Women Who Are Tight With Their Moms Wait Longer To Have Sex, Study Finds

If you and your mom are basically Rory and Lorelai Gilmore IRL, this new research out of the Netherlands might be of particular interest to you.

Experts asked 2,931 boys and girls about their relationships with their parents and their sex lives to see whether the former affected the latter. (Just the sort of questions a teenager wants to be answering!) All subjects were polled once when they were 12 and again when they were 16. 

They found that the quality of boys' relationships with their mothers or fathers didn't have an impact on the age they at which they had sex for the first time (heterosexual vaginal intercourse, in this case).

But interestingly enough, the study found that girls who were close with their moms were 44 percent less likely to lose their virginity between the ages of 12 and 16 than those who weren't. (On the flip side, the quality of girls' relationships with their fathers had no proven effect on when they lost their virginity.)

The researchers chalked these findings up to the fact that "mothers are still the primary providers of sexuality education within families, and also that mothers talk more often about sexuality with daughters than with sons." 

One caveat though: the teenagers polled were quite young. According to a 2016 study put together by Durex (as in, Durex condoms), the average age at which people in the Netherlands lose their virginity is 18.5 years old, which is outside the age range of the aforementioned study's subjects. (The average age in the U.S., for comparison, is just a tad lower at 18.4 years old.)

Despite this flaw, these results shed some light on how moms and dads can affect their child's long-term sexual health.