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Oɴᴇ
It starts with Robb, and in a way, Eddard Stark is not surprised. The boy is the oldest, the leader of the pack of squalling boys and girls that had just been kids the day before. It starts with Robb and he feels he shouldn't feel blindsided, but there is a distinctive lurch in his stomach when he walks in on his son and the older boy who he had thought was just a friend.
One Theon Greyjoy is sprawled across Robb's front, hips between his thighs and mouth trailing a line from his mouth to the nape of his neck. As much as Ned wished he could not see it, he could swear the Greyjoy boy was trying his best to not only grind Robb into the couch and worm his hand down his pants; and Robb was letting him, or had been letting him until Ned cleared his throat loudly and made the two of them jump.
Later, when the red faced but grinning boy - lover? - left, Ned sat his son down for a talk. A talk that revolved around sex, safety, and locked doors.
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Sansa is next, and in a way he shouldn't be surprised here either. The girl had always been a romantic, or that had been the word Catelyn used to describe her. She had told them all of her dreams, of marrying some handsome man with thick hair and a kind face, with manners and ettiquettes and a sense of romance himself, but it was those dreams that made him wary of the man she brought home.
Sandor Clegane is tall, taller than any of the Starks, and has a horrid scar across the side of his face; the hairline by the scar had receeded, leaving him half balding with a few strands of dirty-looking brown hair combed over in a halfhearted attempt to conceal it. By all standards, he is ugly, and he merely grunts in greeting when Catelyn and Ned shake his hand. That is not the most concerning matter, of course; he is a good ten years older than she, and there is something suggestive - almost dangerous - in his eyes when his gaze flicks toward Sansa.
They sit through the evening tense, and the moment that Catelyn closes the front door she turns to give him a stern look that Ned takes to know he is in for quite an evening. But he agrees, shows as much in a slight nod of his head as his wife moves to clear the dinner table and usher Bran and Rickon to bed. Sansa seems to know the talk is coming, because the second he bids her sit down on the family room sofa, she starts to cry and plead with him. But Eddard Stark is nothing if not firm in his beliefs, and in the end he forbids his daughter from ever seeing the man again.
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His nephew shows an even more aggressive approach to the controversial topic of dating, for not long after he brings home a red headed wild beauty with crooked teeth and a sharp mouth (that Catelyn was quick to disapprove of) he catches him in the back yard with another boy. Their shirts are off and Jon is swimming in the large family pool while Samwell Tarly sits on the cement siding and dangles his feet in the water. It seems innocent enough, Ned is too far away to hear what they are saying but they are speaking for a time before Sam laughs and Jon splashes him. Sam's laugh turns into a shriek midstream and then a scream as the submerged boy grabbed his arm and pulled him in.
Ned smiled to himself a tad, but that smile faded as the two boys reemerged from the rippling waters a little too close together; arms intwined around shoulders, more appropriately, and the Stark patriarch entertained the idea that Tarly just could not swim - or tried to, until it became obvious that the two of them were going in for a rather wet, chlorinated kiss. He promptly turned around and abandoned the idea of lounging poolside and reading the politics section of the newspaper.
A few hours later, when Jon returns to the house and Sam has set off, Ned sits his nephew down at the kitchen table and firmly campaigns the slogan "PDA: No Way".
ғᴏᴜʀ
Ned takes one look at Arya's proclaimed boyfriend - Gendry, he recalls his name being; Gendry who doesn't own a shirt. - and just tells her, "No."
ғɪᴠᴇ
Catelyn is the one who walks in on Jeyne Westerling naked and undoing Robb's zipper with her teeth, but Ned heard the shriek all the way in his solar and arrived in time to see the teenagers scrambling for their clothes. Jeyne was a lovely girl - in the personality sense - he had thought all the times they'd had her over for dinner, and a step up from Theon Greyjoy, but the fact remained that the behavior the two had partaken in was against the rules. And if there was one thing that was taken very seriously in the Stark household, it was the rules.
The idea sprung up when they the eldest Starks were in bed that night, curled against each other and discussing the latest relationship transgression. It was a good one, Ned couldn't help thinking, and he agreed that the next morning they would sit down with Robb over his breakfast cereal and describe to him the process of his birth in horridly vivid detail.
The conversation may have ended up in the boy abandoning his porridge and claiming he was moving out, but they didn't have much of a problem with him again until they visited his dorm some years later.
sɪx
Ultimately, by the time their youngest son hits the age where his brothers became interested in girls, both Catelyn and Ned have the art of convincing him to wait down to a t. They take Rickon aside early, explain to him the rules of the house, the consequences of acting rashly, and impress how disappointed they would be if he were to disobey them. And they honestly expected more of a struggle in the later years with him, always the wild child and always running amuck and getting into trouble. But Rickon doesn't bring home his first girlfriend until he is twenty, long since moved out of Casa Stark and off in college.
And while the way he touches the left side of her face is distinctly affectionate, neither Catelyn nor Ned can think of much of a complaint against Shireen Baratheon and the shy way she smiles at her hands.