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.

We will continue to take up the subject of Middle Years parenting by looking at the next two transition phases in a child’s growth and development. The role ‘facts’ now play in their life and the increase of reason over childhood imagination.

2. Transitioning to Knowing the Facts

“You’re out! I touched the base.”
“No, I’m not! You have to touch me.”

They can barely swing the bat, but they brandish their knowledge of the rules as if they had a deep and abiding understanding of the game.

Your middle-years child now relates to other children as peers and to other adults as something more than parental substitutes. During this period, boys and girls demonstrate a need to organize, categorize, and play by the rules. It is important to them that they get their facts right (although they have an oversimplified notion of the correctness of their own assessment during this phase).

Perhaps you’re having a conversation with another adult in which you describe an incident that occurred at the store today. You aren’t even two sentences into your story when you hear, from the only other eyewitness to the event, your nine-year-old daughter. “No, Mom, that’s not how it happened. The man with the shopping cart bumped the manager and then.…”

Don’t be surprised when your attempt to abbreviate a conversation is met by a challenge from your middle-years child, who suddenly seems to have a desperate need to get the story right, as if one fact out of sequence will cause the universe to instantly implode.

Now add birth order to this mix. Because the eldest is born into a world of adults and not siblings, she tends to have an increased need to be “right” about all things. If another child breaks the rules, she is relentless in her efforts to straighten that child out or bring justice to bear on a situation. “Mom! That’s not fair! When I was Billy’s age, you never let me ride to the corner by myself.” Look for these verbal declarations-they’re all part of the transition process.

3. Transitioning from Imagination to Reason

With the middle years comes a distinct shift toward logical thinking. Logic and reason now help your child to begin overcoming the unknown. Consider how small children deal with fear of the unknown or unexplained circumstances. A nighttime shadow on the bedroom wall becomes the villain from their favorite cartoon. A loud noise in the distance is a monster on its way to the house! Because their imaginations develop more rapidly than their reasoning skills, and because they’re aware of their own smallness, younger children often interpret anything they don’t understand as something to be feared.

But everything changes during the middle years. Reason rises to challenge imagination. This means your eight-year-old will begin to appear more daring and adventuresome and less restrained by fear of the unknown.

More to come in a couple of days.

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

Let’s face it: Your child is changing. She doesn’t watch Barney anymore. She doesn’t want your help quite as much. Her emotions are exaggerated. And she’s suddenly realized that not everyone is her friend just because they’re in the same class. She’s begun dealing with deeply felt issues like freedom, friendship, peer approval-even fashion.

Wait! Maybe you’re not ready for this. You’re still quite comfortable setting out Disney plates and chicken nuggets. Now she wants tossed salad with low-cal dressing? Your middle-years child, that eight- to twelve-year-old, is changing.

The middle years are a period of great transition-a developmental phase when a child moves from where she has been to where she needs to go. During this phase of growth, parents are still the child’s first choice as a guide, and he or she definitely needs your leadership. Take advantage of that. Below are eight critical middle-years transitions. Help your children him through this critical adjustment periods and the next leg of the journey just might be crash-free. We will take up the first transition in this post and build each day from there.

1. Transitioning away from Childhood and Childhood Structures

On the first day of kindergarten, you followed her bus all the way to school just to make sure that she remembered to get off, that she was smiling when she did, and that she didn’t evaporate in the few miles from here to there. You laughed; you cried; you chatted with the other half-dozen teary adults who all did the same silly thing. Guess what? It’s time to back off. From now on, wave good-bye from the porch. Finding relational equilibrium with your maturing child is one of the more difficult tasks of parenthood. But by the end of this growth period, a healthy restructuring of relationships needs to have occurred for both you and your child.

This isn’t your four-year-old anymore. This is a young person on the verge of adolescence. You need to begin treating her like a responsible individual. You may be surprised to find that that’s what she has actually become. During the middle years, children begin the long process of metamorphosis toward healthy independence. They move away from childhood structures, dependencies, and interests. There is a shift from a world centered largely on relationships with Mom, Dad, and siblings to a world in which relationships with peers, friends, and real heroes begin to draw their focus.

This particular transition is demonstrated by the way a child attempts to distance himself from early childhood structures. While certain terminology didn’t bother your child at age five or six, at eight or nine that same boy or girl will object to conversations that describe him or her in childish ways, such as “He’s my little guy” or “Yes, she’s my princess.”

Young Ryan couldn’t wait for his week at camp the summer he was nine. Upon arrival, he began unpacking the tidy bundle his mom had prepared. To his horror, he discovered the pillowcase. There was Superman striking a bold pose, much to his campmates’ delight. Ryan’s week at camp turned into one very long bad dream. The endless ribbing left him wishing he could disappear into a phone booth. At eight or nine, your child has already done an enormous amount of learning. Contrast him with the nearly helpless toddler of a few years ago, who needed the structure of Mom and Dad’s direct companionship, love, and supervision. A guiding parent or other supervising adult orchestrated all wake time, naptime, mealtime, and playtime. Your child’s friends were limited to the kids in the neighborhood or his playgroups. He lived in a world predominately structured and made secure by you.

Consider the child who at five held your hand everywhere you went and at six advanced to crossing the street by herself. Now she is notably less dependent on you and the sheltering structures you created for her protection (and your comfort). A driving sense of her own self-sufficiency is replacing your preadolescent’s longstanding preoccupation with personal caretakers.

Early in the middle-years transition, children begin to reject all sorts of minor childhood-related associations that they previously found comforting. The little girl who once was consoled after an injury by sitting on Mom’s lap may start going to her siblings for comfort instead. The young boy who once would not go anywhere without his stuffed animal now buries it in his closet toy box. This is just the beginning. There is more coming in the next post in a couple of days.

