Not ready for the tweens

My oldest daughter is 10 years old and in fourth grade at a Montessori school, which means she is in an "upper el" classroom with fourth, fifth and sixth grades combined. She is one of the older fourth graders, but, I am happy to report, she is still a little kid in many many ways. But she is feeling the pressure to grow up, and it's killing me.

To wit: Around Christmas, she told me that she was feeling very conflicted. Most of her friends no longer believed in Santa Claus and made her feel like a baby for not jumping on the bandwagon of cynicism. I asked her what her friends believed happened on Christmas if there was no Santa, and she pretty much had it right. But then she said she wasn't ready to give up believing yet because she liked that magical aspect of the holiday. I told her that we all have the right to our own beliefs (and then gently reminded her that if she chose to change her beliefs from the accepted Storey narrative about the big guy in the red suit, she should keep her new belief to herself). It was interesting to see her working through this schism with her friends, and, at the same time, dancing around the topic with me, asking but not really asking. In the end, she decided to continue believing but not necessarily talk about it with her friends.

Then, a couple of months ago, the fever around The Hunger Games series hit my daughter's classroom with a vengeance. All her friends were reading the series (emphasis hers), and she felt left out of popular culture because she wasn't in the know. I checked with a few trusted friends who read the books as adults and was told it is pretty dark and violent. Still, it was so important to her to keep up with the Joneses (especially when it came to her passion, reading), that I downloaded the first book onto my Kindle and planned to read it to her out loud.

We did not get very far. The first chapter was a rip-off of the Shirley Jackson story "The Lottery," and set the scene that each of 12 districts must send one boy and one girl to The Hunger Games each year to fight to the death against 23 other unwilling participants. Lovely, right? Oh, and if you are poor, you can pay to get your name in the drawing additional times in exchange for food and heating oil.

As I am reading, I kept trying to understand the content through the filter of my 10-year-old deer in the headlights. Her life has been pretty sheltered by virtue of how and where we live. Why does she need to spend time thinking about cruel societies that sacrifice people for sport. A couple of glances told me (I think) that she was enduring the story rather than enjoying it. After a couple of chapters, I expressed my opinion that this book was too dark for her. I told her we would keep reading if she wanted to, but that I did not think she needed these ideas in her head. I also told her that I have always admired her ability to chart her own course. In preschool, I tried to get her to wear red for Valentine's Day, but she insisted on green. She has a good sense of herself, but I fear that is already being challenged by the pressure of her older peers.

So we did not read The Hunger Games series together. But I read it on my own. Those books are like crack (I imagine)--you get addicted to them but feel kind of gross for having given in to them. Yet you can't wait for more. I know there is a lot of talk about how it is a good anti-war message for kids, but I didn't get that at all. It's a well-crafted young adult drama that has equal parts romance and really twisted violence. Ick.

We survived the first test of pushing boundaries, my 10-year-old and me. I know there will be many more to come.This year it's about books; soon it will be about clothes and boys and lord knows what else. But, in the meantime, I am going to savor my smart, goofy daughter who uses college-level vocabulary but cannot seem to comb her hair in the morning, and who  is beginning to understand what it means to be cool but still occasionally runs with one arm spinning like a windmill, propelling her too fast through childhood.

A good place to start...

Dear YM:
Oops. I somehow replaced your post with my attempt to comment. Yikes.  Sorry!!!

Signed:
Delete-happy in Denver

I hear you about parent teacher conferences for kids who are barely functioning at any level. I think, at that age, not crying hysterically or biting other kids is considered victory. Every thing else just ices the cake. Be glad you're conferences are still in the "plays well with others" and "doesn't eat his styrofoam cup" realm. As the kids get older, the challenge of parenting shifts from physical to mental.

We are a little deeper into the Montessori pool that you are--with all three kids (ages 10, 8 and 4) in a public charter Montessori PreK-12 school., Grades and report cards aren't really part of the Montessori deal, so I have come to cling to those conferences for insight into my kids' school experience. Because, let's face it, children are notoriously bad reporters. They can describe a scene of a movie in excruciating detail, but ask them what happened at school and you're likely to get, "Nothing." Both literally and figuratively

I have been astounded more than once by the insight some teachers can pull out about my kids during a 15 minute meeting. It makes me respect good teachers all the more. Why don't we pay teachers millions of dollars and pay entertainers teachers' salaries? I guess one could argue (based on the above) that entertainers have a bigger impact on young minds. But that is much too scary to be true.

Parenting in Advanced Maternal Age

In my career in corporate communications--the last eight years as a freelancer--I have been fortunate to work with people I really like and whom have become friends beyond professional bounds. I've been working with Niamh since my second child was a baby and before she was married and had kids of her own. Now we're both in the throes of raising kids and working. We talk often but have only met face-to-face a couple of times. And we were both amused and a little horrified the first time we heard the term "advanced maternal age" from our respective OB-GYNs.

This blog will be an ongoing dialogue between Niamh and me (and, hopefully, some regular readers/commenters) about what it is like to have and raise kids after living through our 20s and part of our 30s without them. It's also about raising kids in this time, when there is so much attention paid to "parenting" as a verb. We are living in an advanced maternal age in terms of attitudes and expectations of us as mothers. Or so we'd like to think. But have we really advanced in our thinking? Or just our expectations?