Mom refuses to allow 13-year-old daughter to go to the movies with her friends without her: 'I don't just drop her off. I have to stay and watch.'

Emmy Pratt • Senior Editor

Apr 6, 2026 9:00 PM EDT

Is a 13-year-old too young to go to the movie theater unattended? You would think the average parent would say, "No," but a surprisingly large number of them don't trust their kids to watch the new Super Mario movie in the theater without their mother breathing down their neck.

I remember going to the movie theater with my friends in middle school. If you live in a suburb with few other forms of entertainment besides high school sports games, you will find that the movie theater is the perfect place for kids who are too old to need constant supervision and too young to drive to congregate. When I was a kid, there were huge premiere nights for movies like The Hunger Games and The Fault in Our Stars, and the audiences were packed with every tween girl in the community. No parents were there to ruin our fun, and it was so exciting.

I understand why parents would want to supervise their 13-year-olds at a busy, potentially dangerous event like a concert. But going to the movie theater is such a low-stakes thing. If you can't trust a 7th grader to go to the movie theater and behave themself with their friend group, then you've messed up somehow with your parenting.

The mom in this story ruined a hangout for her 13-year-old daughter at the local movie theater because she wanted to supervise her and her friends. Her friend all but uninvited her after she learned that she'd have to hang out with her friend's mom, too.

via Andrej Lišakov (Unsplash+)

_{Two middle-school-aged girls watch a movie at the movie theater without their mother's supervision.}
_{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}
My daughter is 13 now and has started to ask to go places with her friends. Am I doing too much by not allowing her to go unless I’m there? I hate to be the strict mom.

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_{An anxious young man holds his head in his hands.}
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_{A woman orders coffee on her own because her mom let her learn to order her own food when she was a kid.}
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Mom refuses to allow 13-year-old daughter to go to the movies with her friends without her: 'I don't just drop her off. I have to stay and watch.'

Is a 13-year-old too young to go to the movie theater unattended? You would think the average parent would say, "No," but a surprisingly large number of them don't trust their kids to watch the new Super Mario movie in the theater without their mother breathing down their neck.

My daughter is 13 now and has started to ask to go places with her friends. Am I doing too much by not allowing her to go unless I’m there? I hate to be the strict mom.

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