While there’s no “right time” to start having sex, Dutch researchers found that girls were 44 percent less likely to lose their virginity before 16 if they were close with their mothers. (No wonder Rory Gilmore waited until she was well into college!)
But before you start analyzing all the ways your relationship with your parents changed your sex life, the study has a few caveats. Researchers asked kids how close they were with their parents at age 12 and then checked back in at age 16 to see if they had become sexually active.
While the sample size was large, fewer than 10 percent of participants had sex by age 16, and only a third of the kids who said they’d had sex were women. That’s a relatively small group to draw concrete conclusions from, so take these findings with a grain of salt. The research didn’t show that children were less likely to lose their virginity before age 16 if they were close with their fathers, though researchers noted in Dutch culture, kids typically spend twice as much time with their mothers than their fathers.
