Navigating the World of Tweens

By Anastacia Mott Austin

I have a tween.

She’s a bit of a mystery, I’ll admit. No longer adorable baby, cute toddler, or willful second-grader. She’s 10. Going on sixteen. Sixteen to her is when life begins, when she will magically turn into a glamorous model with a perfect, effortless life.

We’re both scared.

I’m scared because I’ve been told for exactly ten years by complete strangers with gleeful, slightly evil grins in grocery stores, "Just wait until they’re teenagers!" They told me this in the same voyeuristic, leering way they would sidle up to me and whisper childbirth horror stories when my "bump" was barely showing.

Well, great, I thought, but what am I going to do about it now? At least give me some helpful advice!

Nobody really did, but you can read this years later when your adorable baby is about to turn ten-going-on-sixteen, and I promise not to leer at you, "Just wait until they leave home!"

My tween is not a teenager yet. But she wants to be one so bad she can taste it. She’s a little frightened by the intensity of her desire to be anywhere other than the place she is right now. Straining at the reins, she’d jump in with both feet and eyes tightly closed, not looking back at childhood for one second. If I let her, that is. But I’m the one holding onto the reins for dear life.

This creates a natural conflict, to say the least. I realize that she is in a new category, or so the marketers tell me, and I must learn to let go a tiny bit so that she won’t pull so hard for being sixteen tomorrow.

Child development experts tell us parents that there is a new era of childhood: the "tween" years, which most say are between (between, get it?) the ages of eight and twelve.

Part of this change has been wrought by the increasingly earlier years of physical puberty, with girls as young as nine years old beginning to menstruate. Add in Internet access, iPods and cell phones at younger and younger ages, and kids who would have still been playing with Barbies are now online in chat rooms, sometimes with older kids, or if they’re not supervised they’re being exposed to an awful lot of information that my generation didn’t know about, at least not at eight and nine years old.

Dr. Liz Alderman is a doctor specializing in adolescent medicine at New York’s Montefiore Medical Center. "I’m sure this isn’t the first time in history people have been talking about it. But I definitely feel like these kids are growing up faster and I’m not sure it’s always a good thing," said Dr. Alderman to reporters.

A large part of the responsibility must also fall on the media and mass marketing to tween kids. Marketing analysts report that kids in the in-between years are directly responsible for $50 million a year in spending dollars, as well as an additional $170 million that is spent on them. That’s a giant marketing target. And unfortunately, what the media is telling my daughter is that ten-year-old girls should wear short-shorts that say "juicy" or "sexy" across the bum, or halter tops showing belly button piercings. I must have missed something, but to me a little girl is not supposed to be "sexy."

My tween daughter is a perfect target for clever advertising that tells her what "cool" is supposed to look like. This is the part I have a hard time understanding, though, because I’m one of those parents who works hard to shelter my child from media influences. There is no way she is getting a cell phone anytime soon, and she doesn’t know what an iPod is. For that matter, she doesn’t know who Britney Spears is, either (though she did catch a glimpse of a magazine in a store of poor ol’ lost Brit with her bald head and said, "Mom, why did that girl cut off all of her hair?"). My daughter’s granola Waldorf school discourages computer use for kids her age and forbids any clothing with advertising or media characters. I support this – I think the slick and shiny world of everything going too fast can be kept at bay as long as possible.

But she’s still a tween. Somehow it all leaked into her consciousness, and she wants to be a cool, "creepish" sixteen-year-old (don’t ask, I don’t know what it means either). I don’t know how it happened, but somehow it did, and now I’m stuck in the same boat as the other parents with kids her age.

I was an expert mama during the little-kid years. I was the breastfeeding pro, the diaper guru, wore the cotton sling for three years, kissed the boo-boos and the skinned knees, rocked my babies to sleep. The difference then, I think, was that everyone knew exactly who they were and what their place in the world was.

Now, for my tween, that’s all changing, and the fact that it’s changing for her at an earlier age than it did for me makes it harder for both of us. She’s starting to wonder who she is, at ten instead of at fourteen. The rules have changed, and neither of us knows what to do.

