By: ANDREA CLIFFORD-POSTON
Andrea Clifford-Poston is an educational psychotherapist and author of Tweens: What to Expect From and How to Survive Your Child’s Pre-Teenage Years (published by Oneworld) and When Harry Hit Sally: Understand Your Child’s Behaviour (published by Simon and Shuster)
CHILDREN TODAY are surrounded by sex; there is no innocence anywhere. We see the boundary between childhood and adulthood becoming more and more blurred. Cosmetic and fashion advertisements try to convince us that a beautiful body is the key to happiness in life and can instantly be achieved by using their products.
Children are being researched and targeted by both the media and manufacturers; their clothing has been sexualised to the extent that research shows us that girls between 7-10 years old wear make-up sometimes, 83 per cent use nail polish and 66 per cent use lipstick. The same research revealed girls as young as seven were deciding whether to ‘get a boyfriend’ or ‘get an education’ was what really mattered.
Tweens are having sex education at school and may well have begun puberty; it is not surprising that they are wondering about the link between their knowledge and their experience. Parents have the additional worry that by 11 or 12 years old nowadays, many children are physically able to become parents.
All this is not good for healthy child development. Children are being forced to think about sexual matters long before they are ready emotionally or intellectually, some may even feel pushed into adult behaviour.
But this is the world we live in; and what parents need to worry about most is helping children to understand what they do know, and to question what the media is telling them.
And this is not easy; as one mother said of her nine year old, “Sex just wasn’t on our agenda at that age …” Tweens are a new phenomena and parents cannot fall back on how their parents managed them at the same age.
Whose problem is it?
Tweens are children, not teenagers. Teenagers are ready to experiment with sex.
Tweens are much more interested in their own bodies than other peoples. They want to learn about sex, especially the romantic element.
They may spend hours wondering aloud about sex, whose ‘hot and whose not,’ who is snogging who, but when it comes to themselves, as one 11 year old said, “No lip stuff and absolutely no tongue stuff”.
If you respond to your Tween as though they are wanting to have sex then you miss the point. You may also raise their anxiety and cause problems. What this age group needs is:
• To understand the link between the physical changes in their body and the changes in their feelings and behaviour.
• To understand why they feel so uncomfortable with themselves.
• To understand how they can feel as comfortable as is possible with their emerging sexuality.
• To understand how the physical changes in their body are impacting on their feelings.
Of course, they need to know the basic facts of life but more importantly, they need help in understanding when sexual intimacy is and is not appropriate within a relationship.
And sexual intimacy is never appropriate within a Tween relationship. We know that the better a child’s self-esteem, the more confident they are of being loved and admired at home, the less likely they are to lose their virginity at an early age. Good self-esteem will help Tweens to find out, at their own pace and in their own time, what they want sexually and how they are going to get it.
Helping children with sex
Children’s sexual development is as individual and as idiosyncratic as a fingerprint. There are no experts on sex; we need to move away from the idea that there is a ‘right age’ for talking to children about sexual matters. It is much more important for you to recognise when a child is ready by observing the subtle changes in the way you react to them. So, when you begin to be anxious about what your child may be doing outside the home with children of the opposite sex then your child is communicating to you that they are ready.
But their communications are less about wanting to lose their virginity and more about whether or not they ‘look cool.’ And, ‘looking cool’ can be your child’s way of telling you that they are concerned about how they are going to cope in the unfamiliar world outside home.
This is very different to teenagers who may be preoccupied with how they are going to leave home.
Your job as a parent is to help your child to feel so confident and admired at home that they can take this sense of wellbeing into the outside world.
• Try to compliment your child more on some aspect of their personality or behaviour rather than their appearance.
• Try not to argue if they complain that they are unattractive! Sympathising, “Yes, I can see you are very disappointed at the size of your nose … colour of your hair …”may be more of an invitation for your child to talk about how they feel about themselves than persuading them that they are attractive in spite of their particular worries.
• Story lines from soaps, films, news items can be a helpful way of discussing sexual matters indirectly. Your child may be more happy to discuss the latest teenage pregnancy in a soap and the issues surrounding it than they will be to discuss their own sexuality.
• Encourage older siblings to be careful about what they talk about and how they behave in front of the Tween in the family.
