Dancing Around the Issue: Thoughts on Teen Dating

Parents of High School students, it’s that time of year again, school is in and homecoming is just around the corner. That means for many parents, it is likely that your child will be invited to attend the big dance by a special guy or girl from their school. For many families, this can bring up all sorts of fun conversations centered around the idea of dating relationships. My hope in writing this article is to give you some insight into how we go about these conversations here in SMCC Student Ministries.

First, we encourage our students that this is a season of life to focus on becoming the person they want to be. It’s easy to get laser focused on wanting to date the cutest guy or girl at school. We want them to know that the choices they make today when it comes to dating will affect the person they are tomorrow. Our goal is to get them to shift their focus from asking “Who do I want to date?” to a more important question, “Who do I want to be?” We believe that great relationships, whether that’s now or in the future, come from being the right person not finding the “right” person.

Second, if students choose to date, we encourage them to honor Christ, to honor the person they are dating and to honor their future spouse. Honoring Christ means that we honor His values and standards when it comes to relationships. We also teach our students that part of honoring Christ means that you choose to honor your parents’ rules when it comes to dating. We think it is best left up to you as the parent to decide whether or not your child is ready to date.

Third, we teach our students that healthy relationships require good boundaries. Boundaries are the guardrails that keep us from falling off the cliff relationally. Guardrails help protect healthy intimacy in the future for your student and for the person he or she is dating. They help our students say no to something now, so they can say yes to something better later. In a healthy relationship, there should be both emotional and physical boundaries.

Here is a tension that I have found helpful to discuss with your child in this conversation – the longer you choose to be in a single dating relationship, the harder it becomes to honor Christ in that relationship. To be frank, statistics show that the longer a student is in a dating relationship, the more likely they are to engage in sexual activity.  We want to help our students play the tape forward and ask the question, “Where is this relationship headed?” and “What makes you think your relationship is going to be different?”

The best relationship decisions come from pre-decisions – making decisions before you even start a dating relationship. Some questions I have found helpful in these conversations with students are as follows:

• What do you think are some good boundaries for a Christ honoring relationship?
• Why do you want to have boundaries in your relationship?
• What does it look like to honor the person you are dating?
• What does it look like to honor their future spouse?
• What are your hopes for this relationship?

My hope is that you can use this article and these questions to start a conversation with your student. It can be tempting to dance around the issue of dating relationships, but I think your student will appreciate your initiative to guide them in this important season of life.

Thanks for reading. As always, I hope you have found this read helpful and hopeful.