In your opinion, should parents allow their underage teenager (approximately between the ages of fifteen and seventeen) to date an eighteen or nineteen year old? Aside from what the law says, do those small handful of years make a significant enough difference at that point to warrant disallowing it?

It depends. I think I'd be more cautious and wouldn't allow my 15 yr old to date an 18 or 19 yr old simply because I wouldn't want any problems for him. The law is the law. On the flipside, my dad is 4 yrs older than my mother and they hooked up when she was like 15. So I personally don't think those years make [i]that[/i] much of a difference but to be on the safe side, prob. not.

Well first of all, my kids wouldn't be allowed to date until they were 16 anyway so that immediately takes 15 out the window, 16 and up, would I approve my 16 year old being involved with an 18/19 year old, no, 17 perhaps, but it would also depend on what kind of person the guy is and the kid is.

18 is such an arbitrary number. It's about the other person's personality and sense of ethics. Not how old the carbon in his body is.

The closer the gap, the better.

I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing. It really does depend though on the maturity of them all and the life that the older person is leading.

After Sophomore year, I began dating a guy who had graduated the year I was a Sophomore. So, he was 18, with me 16. And it really wasn't strange because we both lived in the same town, and he worked out of high school, no college. So, it wasn't as if he exposed me to an adult world because we all hung out with the same people playing basketball anyway. That is mostly all we did.

I think, during the teenage years, there shouldn't be more than a one or two year age gap between two kids. Something like a 17 year-old and a 19 year-old wouldn't bother me, but if I were a parent I wouldn't let my child see someone more than two years younger or older than him/her. I hear about these 14 year-old girls dating 18 and 19 year-old boys and it's really gross because one is a little girl and one is - according to the law - a grown man. I'd have a serious problem with that.