In The News: Young People Growing Up With Bad Dating Habits?
By Susanne on Mar 9, 2010 in Dating Advice
It’s reassuring that such an enormous outcry followed the news that Sarah Burge has been condoning – and in fact encouraging – her fifteen year old daughter to use Botox – the facial treatment that irons out all the kinds of wrinkles that come with life experience.
It’s pleasing that this episode baffled and enraged most of the people who commented on it, because it acts as further proof that there’s still some sanity out there, though the media might sometimes have us think otherwise.
In light of the paper that was released last week on The Sexualisation of Young People, this episode seems to take the concept to the absolute extreme and resulted in a lot of head-shaking from the public at large. ‘How could a mother foist her own insecurities on a child?’ was the general outcry - ‘and what’s more, is this even legal?’
It just adds further concern over the way our kids are going and blurs the boundaries of what is right and what is wrong in the treatment of our intelligent, information-aware children. It makes the universe seem somehow broken and much, much darker.
In reality, I’m sure this isn’t the way things are. Sure, there’s lots more information out there – but we also have a generation on our hands who are actually capable of processing it where, in the past, we might not have been so high-functioning.
We tend to take all of the texting, MSN messenging and Youtube uploading as signs that our kids have short attention spans, but perhaps they prove the opposite? We might be better placed to take it as a sign that they are more turned on to the world around them than we might have been, back in our day… and maybe that their dating habits are also as advanced.
We hear about teenage pregnancies all the time as the media tries to portray children as shambolic and unprepared, but the picture is distorted. The fact is, they are probably far further forward in their interactions than we ever were. It’s possible that manners have declined, but for manners we had to balance a complete lack of knowledge on how dating worked, and as a result we probably developed bad habits along the way that followed into adulthood.
It’s important to take stock of what mistakes you might be making if you’ve had a series of bad dates. Remember, we all have them – and often we have a couple or a few in a row. Those who pull themselves out of these slumps do so by taking an objective view of how they carried themselves and what attitude they put across – but doing so without dwelling on the negatives. It’s the only way to crack those bad habits and to take charge of your dating success!
