone with ill intentions.
“his bedroom is shares a wall with ours, which would be kind of uncomfortable”
I assume some sex happened at some point on your side of the wall and was done in such a way that your son wasn’t uncomfortable or even aware? 
I have had 2 of my post-college young adult (22-23ish) kids who had gone to out-of-state colleges staying at my house (basement apartment) at different times over the last couple years. Neither were dating anyone during this time, and it never was an issue. There are younger siblings in the house, and our expectation is that sex is for married couples only. If it became an issue it wouldn’t be going on in my house.
The bigger issue for H and me is having an adult kid in the house when WE had gotten used to more privacy
It wasn’t that long ago that even going away to colleges meant one still had to sneak around to avoid school disciplinary measures including the risk of possible disciplinary suspension/expulsion.
For instance, even Oberlin…a college known for being more progressive than most colleges had dorm mothers, segregated dorms by gender, and even had the absurd rule that if a member of the opposite sex visited a given dorm, the door must always be open and at least one foot must always be planted on the floor.
The last rule existed well into the mid-1960’s according to an older alum who attended during that period and the absurdity of such rules even to most of the undergrads of that period factored into them organizing protests to the point the administration eliminated that rule sometime in the mid-late '60s.
A yearbook from the early '50s also had cartoons/pictures of “proper parlor room conduct” when a member of the opposite sex(seems to be exclusively males visiting female dorms).
This was also one area where my father’s being effectively academically accelerated by being allowed to skip high school and start college at ~16 after passing the exceedingly competitive college entrance exams likely helped him.
He was too young to be conscripted before college and back then they had a severe shortage of junior officers so if one completed college before serving the mandatory service obligation, he could complete it as a conscripted lieutenant. Not that it would have mattered much as most undergrads of that era in the ROC(Taiwan) were far too poor to date by most accounts, had practically no privacy in dorms(6-8 students packed into a dormroom the size of a small American double), segregation of dorms by gender, society was even more conservative about pre-marital sex than '50s USA, and a mandatory nighttime curfew. The last is enforced by locked dorm room gates after curfew though a few undergrads did make a good game of scaling the gate and sneaking back in without being caught by dorm guards even though there were severe penalties for being caught(expulsion and the associated stigma which came with it for the individual student and family).
There was also the added factor that back then if a male student had wanted to go steady with a female classmate that her family…especially the father would be less than thrilled if they found that student had yet to complete his mandatory service obligation beforehand due to a perception of lack of maturity, possible lack of civic virtue* and practical reasons(relationship not likely to last with 2+ year separation with little contact due to harsher training regimen due to greater impending dangers of invasion from the CCP and ongoing skirmishes).
- Families, especially men of my father's generation and older regarded the mandatory service obligation in the ROC(Taiwan) in the same light as paying one's taxes...especially considering this was the period when the CCP were still actively trying to invade and make the ROC(Taiwan) part of Maoist China.
Regarding the maturity aspect, this attitude is still very strong in South Korea according to a few Korean immigrant friends as if an 18+ year old male was behaving immaturely/complaining too much about perceived inconsequential matters, the common retort from older men is “have you completed your mandatory service yet”.
This really would come down to one’s attitudes about a behaviour and whether it should be encouraged, discouraged, or tolerated.
Sex can create a number of problems that are not physical in nature, but emotional. I want my kids to focus on school. I want them to set a good example for their younger siblings.
I am not naive. Mammals have a need. I think the most normal thing is for parents to discourage/forbid premarital sex in their homes and for college-aged children to work around it by being creative.
D1 will be living at home. She is a straight-laced kid right now. She barely dates, much less consider bringing a guy home overnight unless he is planning to sleep in the guest room.
It’s normal to forbid something based on a purely arbitrary cultural milestone (ie marraige)?
Everyone is entitled to their own rules and whatnot but let’s not start throwing around words like “normal.”
Do I disagree that there are many? Nope. Do I disagree that there is such a thing as “hook up” culture? Yup.
And I was disagreeing with the idea that sexual patterns now are different than in the past (which you did talk about).
Women did have ways of curtailing their fertility and those who didn’t just had quickie marriages if they did get pregnant and didn’t terminate (which MANY did even pre-20th C). The only thing that’s really changed is that we don’t culturally force people into marriages just because of a pregnancy.
Wow, how times have changed.
In the 1970s, when I was in college, absolutely none of my friends’ parents would have let their daughter’s boyfriend stay in her room overnight. None. I remember one conversation with a friend whose parents wouldn’t let her and her boyfriend go on a weekend trip together – this was a couple who had been together for at least a year, had met at college and had had plenty of opportunities to have sex. Her parents were adamant that she couldn’t share a bed with him with their knowledge. No way, no how.
My daughter didn’t have a boyfriend in high school or college, so this was a non-issue for us. If she were to visit us with her current boyfriend, who she’s been dating for 1+ year, I would expect them to share the bedroom.