Dealing with Crushes in Your Childs Life

It wasn’t that long ago, or was it, when we were young and thought for the first time that we were “in love.” And now, in one of fate’s cruelest twists, our son or daughter is in the same place, feeling those feelings for someone else. For us, it was just “puppy love.” For them, through our eyes, it may be innocent or it may be a real threat.

Growing up today is totally different than it was in our day. Popular culture and media emphasize romance and “love” in much different ways. For example, take the following headlines from some recent “teen magazines.”

• Crush Clues: You Said Hi, Now What?
• Get Your Crush to Worship You: It's Easier Than You Think
• Turn Your Crush into Your Boyfriend: We'll Show You How.
• Diary of a Guy's Crush.
• Is Crushing Better Than Dating? Results From our First Ever Dating Survey!
• Seventh Heaven's Jessica Biel: Dishes about her Co-Star Crushes, Gutsy Guy-getting Moves and Why She's No Angel.
• Sex Secrets - 8 Ways to Tell if You're Really Ready.
• The New Rules for Hook-up Safety
• Sex Pressure: How to Deal.
• 145 Ways to Look So Sexy!

Teens today also develop crushes in ways that sound foreign to many dads. Internet chat rooms, instant messaging, web sites and cell phone messaging can be the source of budding relationships. Sites like e-Crush and mysecretadmirer.net even allow your teens to anonymously express their affection for a potential crush.

So what’s a dad to do? What do fathers need to know about the modern world of crushing and what should they do when their child is in the height of a crush?

What Dads Need to Know

First, some things have changed and some have not.

Crushes are not usually acted on. Just as when we were younger, there is still a tendency on the part of girls and boys to engage in some simple fantasy about their intended crush. Teens are still, for the most part, too shy and insecure to even approach their crush. A current survey on the WholeFamily site asks teens to indicate how often they act on a crush, and the answers indicated that it wasn’t very often. Some representative comments from responding teens are:

• "I don’t really act on them. I just tell one of my friends. It eventually get over it!"
• "I take crushes seriously but I'm too shy to step up to the plate and actually have a conversation with them."
• "I generally don't act on them because of fear of rejection."
• "I act on them, but not to him, I just discuss them with my friends. The biggest problem from me is that I am scared of being rejected."
• "I take my crushes really seriously, but I have a hard time telling them I like them because I am scared that they don't like me."
• "Lately, I've been majorly crushing on one guy. Talking is my greatest problem. I mean, I can't even have real conversations. I start to loose my mind and every thinng gets blocked out of my mind. It's like my mind is a big wipe board freshly washed clean, a clean slate."
• "Some crushes just last for a few days and I don't really take them seriously, but sometimes I get completely lovesick and they are all I ever think about. I don't act on crushes b/c I am a really shy person and I don't want them to think I'm a major dork."

There are gender differences. Boys and girls usually react very differently to their feelings of affection for an intended crush. Girls will tend to be more vocal about their crush, generally with their friends and occasionally with a parent. Boys, if they are aware of their feelings at all, will generally not vocalize them. The boys feel a little awkward about the feelings and generally won’t talk to their friends unless the crush results in an eventual physical relationship. Girls also tend to have more intensive but shorter term crushes. Boys on the other hand will keep the fantasy alive longer.

Kids that do act on their crushes are often pretty forward. One of the things I hear from lots of dads is the concern about their daughters being pretty direct in flirting with a crush. This is a pretty big change from our teen days. I recall one mother telling me a few months ago about her seventh grade son arriving at junior high school registration and the “roving bands of bare midriff young women” scoping him out and approaching him with “corny pickup lines.” And boys are often similarly assertive once they get up the nerve to approach an intended crush.