Not everyone is ready at the same time for intimate relationships. It is a parent’s job to analyze the child’s readiness for any given activity and consent or restrict the extent a child participates in said activity.</p>
<p>A better example to compare dating to would be driving. Most kids at age 16 are ready to get behind the wheel for some types of driving (familiar roads, daylight, good weather, etc.) to start off. Not all kids are ready.</p>
<p>However, when you give the keys to the kids, you set boundaries for the use of the car. No teenage passengers (too distracting), don’t stay out too late (tired driving), etc. You cannot be there to enforce the rules, but you do expect them to be observed. </p>
<p>Kids make mistakes, though. Some through dishonesty(in the relationship), some through inexperience.</p>
<p>It is up to a parent to prepare the child to minimize the mistakes of inexperience, but we too are human and don’t perfectly understand our child’s level of development in certain areas, nor sometimes do we anticipate the potential problems our child will face.</p>
<p>We make judgements (sometimes erroneous on either side) as to how broad of an experience our child will have. It is up to the child to better communicate their level of readiness for certain activities if they believe they are ready for more responsibility. This is not done through wining or making poor analogies to other non-related subjects. It is about discussing the issues of a situation and how they have been preparing themselves to deal with it in a mature fashion. </p>
<p>These discussions, unless done on a regular basis (the mark of an excellent parent-child relationship) can be very uncomfortable for most teenagers and their parents. Talking about intimate subjects is difficult without a level of trust. It is done slowly and in measured amounts over time, not on a one-time basis. Let’s face it, if a child is not comfortable talking about the intimate moments with the member of the opposite sex with their parents, they may very well not be ready to deal with it and what it lead to in real life.</p>
<p>When the lack of such an honest relationship with parents exists, you will find that teenagers often sneak off to do the forbidden-fruit activity, be it with dating or with driving. They take risks they may not be prepared for. And when these activities are discovered, the parents often react by taking away more priveleges from the teenager than just the offending area of behavior. Without adequate and prompt followup to fix the relationship, this often starts the downward spiral of both behavior and relationship.