Advice from parents with teenage daughters

[StrangeGator]

Just got wind of the first pregnancy rumor from my kids' graduating class. Former soccer teammate of my daughter's has been down at SIU and came home pregnant. Her dad is a prick. My ears are still ringing from standing next to him while he yelled at her from the sidelines. I would not have wanted to be around when she broke that news. Apparently she is not going back to school, nor is she welcome at home.

[toon66]

Originally Posted by g8orbill

I have 4 daughters and 1 son

we started out early getting them grounded in their Faith-then we constantly stressed decisions have consequences and that bad decisions are usually accompanied with bad consequences- I also told them about boys like I was and that the line if you loved me you would let me is total BS and that if a boy every said you cannot leave me in this condition to not worry-it would go away on its own

we also put them on the pill before they entered college(except for our 17 year old who is still in high school)

we did not allow them to date until they were 16 and then the boy had to come and meet me and talk with me prior to (and not on the night of) their first date-the last thing I said to every boy on the first meeting was-"if you do anything to her you shouldn't do then that is exactly what I am going to do to you". One kid got a little mouthy with me and there was no date EVER for him-I ran into his mother at Publix about 2 weeks after this incident and she asked me why I would not allow my then 16 year old to go out with her son-I told her exactly what I said and exactly what he said-she merely said oh and that was the end of it-until the next Friday night when he came up to me at the football game and apologized-I still did not allow them to go out

when ever they went anywhere I would always say- "remember life is about decisions and bad decisions are usually accompanied with bad consequences". My 17 year old rolls her eyes but she always says yes sir-the rest are doing just fine in their lives. I am a blessed man

I like your style. My niece is 14, bright and drop dead. Her parents are very solid and firm but you can guarantee I will be there reinforce the message when dating time comes.

Thanks for your post.

[toon66]

Originally Posted by StrangeGator

Just got wind of the first pregnancy rumor from my kids' graduating class. Former soccer teammate of my daughter's has been down at SIU and came home pregnant. Her dad is a prick. My ears are still ringing from standing next to him while he yelled at her from the sidelines. I would not have wanted to be around when she broke that news. Apparently she is not going back to school, nor is she welcome at home.

Her dad is a prick. Terrible thing to do.

[gator10010]

I can't believe all of these fathers waiting until college to get them the pill.
And don't kid yourself chances are your daughters are not waiting until college to have sex.

I don't care what rules, you have/had in place or how strict you were, if you waited till college you were late.

College is too late, you need to get real in your thinking and start in high school. To the OP who is concerned about his daughter telling him the truth or not about the acne excuse.......do you really care? Maybe it is for acne, maybe it is for sex, either way she is asking for birth control and that in itself should provide you with some level of comfort.

So what if your daughter is not comfortable telling her dad she wants to have sex, what daughter would be comfortable with that conversation at 18 years of age?

If it is for acne great! If it is for sex, at least she is being responsible even if she is hiding behind the acne excuse. Just because you feel like she can tell you anything doesn't mean she is comfortable telling you everything.

[StrangeGator]

Originally Posted by gator10010

I can't believe all of these fathers waiting until college to get them the pill.
And don't kid yourself chances are your daughters are not waiting until college to have sex.

I don't care what rules, you have/had in place or how strict you were, if you waited till college you were late.

College is too late, you need to get real in your thinking and start in high school. To the OP who is concerned about his daughter telling him the truth or not about the acne excuse.......do you really care? Maybe it is for acne, maybe it is for sex, either way she is asking for birth control and that in itself should provide you with some level of comfort.

So what if your daughter is not comfortable telling her dad she wants to have sex, what daughter would be comfortable with that conversation at 18 years of age?

If it is for acne great! If it is for sex, at least she is being responsible even if she is hiding behind the acne excuse. Just because you feel like she can tell you anything doesn't mean she is comfortable telling you everything.

I guess you weren't following too closely, though it has become a long thread. I didn't for a moment stand in the way of her getting the pills and I didn't confront her about it. I just wanted her and her mom to have an honest, open discussion about it.

I don't think anything is going on, but she won't even say that to her mom. We knew exactly what was going on in high school and there was never a need to bring this up. You don't force birth control pills on a girl who has never had a boyfriend and has only had one date. I'm not naive enough to think that I knew everything that she was doing, but we knew where she was and for the most part and who she was with and she was always home before curfew. This town is two miles east to west and three miles north to south. Almost 60,000 people are crammed into that space, so it's pretty hard to hide and these girls never tried to. They would go into the city a lot, to shop or go to concerts, but they were always back at a reasonable hour. Some of the time, I dropped them off and/or picked them up, but they were always there waiting for me. They got into some mischief, but it never involved boys. They moved in a posse of five to 12 girls, few of whom had boyfriends at any given time. Most of them have still never had boyfriends.