Frustrated parents often tell us they stopped correcting their children because they thought they were exasperating them, something we all came to understand in Growing Kids God’s Way was to be avoided. Upon further discussion, the parents would go on to say that they could tell their children were getting frustrated with the parents and so they stopped.

Guess what? There is a difference between being exasperated and being frustrated. So let’s define the terms. To exasperate someone is to ask them to do something they cannot do. To frustrate someone is to ask them to do something they do not want to do. The difference here is huge. Well-meaning parents, such as the ones mentioned above are indeed frustrating their children. They aren’t asking them to do something they cannot do. They are asking them to do something they do not want to do.

Your toddler will show frustration over many things.  He will be frustrated when you ask him to do something he doesn’t want to do, when he doesn’t get his way, if he doesn’t like what you have given him and so forth.  This is normal and to be expected.  You exasperate your child when you ask him to do something he is not capable of doing.  Parents often over-talk their toddlers, explaining things to them they are not going to understand.  A toddler, for example doesn’t care if it is cold outside.  All the explanations in the world aren’t going to convince him of this.  If you want him to wear a coat and he is refusing to put it on, just put it on him. If, on the other hand, you try to teach your toddler to tie his shoes, you will exasperate him.  He doesn’t have sufficient coordination or mental problem solving ability to accomplish this.  Sometimes we try to advance our children too fast.

Frustration Tantrums

It is possible for toddlers to demonstrate frustration tantrums.  An example of this would be when he is trying to get a toy to work a certain way and it just won’t cooperate with him.  In this case parents can substitute another toy, or if the child refuses to play with another toy remove the child and have him sit for a few minutes until he regains self-control.  If your toddler demonstrates a frustration tantrum when you ask him to do something he doesn’t want to do, such as come inside for lunch, then you will want to have him sit for a few minutes until he gains self-control.

Older Children

How does this work with children over 4 years of age? I can be a perfectionist when it comes to the way I clean my house. My mother told me once I was unfairly correcting my children for not cleaning the house to my standard. She taught me that my son, then 5 years old, could not get the sheets and blankets on his bed straight enough for me where the bed was positioned. She suggested I do that part, and then have him pull the comforter up and finish. As he matured in age, he learned to do it all.  I was exasperating him by requiring him to do a job that was difficult for his young body to do, a job I could easily do. How foolish that seems to me now to expect that of him.

We can also exasperate our children when we ask them to do something they may be skilled for, but other things may make it impossible for them to do at a particular time they are asked. What do I mean by this? At 8 years of age Sarah can certainly get her room picked up when asked. One day, the results of Sarah’s efforts were less than satisfactory. Mom was mad. She got on Sarah and made her clean her room again, but with no better results. This went on for most of the afternoon, with both Mom and Sarah losing control. What went wrong? Mom did not take into account that the night before they had been to Grandma’s house to celebrate Grandpa’s birthday and had gotten home quite late, several hours past Sarah’s bedtime.  Sarah had also been fighting a cold all week, and was tired and run-down from that.  Sarah did not have the energy to clean her room correctly. Was Sarah being rebellious? No. Sarah was tied, understandably so. As parents, we need to think things through and rule these kinds of things out before getting on our children.

So, next time you think you are exasperating your child, ask yourself – “Is this something they can in this moment do and do well?”  If your answer is “Yes”, then your child is telling you she does not want to do it, and you deal with that in an entirely different way.

By Carla Link
MomsNotes.com

Ok, so as promised last time, here is what the ever-gracious Anne Marie had to say when we moved from talking about melancholy first born boys to second born girls (who in our family also happens to be our eldest girl!).

I didn’t see it! I had often quietly thanked the Lord that He had blessed us with a boy first in our family because I had seen so many friends have girls first and to me, they always seemed a little bossy, carried the weight of responsibility on their shoulders and had the tendency to be wise in their own eyes. Sounds harsh I know but as much as I was sure I didn’t want to end up with that in my relationship with my own daughter, it had indeed snuck up on me! Now please don’t misunderstand me – our eldest daughter is an absolute delight. Our ever-so-eager-to-please, happy, helpful beautiful daughter is a huge blessing in our family and indeed has become my reliable little helper. However, as my conversation with Anne Marie developed, she ever so gently pointed out to me that by allowing our precious daughter to help as much as she did, we had inadvertently allowed her to carry the weight of responsibility on her shoulders. Practically, that meant that she would often ‘step in’ and mother the younger children in a helpful way but at times when David and I were there. This was usually not appreciated by the younger children causing added conflict. It would also sometimes present as a ‘Wise in her own eyes’ moment! What Anne Marie pointed out to me was the need to ‘relieve her of her duties’! She explained to me how to gently thank our girl for her help but that as long as Dave and I were around, she could be off duty and enjoy being a child! I remember myself being an eager-to-please, helpful and very responsible daughter! However I also remember being concerned about things that I really needn’t have worried about as a child. The way Anne Marie explained it to me is like giving our daughter the gift of her childhood back! As we have tried to implement this advice, we have seen our daughter appreciated for her initiative and help but also released from unnecessary responsibility so she can enjoy being 9! This isn’t one of those ‘quick fix’ tips. It is something we need to continually implement to help our family relate in a more healthy way.

Yet again Anne Marie’s wisdom has made a huge difference in our family life and, I believe, saved us from a lot more retraining (as I’m sure you’ll agree most of the Ezzo’s advice does!). I thought next time I’d share about the ‘Walk and Talk’ principle – yet another opportunity to train rather than retrain!

Until then …. Blessings, Charissa