Providing teenage dating help to enable your child to navigate the highways of love and read the road signs to dating success requires a thorough understanding of the millennial teen dating landscape. While the age around which they start pairing off hasn’t changed much (between 12 and 14), the age at which teens become physically and even sexually active certainly has. Young teens may have the desire to drive a car at 13, but that doesn’t mean they should! Instead of waiting for their maturity level to catch up to their decisions driven by desire, teens are heading down a dangerous path with each other at ages as young as 12, 13 and 14! Sometimes younger!

A parent’s concern for their children being physically active at too young an age is as strong as the parental concern that they will steal the car and end up in a ditch! And when teenage dating help demands a solid boundary line of: “wait ‘til you’re married,” teens often drift across that line when no one is looking. With the dwindling role of religion in education and a wide range of upbringings, many teens today are not committed to remaining celibate until marriage and sometimes it only takes a line to be crossed once for there to be a tragic accident.

Teenage Dating Help for the Millennial Parent: The Key to Safe Navigating

What teenage dating help can those parenting teens provide for their kids when the desire is revved up and rarin’ to go? Obviously you don’t want to endorse physical exploration but there are some inevitabilities that those who are parenting teens would do well to understand. Just because kids don’t own a car or have a license yet does not mean they aren’t craving both. The problem is that it is much easier to lock the car in the garage than a hormonal teen! The Internet and cell phones have made it incredibly easy for teens to stay in constant contact with each other. Instead of being forced to wait hours and even days to hear from the object of their affection (via the trusty telephone or in person), teens can spend the entire day messaging each other back and forth without any “dating police” in sight. This facilitates a much faster progression from casual to serious and from plutonic to physical.The array of social media and networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace also puts the dating game on the fast track. And the typical teenage dating help from parents often does not even include the recognition of dating sites on the Internet available to our teens free of charge! Imagine a car dealership where your young teen can go to test drive cars for free without parental permission, supervision or having to meet any requirements! And, they can bring a friend! Welcome to online teen dating!

Teenage dating help that demands that kids preserve their sexual integrity is hard pressed to drive home when they are constantly exposed to sexual images and media. It’s like taking your teen to the car lot every day, letting them see all the “beautiful options” and expecting them to resist the temptation to want to sign on the dotted line. Sex sells. The kids of those parenting teens are becoming aware of their bodies and sexuality at much younger ages and we have advertising, movies and music to thank for that. You can try to isolate your children from this media, but trust this teenage dating help: it would be easier to eliminate all vehicles from every road assuming that it will remove your teen’s desire to drive a car! Because their brains are not fully developed until around the age of 25, the best teenage dating help for parents of millennial teens is to “get in the car” and to help them understand how to safely navigate this uncharted course. The state mandates that those parenting teens ride alongside them when they are learning to drive; why not apply the same principals to relationships and teen dating? Let them steer, teach them how to brake as you gently guide them through experiences that will help them own the decisions they make. The only weapon your teen has against a world fraught with temptation and corruption is their own ability to date defensively and steer clear of unhealthy relationships. And this is something that a solid family foundation, parental wisdom and the right teenage dating help can provide.

What Those Parenting Teens can do

•    Teenage Dating Help #1: Night driving is more dangerous than in the daylight. Apply the same concepts and limit cell phone usage at night: Charge their phone in your bedroom…not theirs.

•    Teenage Dating Help #2: You learned to drive before your teens, right? Why not learn to navigate social media before they do? It is not a matter of “if” but “when”.

•    Teenage Dating Help #3: Those parenting teens must be open with their kids about the physical and emotional consequences of poor decisions. Hitting a guardrail can hurt.

•    Teenage Dating Help #4: Get in the car! Know the “who, what, when, where, how” of dating with the same boundaries as driving.

•    Teenage Dating Help #5: Provide teenage dating help with some “classroom hours” before they get behind the wheel of a real relationship. Talk about peer pressure vs. date pressure and peer pressure and what they can expect.

Some Final Teenage Dating Help for Those Parenting Teens:

Too much control will alienate your kids. The right amount of control and support will compel them to make the most responsible decisions. Best teenage dating help for those parenting teens? Don’t drive blind, don’t tailgate and don’t be an airbag parent deploying only on impact when it’s too late!