Last Updated on October 24, 2025 by stlplace
When their daughter(s) finds someone she loves. I think the right word probably is “mixed emotions”. No, I am not implying anything and our older daughter who is 15 and hasn’t dating someone yet – good to me for now :-).
I also have a friend who strictly forbids her daughters dating even in college. She told me about this rule; they are from India btw. My view is less strict: personally, I feel it’s okay to date in college because I did, and it didn’t turn out to be a disaster (I was lucky in many ways I think :-). But date in the high school is probably too early. This is also considering their schoolwork in the HS, which is a lot in my opinion.
A bit over 10 years ago, before our younger daughter was born some of my colleagues did a baby shower, one of my American colleagues commented: you need to watch out all the guys now you are having a daughter 🙂
In July 26 this summer, I happened to be a similar boat like this. I was going to drop off the girl who is from China (she is 16 years old), and attended the summer camp here at WUSTL, to the STL airport. The time was a bit tight for me, because after dropping her off, I need to come home and drive my older daughter to the Community Music School in Webster University at Webster Groves. So, I arrived at the girl’s place early so that I could have some breath room just in case. I told them about my plan. But the girl would not come out at 8 am, and I was a bit upset, because it could take 15 to 20 minutes to drive from WUSTL to the STL, and I also need to go inside the airport to make sure her can check in luggage and get boarding pass and so on. So, I said in the WeChat group chat to hurry up. And after probably 15 or 20 minutes, the girl came out, with a boy and it’s quite obvious the boy is her (likely new) boyfriend. Then I felt pretty bad.
And also, I was thinking what would I feel if I saw my older daughter in this kind of situation? Keep in mind I never saw that girl before, and I had to guess whenever someone comes out from that building. But her dress reminds me of my daughter. Btw, I talked about the teen girls dress trend here, from my observations, scroll to “What to wear for girl nowdays???“.
Anyway, I did have a small opportunity to make up my dumb (and being rude) mistake. The girl’s luggage is over the weight limit by 6 pounds, and I paid the $100 luggage fees right away. I was not late for my older daughter’s thing either: here is some of the percussion that the students at CMS did in the past school year (YT) including the summer. Can you guess which one is my older daughter? Hint: she was in the way back and she didn’t have a lot of time on the screen.
PS: you may like my other post here Dad daughter moments. As you may be able to predict or perceive, not all moments are happy or light moments though – something I didn’t anticipate or intentionally ignoring before we have our kids. Some moments are quite hard or difficult, honestly speaking.
PS2 (10-24-2025): I wrote more re: “Father’s love, or elder generations love towards the kids” here.