Wes: If you’ve read Double Take or listened to my media appearances, you know I try to stay ahead of teen and young adult dating trends. I often feel like that cartoon character you see hanging on to the bumper of a car (airplane, spacecraft, etc.) twisting back and forth, nearly thrown off at every turn.

Most parents of teens understand that feeling all too well.

When it comes to dating practice, we seem always to be falling back from one position to the next. Once, we imagined sex might be saved for marriage, though research indicates this was never a popular practice. Most of my career I’ve pushed the idea that sex should at least be within an identifiable relationship, however you define it. Today, I feel like I’m guiding a horse and buggy down the wrong lane on a freeway full of self-driving cars.

Time to fall back again.

Dr. Wes Crenshaw and Kyra Haas

Perhaps the saddest casualty in this revolution of human mating is The Date. Young people needn’t go back to formal courting, but they might actually try going somewhere and maybe have an adventure, or sit and look into each other’s eyes and care nothing about the rest of the world (read: smartphones), or hold hands in a theater. Or look at the stars.

The Date served a far greater purpose than romantic foreplay. It gave kids a chance to get to know each other; to see how they fit together in the real world; and to have others see them as a couple. Instead, we have a culture of half-hearted hangouts and hookups, along with a profound distrust of the dreaded “RELATIONSHIP.”

I’ve been trying something this year with several young people I see, and it’s caught on better than about any other intervention I’ve concocted in 23 years. I call it 25 dates a year, or if you’d like to tweet about it, #25dates.

It’s pretty simple. I challenge young people to forget hanging out and hooking up for a year and instead go on 25 dates with 25 different people. They can go out more than once, of course. Kyra will share below one of the crucial tools in this process, and then next week we’ll offer additional tips you can pass on to your teens about how to make this work.

In the meantime, feel free to tweet. Maybe we can get a whole healthy dating trend going and change the world.

Kyra: If teens and young adults want to join Dr. Wes in his latest dating initiative, they’ll have to find 25 people who actually want to go out with them. Luckily, technology has their back if they use it correctly.

Dating via the Internet and apps is becoming more and more the norm. According to Nielsen data, one in 10 American adults average more than an hour every day on a dating site or app. While IBISWorld finds two-thirds of America’s current online dating pool to be over 34, newer dating apps geared toward a younger hook-up culture have emerged over the last few years, Tinder being the most prominent.

Some parents who met the “old-fashioned way” before the Internet made electronic dating practical, may see this new wave of swiping thumbs left and right less authentic than scanning people at a party for an attractive individual to talk with face-to-face. However, for a generation that spends most of its free time on Twitter and Instagram, it only makes sense dating would eventually shift this direction.

Online dating increases the opportunity to find likeminded partners looking for the same kind of relationship–from hook-ups to marriage. That makes settling for less than one wants or deserves unnecessary. It also makes getting to know someone safer and more efficient, as app users are under no obligation to continue a conversation if it’s going poorly or gets uncomfortable.

Of course, caution is necessary, as catfish (a person pretending to be someone she’s not) lurk throughout cyberspace. However, there are plenty of good fish in the sea, and online dating enables you to cast far more lines before selecting a good catch and meeting him IRL (Internet speak for “in real life”) to reach the 25 date goal Wes suggests.

Wes Crenshaw, Ph.D., ABPP, is author of “I Always Want to Be Where I’m Not: Successful Living with ADD & ADHD.” Learn about his writing and practice at dr-wes.com. Kyra Haas is a Free State High School senior who blogs at justfreakinghaasome.wordpress.com. Send your confidential 200-word question to ask@dr-wes.com. Double Take opinions and advice are not a substitute for psychological services.