That was always my biggest concern about her going off to college. She didn't have any experience with boys. There wasn't a context for discussing sex. We could talk about being safe and being smart, but not in a situation where she was with a young man that she was out for the evening with. I'm more worried about her not knowing how to connect on a meaningful level. She's old enough to have sex and mature in most respects, but when it comes to relationships, she's more like a 14 year-old. I don't think she's prepared for a mature relationship with a young man in any way.

She's not hiding behind acne. She's hiding from relationships. The only reason she wants the acne to go away is to look better for the girls. She's a lot more about competing with girls than attracting boys. She's a bit lost without her posse who are scattered between eight or ten colleges. I hope these other girls are moving forward. Hope some of them actually need birth control.

[rpmGator]

There was an old joke about guy's who got fixed so they wouldn't have to wear a condom. When HIV hit, the joke was, the risk of surgery and you sitll have to wear the condom anyhow.

Pills can keep grandkids away, condoms save your kid's life.

[OaktownGator]

Originally Posted by LeafUF

No, equating a fraternity member to a gang member does not make me feel better. Over my four and half years at UF I lived my fraternity house for about three and there were plenty of girls who hung out a lot. None of them were raped or drugged or had any harm come to them at all.

The rest of what you say is true though it basically includes just about any social situation. Concert, bar, night club, frat party, house party, no matter where you are or who you are around you need to be smart. You aren't going to know everyone or everything when you are out socializing but you can go with friends and be smart.

The bolded paragraph is the main point I was trying to get across.

I'm not picking on frats specifically. Guys that age when horny, combined with intoxicants of various types do bad chit at times, even if they're "nice guys". And TBH, I don't think you should be so confident no one was raped at your frat house. You didn't hear about any and that's certainly a good thing, but it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

From a Harvard Study:

A RECENT DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE study estimated that a woman has between a one in four and one in five chance of being raped during her college years
(Fisher et al., 2000). Koss and colleagues (1987) assessed the amount and type of unwanted sexual contact in a national sample of 32 institutions of higher education. They found that more than 15% of college women had experienced a completed rape since the age of 14, and an additional 12% had experienced attempted rape. Of these
women, 17% had experienced either rape or attempted rape in the previous year. Abbey (2002) reviewed the literature and concluded that similar prevalence rates have been found in studies conducted at colleges throughout the United States
(Abbey et al., 1996a; Copenhaver and Grauerholz, 1991; Mills and Granoff, 1992; Muehlenhard and Linton, 1987).

Alcohol-related sexual assault is a common problem among college students (Abbey, 2002). Previous studies have shown that alcohol use is associated with at least 50%
of sexual assaults on female college students (Abbey, 2002; Abbey et al., 1996a; Koss et al., 1987; Presley et al., 1997; Received: April 8, 2003. Revision: September 2, 2003.)

ABSTRACT. Objective: Heavy alcohol use is widespread among college students, particularly in those social situations where the risk of rape rises. Few studies have provided information on rapes of college women that occur when they are intoxicated. The purpose of the present study was to present prevalence data for rape under the condition of intoxication when the victim is unable to consent and to identify college and individual-level risk factors associated with that condition. Method: The study utilizes data from 119 schools participating in three Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study surveys. The analytic sample of randomly selected students includes 8,567 women in the 1997 survey, 8,425 in the 1999 survey, and 6,988 in the 2001 survey. Results: Roughly one in 20 (4.7%)
women reported being raped. Nearly three quarters (72%) of the victims experienced rape while intoxicated. Women who were under 21, were white, resided in sorority houses, used illicit drugs, drank heavily in high school and attended colleges with high rates of heavy episodic drinking were at higher risk of rape while intoxicated. Conclusions: The high proportion of rapes found to occur when women were intoxicated indicates the need for alcohol prevention programs on campuses that address sexual assault, both to educate men about what constitutes rape and to advise women of risky situations. The findings that some campus environments
are associated with higher levels of both drinking and rape will help target rape prevention programs at colleges. (J. Stud. Alcohol 65: 37-45, 2004) Testa, 2002, for a review). Koss (1988) reported that 74% of the perpetrators and 55% of the victims of rape in her nationally representative sample of college students had been
drinking alcohol. Muehlenhard and Linton (1987) found that alcohol was consumed by 55% of the men and 53% of the women who reported sexual assault on a date. They also found that sexually assaultive dates were more likely than nonassaultive dates to involve heavy alcohol consumption by both men and women. Harrington and Leitenberg (1994) also found that 55% of the sexual assaults reported by college women involved alcohol consumption. Ullman and Breklin (2000) reported that 100% of the incidents in which the victim was drinking involved perpetrator drinking.