She knows she does not want to be a little kid anymore. She wants to get to the next phase of being magically sixteen, but that’s still six years away so she doesn’t know how to get there and where to hang out in the meantime.

It’s a lot of confusion, and I would like to help her feel more like the mature teenager she wants to be, while still assuring her that it’s okay to still be a kid for a while.

I’ve picked up a few tips from moms (and dads) who have been there and successfully come out the other side with great kids and only a few scars. Here are some of them:

• One dad told me that it does get harder to talk to your tween, because she wants to be seen as independent and might not confide everything in her parents anymore. But, he said, it’s more important than ever to keep the lines of communication open. The worst thing you can do is take your tween’s "don’t talk to me" stance and leave her alone. She needs you more than ever. And while it’s hard not to make the mistake of using together time to lecture about chores or homework, it’s important to listen. Sometimes it helps to find an activity to do with your tween, a hobby or a common interest – that way conversation will occur naturally. And if you can be quiet and listen, your child may take the opportunity to tell you how she is really feeling. An added bonus is that this is the time when a lot of parents will build the communication framework for when their kids are teenagers – if you can talk to a tween, it isn’t as hard to transition to talking to a teen.

• Find ways for your tween to feel more mature and independent, like she so wants to be, but safely – a test run, if you will. Depending on her age, you can leave her alone in the house for brief periods of time, have her answer the phone and take messages, help make dinner, keep an eye on the younger kids (unless she’s the one who’ll break into the cookie jar or the safe). It’s not just an opportunity to give her extra chores, but letting her be a more important part of the household lets her know that you trust her and that you realize she is now becoming more than "just" a little kid.

• Plan a special, just for the two of you date, going to dinner together or a movie. This could be a challenge if you have other children (or a job, or even a regular life these days), but it will help your tween feel like she’s important, which is hard for her these days. She’s not quite sure where she fits in, and feels like people are not seeing her, but making sure that she knows she’s important to you will go a long way.

• One thing I have learned myself is that this is a time for pushing buttons. Luckily, your tween is just practicing the art that will be perfected during the teen years, or so I’ve been told, and you can get a handle on it before it’s out of control. Learn to walk away or take a time-out yourself if she starts shouting that you "NEVER!" let her do anything she wants to do, you’re the meanest mom ever, all the other moms are letting their daughters get their eyebrows pierced, etc. Lamaze breathing comes in handy here – at least those classes were good for something. Breathe.

• One mom told me that her relationship with her tween son completely changed one day after he accused her of "never saying anything good!" It stung, but it made her think about what kind of communication she was using with her family. She realized it was mostly true – she spent the majority of her time with her son telling him what he should do, why he wasn’t allowed to do this or that, how he could do better, etc. It was hard to change, she said, but she started to mention to him when he did well with his siblings, tried to laugh at his pre-adolescent jokes, told him she was proud of him. Mostly, though, she tried to relax and just have fun with him. Kids, no matter what their age, need positive feedback from the people around them more than anything. The tween needs this double. This is the age when they are starting to realize that maybe they aren’t going to be Superman when they grow up, maybe they aren’t good at everything. That’s a hard dose of reality and they need to have positive, yet real interaction with their parents.

The parents I talked to said that the most important thing was to stay involved with your child’s life, and if she rebuffs you in one area, maybe it’s time to find a new way to relate to her.

For my tween and me, we both face challenges. She can’t understand why I am literally being a drag, my heels making deep ruts as I resist being pulled by her into her shiny, exciting teenagerhood. And I have a hard time understanding why she wants so much to leap away from childhood, when for the rest of her life she’ll want to get back to the place where the world was safe and nobody knew what poor Britney Spears was doing.

It’s a give and take. I’m a parent, so I know how that will go – I’ll give, she’ll take. But that’s okay with me. I hope what I have to give she’ll take with her into that exciting future – that no matter what, she will never be too old to have boo-boos kissed, or be rocked to sleep in my arms. Regardless of what age she is, I hope she’ll know that I will always love her and she’ll always have someone to come home to.