Dear 21st Century Dad, my fifteen year old daughter wants to join her nineteen year old boyfriend for a family get together at his mother’s house in Vancouver, a day’s travel from here, for five days. I like the boy. His parents are separated; he lives with his dad here. I’ve met his dad once and I don’t like him. He doesn’t like my daughter. We are not exactly on speaking terms and I know from talking to the boy that his mother and father don’t communicate at all. No wonder considering his father. I can hardly ask him for a reference about his ex-wife.
My daughter has always been pretty good around curfews and the boy has always been respectful to me. They have been going together for a year and they are really close. I know he’s had STD tests and he is negative. I’ve talked to my daughter about sex and I have put her on the pill but it won’t come into effect for two weeks. My daughter is persistent in asking for what she wants. What do you recommend?
Dear It’s Your Call But,
We never have liked the disparity in ages between our two suitors. However, our daughter and her boyfriend have had a relationship for a year now. Contact the mother and get the low down on the sleeping quarters. Modes of sexual conduct, and permissiveness, vary from family to family and it is the last assumption to be relied upon. What we permit in our family could either be viewed as permissive or outdated. Both comparisons mean little if our daughter crosses the last sexual frontier in a frivolous manner.
Many family get togethers are polite affairs and some are arenas that accommodate the bottle and the break out of drugs. Do we know what happens in the Vancouver home? Our daughter’s suitor has had a year long relationship with our daughter; we should be familiar with his habits of intoxication, if he has any. We would talk to her mother to get a sense of her beliefs around recreational drugs and alcohol.
We would swallow our discomfort with the boy’s father. Let’s talk to him. There probably would be no better character reference than this divorced dad. Anything unsettling to us could easily be ironed out with more questions to mother and son.
We would want to know who is to be the chaperone? And will a chaperone be available all the time, and would the chaperone be the same person? We would want to see a schedule for activities, and know who they will be visiting when they become bored with being in the house after a couple of days.
We would make clear what curfew times our daughter has now, and how stringent we would expect the curfew to be maintained.
We would expect our daughter to phone us morning and evening to check in, just a polite and short “this is what I’m up to”, and while she is on the phone, why not just pass the phone to the mother so we can have a polite, “I hope our daughter is helping you around the house.”
We would give our daughter an emergency fund to be used only to get a taxi and a bus trip home, and/or be prepared to drive or fly to Vancouver to retrieve her if worse ever came to worse, and she needed our support.
Do we trust our daughter? Do we sound anxious and uptight?
It’s worth it. She’s not eighteen, though the same conditions and anxieties could arise.
If our daughter were absent from her boyfriend for five days, would our decision to say yes or no alter what these two teens intend to do with their lifetime together?
Society applauds when it learns of marriages lasting the span of a lifetime. Are we being naive seeing these two together for a lifetime?
Key into YouTube:
1. The Monkees- The Chaperone Clip
2. keyara and friends
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