You are listening to Feeding the Mouth That Bites You with Ashley Parrish and Jessica Pfeiffer.

A weekly podcast guide on parenting teens and launching them into the world.

As always, we are joined by psychologist and author, Dr. Ken Wilgus.

Hey, everybody, this is Jessica.

Today I'm here with Ashley and Dr. Ken, and we're going to discuss dating. Hey, Ashley,

what are you thinking about dating coming up in your family life? Oh, I've been looking forward to

this episode. I have so many questions for Dr. Ken. Dr. Ken, are you ready? I am ready. I've got a lot

of questions. But I wanted to first start off. You know, I think my heart, my intention is right.

However, I can only come to the table with my own personal experience, Jessica.

And, you know, I've shared this with you before about how many rules and restrictions I had.

And I know that I don't want to pass on all of them as I raise my teenagers and we,

you know, not we, as my teenagers start dating and parenting them through this, I just want

to do things differently, but I don't know exactly what that is.

And so I'm super excited to ask Dr. Ken all of these, all these questions.

And I think it's hard because we each come to the table with our own hangups and our

own regrets about our dating. Maybe fear our kids will be making the same mistakes. And it's

hard to see this precious little child of yours becoming a sexual being. We kind of want to

stay naive and pretend like it's not

happening. And so it's really easy to try and control this area to try and think that we have

a lot of authority here and we can make them do certain things to protect them, really.

Right. And I don't want to hinder, you know, it's like I don't want to hinder this natural

progression of them growing up. But at the same time, it's so hard not to.

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