In this post we will take up the next two middle years transition, the role of emotions and responses to body changes.

4. Transitioning to New Emotional Patterns and Expressions

Every healthy child comes into this life with the potential for experiencing the full range of human emotions. Obviously, these emotions influence the way we think and act. Though all humans have the same emotions, each of us responds to these feelings differently. Some responses are constructive; others are detrimental. In the latter case, it is not the emotions themselves that get us into trouble, but the manner in which we deal with them.

The more we respond to an emotion in a certain way, the greater the likelihood that it will develop into a habit. Developing positive habits is particularly important during the middle years because this is the season of life in which a child’s moral knowledge (moral truth taught by parents and teachers) combined with his emotions can help establish patterns of right behavior.

For example, the child who learns early in life that “honesty is the best policy” is likely to carry that teaching into adulthood. Your four-year-old can understand the principle, but your eight-year-old can make it a way of life.

Do not miss this important point: You and your home environment will play a dominant role in shaping your child’s profile of emotional responses, especially during the middle years. A child who observes Dad returning wrong for wrong by walking the dog on a neighbor’s lawn as payback for a similar disservice will learn that paybacks are okay for peers. If right responses are not learned during the middle years, wrong ones will most likely characterize the teen years. Now is when you need to check out your own attitudes.

The middle years also bring about a shift in a child’s outward expression of emotions. A young child’s emotional outburst lasts a few minutes, and then it’s over. Contrast this response with that of the socially sensitive middle-years child, whose short-lived outbursts have given way to drawn-out periods of moodiness. What all this demonstrates is that your middle-years child can now exercise cognitive control over his emotions. A few years earlier, this was not the case. The decision of how to behave is, in the end, your child’s. However, you still play a significant role in shaping how your child develops his or her responses. Take advantage of this.

5. Transitioning to Hormone-Activated Bodies

Perhaps you have found yourself thinking, My child is only eight or nine-it can’t be hormones yet. Yes, it can. Most people think hormonal changes don’t begin until just before a child reaches the teen years, when they naturally set into motion a series of defiant acts and rebellious mood swings.

But the truth is that hormonal changes in a child’s endocrine system begin at approximately age seven, not twelve or thirteen. You may have already begun to see the effects. Yes, your middle-years child is hormonally active. From this point on, he or she will experience greater emotional highs and lows. This may, in turn, affect behavior. But wait: The fact that your child is undergoing these changes does not provide an excuse for wrong behavior.

Have you ever wondered why your nine-year-old daughter can change moods overnight? She may go through phases of discouragement and break into tears over minor details. Someone looked at her wrong. She looks all wrong. She’s not sure what is wrong. Her face becomes a little oilier, and she is sure everyone is noticing. For a few days she becomes more snippety toward her siblings. Then, just as quickly, she returns to being the stable child you knew before. Hormones at work. While hormones play their part, the moral environment in which your child is raised also plays a significant role in shaping her perception of her changing body and the sexual tension natural to growth. Clinicians have noted that children who come from differing domestic moral climates will have very different sensual experiences.

For example, young girls weaned on MTV are more likely to express their budding sense of womanhood according to the images promoted by the sexual image-makers of MTV. In contrast, pubescent daughters coming from homes that do not allow this influence tend to direct their budding sexual awareness into channels of innocent romantic thought.

Have your ever watched Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea? It took Anne, the main character of this drama, eight hours (in film time-eight years in story time) to realize that it was Gilbert, her old school chum, who she really loved. While such romantic portrayals are entertaining for a sixty-year-old woman and perhaps confusing for a six-year-old girl, a ten-year-old girl enters into eight hours of romance by identifying herself with the heroine.

Why is she hooked while her six-year-old female cousin and her eleven-year-old brother find something else to do? Because hormones active in her body have brought about a burgeoning sense of romance. Her body awakens her mind to a vague but real awareness that someday perhaps there will be a Gilbert for her, too. Endocrine changes awaken a sense of romantic sensitivity in girls much earlier than they do in boys. Your ten-year-old daughter is asking, “Mom, how did you and Dad meet?” or “Where did you go on your first date?” Meanwhile, a boy of the same age is asking, “Mom, have you seen my football?”

Valiant knights prance their white steeds dreamily through your daughter’s thoughts. But it will be another year or two before the neighbor boy of the same age starts to consider your daughter more than a decent right fielder or someone to torment with his plastic spider. But in time, preteen boys, too, succumb to the powerful effect of hormones on their views of the opposite sex. In our next post we will take up the final three transitions, the growing influence of peers; the move toward a set of personal values and his inclination toward personal responsibility.

More to come in a couple of days.

Don’t forget to read Part 1 and Part 2 if you missed it.