Kids who start dating from 11 – 13 have higher risk of drug use, horrible study skills – Study

Sometimes, allowing our children to grow up too fast can create a situation that  makes us wish we could just hit the rewind button.  A new study is showing that students who date in middle school are four times more likely to drop out of school, and their study skills are far worse than other students. Beyond that, they are twice as likely to use alcohol, tobacco and marijuana. “Romantic relationships are a hallmark of adolescence, but very few studies have examined how adolescents differ in the development of these relationships,” said Pamela Orpinas, the author of the study and professor in the College of Public Health and head of the Department of Health Promotion and Behavior.

Orpinas studied 624 students over seven years from the sixth to the 12th grade to understand their dating behaviors and other life choices.  She correlated their dating decisions to their decisions to use drugs and alcohol, and asked their teachers how they were doing in class.

The results were published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence.

“In our study, we found four distinct trajectories,” Orpinas said. “Some students never or hardly ever reported dating from middle to high school, and these students had consistently the best study skills according to their teachers. Other students dated infrequently in middle school but increased the frequency of dating in high school. We also saw a large number of students who reported dating since sixth grade.”

She said that the correlation between dating and study habits was very clear.  The students who dated the most were the worst students almost 100% of the time.

“At all points in time, teachers rated the students who reported the lowest frequency of dating as having the best study skills and the students with the highest dating as having the worst study skills,” she said in the article.

The professor believes that dating is one of a series of at-risk behaviors that the youth were involved in, with poor study skills being a symptom of bad life choices.

“A likely explanation for the worse educational performance of early daters is that these adolescents start dating early as part of an overall pattern of high-risk behaviors,” Orpinas said.

She also says that the students who were dating early were also likely to use drugs and experience emotional imbalances.

“Dating a classmate may have the same emotional complications of dating a co-worker,” Orpinas said. “When the couple splits, they have to continue to see each other in class and perhaps witness the ex-partner dating someone else. It is reasonable to think this scenario could be linked to depression and divert attention from studying.”

The professor advises that parents not consider dating to be a rite of passage in middle school.  Take the time to allow your child  to be prepared emotionally for the things that are yet to come.

Read more: All Christian News

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