Is is ok for a kid to not date (or interact with) the opposite sex until college?

[Anonymous]

I have two friends from college who went to all girls’ schools. Both did coed club sports and had high school boyfriends (one from ski team and one from swim team) and both dated normally in college and ended up marrying guys they met after college.

I also have a mom friend who was homeschooled, wasn’t allowed to date or even hang out with boys at all. She went to a Christian college and met and married her first boyfriend. He was a terrible person who had an affair and also had a shopping problem and blew through their savings and all the money set aside for their child’s education. This is an extreme case, but she missed so many signs along the way. She told me that when they were dating he used one of those laptop privacy screens so she could never see his screen and she was never allowed to use it. This continued after they got married. She also told me that while they were dating, he would go through her texts on her phone and had access to her gmail account but she couldn’t see or access his. She told me that she didn’t know that these were red flags. She is doing great now, but I blame her parents for sheltering her so much.

[Anonymous]

My daughter went to an all girls school for MS and HS and it was a great experience for her. We put her in co-ed extracurriculars and she participated in clubs at school that had activities with kids from co-ed schools, public and private. She is at a co-ed college and has friends who are male and female. She seems to be managing fine, but we didn’t choose and all girls school to sequester her. We chose it to give her an academic environment that catered to her.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm surprised at all the negative answers. I went to an all girls' school and didn't interact much with boys until college. I was shy around boys for maybe the first week of college? but in a coed dorm I got over it quickly. I dated in college and grad school and am happily married to a man I met after grad school. Zero regrets about my all girls education and I'd send my daughter to a secular all girls' school in a heartbeat if I could find one around here.

Also, some of my high school classmates dated boys they met at extracurriculars, church, or our brother school. If your DD wants to find boys, she can.

I assume many women have the same experience as you, likely the majority of women who go to all girls’ schools. But it’s the smaller number of women who have difficulty that is concerning. Even if it’s a small minority, the repercussions of feeling socially awkward and even getting married to a bad match is bad enough that it’s worth worrying about. And whether it was causative or just correlated, it seems that some women think it stemmed from not having male friendship/romance before college. It does make sense in my mind that women who went to an all girls’ school and did not have male friendships prior to college would be more naive and have poorer judgment about relationships.

+1000 PP! I know several women who went to all girls' schools, and honestly how well they did with dating and relationships depended on whether they had meaningful other interactions with boys at least in high school, if not in middle school too. Those who literally had almost no regular social contact with boys at minimum had really rough starts to dating and had some bad experiences that stuck with them for life even if they ended up happily married. And at the worst end of the spectrum, some of them really suffered from not being able to or be comfortable with navigating power relationships for most of their adulthoods. Therapy helped a few, but just as PP said, it's a significant enough # of girls who struggle later that it is well worth worrying about and maybe taking steps to socialize them among boys long before they leave your house for college.

[Anonymous]

It's a problem if they aren't socializing with kids their own age of a different sexual proclivity. So it's probably okay if they have brothers or participate in a lot of co-ed extra-curriculars. Otherwise, some will build up an odd perception of the groups of people they don't socialize with. This is true with any grouping - think racial segregation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not dating isn't a big deal, but not interacting with or socializing with boys at all would be a problem. I'd look for some kind of activity where boys are included: church youth group or volunteer group? Camps? Scouting? Theater? Music? Job?

+1 I didn't date or do anything romantic with anyone until college but I started making male friends in high school and I'm glad I had the chance to interact with them and learned they weren't actually an alien species before trying to date.

Same for me and both my kids. But I do have both a boy and a girl so they interact with the opposite sex just as part of life.

That's very different than if you had two kids of the same gender.

[Anonymous]

I think the question is if this would be good for a boy too? All boys school, no sisters or female cousins he sees often, and no girlfriends or activities that involve girls, no friend from the neighborhood that is a girl who he hangs out with. The answer is NO. I don't think that is healthy for any peron, boy or girl. For different reasons both genders need to see the other as "people" not dates in college, and have a lot of interaction with the other half of the population as they grow up.