“To my surprise, she was very relieved,” Orpinas says.
Just ban dating till they’re 16?įrom 2003 to 2009, as Orpinas was collecting the survey data and spotting the tie between early dating and poor study skills, she admits she forbade her daughter (now in college) from dating till she turned 16. The only real way to find out what counts? You’ll have to have that conversation with your child. Text-only dating is just one facet of the complex early dating scene, along with “more than friends” and “Facebook official” and everything in between. Even when kids are only texting, she says, “parents really need to step in and see how much time they’re spending.” “We had one participant who would talk on the phone from 6 pm to 4 am with her boyfriend,” Orpinas recalls, lamenting the lack of balance in the girl’s life. “It’s definitely an area for further research,” Orpinas says, warning that any relationship-like activity that dominates hours of a middle schooler’s time is a red flag. Are these situations, where kids text incessantly but barely utter a word to one another, count? It’s a gray area - but if you think kids would report them in response to Orpinas’ survey, they probably do. The big questions, then, are what really constitutes dating and when should you start letting your child date? For instance, what about so-called relationships that exist solely via text message - a trend dubbed D8-ing in a Wall Street Journal story. “In the end, it’s some kind of romantic involvement.” Partly, she says, because kids at each stage and grade know what these things mean to them - and that’s more useful for self-reporting survey responses than getting bogged down in a definition, she says. Over the course of her study, Orpinas left the meanings of “dating,” “going out with,” and “going steady” up to the kids’ interpretations. “It’s a risk factor,” she says, “and it’s associated with other problem behaviors.” What is “dating” in middle school, anyway? While it won’t surprise most parents to hear alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs listed as problem behaviors, it’s likely to raise eyebrows that early dating belongs on that same list. Her study, published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence in 2013, is among the first to look at how early dating is related to school work, and the results are pretty clear: “The kids who report little or no dating, their teacher evaluations are consistently higher - and the kids who report dating more, their teacher evaluations are consistently low.” What the study leaves unexplained is whether early dating was associated with broader risk factors for problem behavior - such as low socioeconomic status - or whether early dating was linked to problem behavior irrespective of other risks.
Every year, teachers rated the children’s study skills - such as completing homework, reading assigned chapters, being organized, and doing extra credit work - from high to low. In addition to collecting the kids’ survey responses, Orpinas gathered information from the children’s teachers. The pivotal question, just a single line in the survey, was whether the child “had a boyfriend or girlfriend (someone that you dated, gone out with, gone steady with)” in the previous three months.
#Poor study habits series#
Dating’s effect on studiesĮvery year, she’d ask the students a series of questions about everything from homework habits to whether they’d tried pot. Pamela Orpinas, a child development researcher at the University of Georgia, made this startling discovery over the course of a seven-year longitudinal study where she followed more than 600 kids in Georgia from sixth to twelfth grade. Compared to adolescents who waited or dated early and then reversed their course in high school, early daters reported twice as much drug, tobacco, and alcohol use and dropped out of school at four times the rate. According to research, dating in middle school is tied to poor study habits and even dropping out as well as behaviors such as drinking alcohol and doing drugs.
Turns out, puppy love may not be quite as harmless as it seems. Some consider it a normal step for kids entering adolescence - a rite of passage like acne or being embarrassed by your parents - but it may be time to reconsider. Many adults remember having their first boyfriend or girlfriend in sixth, seventh, or eighth grade.
0 kommentar(er)
