Parents’ Perceptions on Adolescent’s Romantic Relationships Sugiyanto* Psychology and Guidance Education Departement Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta Yogyakarta, Indonesia sugiyanto@uny.ac.id* Syamsu Yusuf, LN Psychology and Guidance Education Departement Indonesia University of Education Bandung, Indonesia syamsu@upi.edu Mamat Supriatna Psychology and Guidance Education Departement Indonesia University of Education Bandung, Indonesia ma2t.supri@upi.edu Nurhudaya Psychology and Guidance Education Departement Indonesia University of Education Bandung, Indonesia nurhudaya_bk@upi.edu Abstract— Parents’ perception about the romantic relationships among the early adolescents (Middle School) has become an interesting phenomenon in which this will bring some impacts on their parenting patterns. For parents, dating phenomenon among early adolescents then comes to be a dilemma. They are facing two decisions: allowing or prohibiting their middle-school-age children to do so. In one hand, if it is prohibited, the parents are worried if their child will choose to have a backstreet relationship, consequently making such condition getting worse. On the other hand, if allowing, the parents are worried that their children are unable to control themselves and this would make their romantic relationship progresses differently as expected and negatively brings an impact on their studies. The different parents’ perception about the adolescent dating, in turn, will determine their parenting patterns to their child that has or has not started dating. Observing the parenting patterns to early adolescents (at Middle School) comes to be interesting then. This research involved 123 parents in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. A number of questions were given to the parents in relation to their perception about dating, things they do in parenting their child that has and has not started dating. The data analysis was conducted using the mixed descriptive-quantitative and qualitative method. The results of this research showed that parents had a perception about the adolescent dating and identified some parenting acts of parents towards the adolescents having and not having a romantic relationship. Keywords— parents, romantic relationship, middle-school-age students I. INTRODUCTION For adolescents, one of decisions they must have in terms of inter-gender relationship is to have a date or not. The perception about the dating concept has changed along with the development of generation in which the today dating behavior is getting more unrestricted and permissive with the much earlier onset [1]. Romantic relationship is defined as an on-going voluntary interaction with a mutual acknowledgement and typical intensity commonly characterized with the affectionate expression that might involve a sexual behavior [2]. Furman and Shaffer [3] stated that romantic relationships among adolescents can last temporarily and narrowly; however, such relationship might play an important role in the teenage lives, stimulate a very strong emotion, bring a significant impact on both health and self-adaptation [4]. The phenomenon of adolescent dating (Middle- school-age children) becomes a dilemma for parents. It goes awry for parents to decide whether they should allow their middle-school-age child to start dating. In one hand, if they prohibit their child, the parents are worried if the child will choose to have a backstreet relationship; consequently, making it worse. On the other hand, if their child is allowed to start dating, it is worried that the child is unable to control him/herself and this romantic relationship will get more intense; eventually badly disrupting his/her studies. At this point, the different perspective of parents about romantic relationship at the middle school age determining the parenting patterns as well as the implementation of rules in the family is a subject interesting to be studied. Perception about the adolescents dating is different between western and non-western culture. In the west, people agree with the romantic relationship among adolescents for being seen as a part of task in adolescent development [5, 6, 3]. In contrast, the non-western culture has a different perception [7, 8]. However, the globalizing west culture undeniably has brought an impact on the culture in the non-western countries and internalized the adolescence concept in those countries about romantic relationship. A number of researchers in eastern countries assumed that there has been a shift in the adolescence concept from previously holding the original tradition to western culture [8] adopted through any various media [9]. Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 462 Proceedings of the 2nd International Seminar on Guidance and Counseling 2019 (ISGC 2019) Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL. This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license -http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. 325