From a more recent DOJ funded study, similar statistics along with an estimate of fewer than 1 in 8 rapes ever getting reported:

Rape among Women in U.S. Colleges
Estimates are that 673,000 of nearly 6 million women (11.5%) currently attending American colleges have ever been raped.2 This includes an estimated half-million college women who have been forcibly raped, 160,000 who have experienced drug-facilitated rape, and over 200,000 who have experienced incapacitated rape.1 During the past year alone, 300,000 college women (5.2%) were raped: nearly 200,000 who have been forcibly raped, nearly 100,000 who have experienced drug-facilitated rape, and over 100,000 who have experienced incapacitated rape.

Among college women, about 12% of rapes were reported to law enforcement. Consistent with the national sample, victims of drug-facilitated or incapacitated rape were less likely than victims of forcible rape to report to the authorities. Barriers to reporting rape incidents to law enforcement among college women included: not wanting others to know about the rape, fear of retaliation, perception of insufficient evidence, uncertainty about whether a crime was committed or harm intended, and uncertainty about whether the incident was “serious enough”. Injury was reported for 47% of forcible rape incidents and 20% of drug-facilitated or incapacitated incidents. Medical care was received following 14% of forcible rape incidents and 19% of drug-facilitated or incapacitated incidents. Perpetrators were known to victims in most rape cases.

[StrangeGator]

Thanks for reminding me Oaktown. I'd pass it along to my daughter, but she's probably been forced to sit through numerous lectures that offered up those statistics. Had to sit though one myself at her orientation. I'm glad that we have been able to talk openly about alcohol and drug use. She's not abstinent, but she is cautious. She's not a risk taker, not even in the good ways. I taught both my kids how to ride public transportation safely when they were 12, so she has a good concept of the need for vigilance. There's not much more I can do but let go. She heads back next weekend.

[OaktownGator]

Originally Posted by StrangeGator

Thanks for reminding me Oaktown. I'd pass it along to my daughter, but she's probably been forced to sit through numerous lectures that offered up those statistics. Had to sit though one myself at her orientation. I'm glad that we have been able to talk openly about alcohol and drug use. She's not abstinent, but she is cautious. She's not a risk taker, not even in the good ways. I taught both my kids how to ride public transportation safely when they were 12, so she has a good concept of the need for vigilance. There's not much more I can do but let go. She heads back next weekend.

It really sounds like you've done what you can for her Strange - prepared her well to make smart decisions, and made her confident to do so. I think that's the best thing we can do for our kids. And keep the communications as open as possible.

Best to you and her.

And keep us up to date on any developments with that friend of hers (come hither eyes) you mentioned earlier.

[StrangeGator]

Originally Posted by OaktownGator

It really sounds like you've done what you can for her Strange - prepared her well to make smart decisions, and made her confident to do so. I think that's the best thing we can do for our kids. And keep the communications as open as possible.

Best to you and her.

And keep us up to date on any developments with that friend of hers (come hither eyes) you mentioned earlier.

Don't expect any. If I come on to her, I'm dead. If she comes on to me, I'm still dead. (Who would believe me?) She's not even the hottest of her friends, just the most overtly sexual.

[toon66]

Originally Posted by StrangeGator

Don't expect any. If I come on to her, I'm dead. If she comes on to me, I'm still dead. (Who would believe me?) She's not even the hottest of her friends, just the most overtly sexual.

American Beauty

[StrangeGator]

Originally Posted by toon66

American Beauty

At least they're out of high school.

Recently had a bit of a crush on 24 year old girl/woman I met at an Aikido seminar in Grand Rapids last spring, then saw her again at two local seminars. Walked her back to her car after the last one and had a nice chat. She said to look her up next time I'm in Grand Rapids. We just got a note from her sensei about a memorial service for her. She committed suicide last week.

Not really related to the original post, except that we need to stay close to our children even after they're no longer children. They're headed out into a difficult world and they're not all emotionally prepared.

Can't stop thinking about that girl. She was beautiful, but there was something a little sad about her. Trying to imagine what went wrong in her life that made her want to end it. I've been sure to hug my kids every day since then, and will every day till they head back to school. They will never have to wonder whether or not their parents loved them.

[wci347]

Since she was honest enough to break the ice, I think your response should be to level with her that there is an added benefit to them which you are sure she is well aware of, and that the discussion should not be an encouragement for her to use them or as a green light for uninhibited indulgences. But if she is going to use them for the more widely used purpose, that you would expect her to use discretion and caution in that regard. End of conversation.

Raised two teenage daughters who are now in their 20s both college grads, one's in grad school and practically engaged. The other is working in Hawaii and dating. Neither have had any children, abortions, or STDs. Thank God.