My son turned ten. It’s pretty momentous to add a digit to your age. But despite the fact that it is basically an artificial milestone, I think it has been really interesting to see how he’s changed in the last year.
The “tween” phenomenon is largely a marketing ploy. But there is definitely something going on at this age.
In the past, our son’s friends have come to parties expecting to be entertained. He has always said, “What can we DO at my party?”
And they also expected to leave with something. The only time I completely resisted the “goody bag” phenomenon, I heard a child leaving with his mother say, “But Mommy, I can’t leave. I don’t have my goody bag yet!” The embarrassed mother shushed him, and I always have figured out ways to have kids leave parties with something in hand, though never the traditional bag of junk that breaks and candy they don’t need.
But this party was different. First thing my son wanted to do when a friend arrived was disappear upstairs to his room. I suggested that maybe he should be downstairs to greet his other friends, and he reluctantly agreed. Then when the second friend arrived, the three of them went upstairs anyway. When the doorbell rang next, I heard him say, “I have to go downstairs to tell people where we are.”
That’s the last we saw of the kids till they started to get hungry.
They all enjoyed pitching in and making homemade pizza, the only activity I had planned. But otherwise, their party was largely a kid version of an adult party: eat, drink something bubbly, and talk, talk, talk. None of the kids expected a goody bag.
My son said he was very satisfied with the result. A good party. No entertainment, no goody bag. Just friends, food, and conversation.
In other words, he’s growing up.
With both of my kids, the intellectual growth was early and explosive. My son went from one word repetitions to speaking paragraphs. As a preschooler, he preferred his richly populated imaginary world to having friends in the real world.
Their emotional growth has been much slower and much steadier. At times I have despaired of their ever attaining certain basic emotional and social goals that it seemed that other kids got instinctively. When other parents would say to me things like, “Isn’t it cute that the kids are all deciding who’s their best friend?” I would smile and nod, wondering if my kids would EVER get there.
And just when you stop wondering whether your kids will attain a goal… Here he is. Ten years old and actually acting [pretty much] his own age! He gets along well with other kids and has one friend in class who is nearly as crazy about computers as he is. He seems to enjoy pretty much all the kids in his class, and he mostly looks forward to going to school each day, though vacations and weekends are also appreciated.
Someone was talking to me the other day about how there seem to be brief periods of relief in the lives of parents when their kids coast through stages that are relatively easy to handle. He was definitely easier to handle at about 7 and 8. 9 started to be a bit of an emotionally rough year. But looking at him now, I am seeing that we might be able to achieve a short coast again before the tumultuous teen years hit.
Those tweens: marketers might think of them as people who wield influence over their parents’ pocketbooks, but I think of them as little adults in the rough. They’re learning who they are. They’re starting to feel confident about the things that they’re good at and starting to realize that there might be some work ahead on things that don’t come to them easily.
Our son is a marketer’s headache: he has no interest in clothes and most toys. The very best purchase I’ve made in the last year in his opinion was Adobe CS4 (graphic design software, for those of you who don’t have a computer-geek son!). With his birthday passed, he now has saved enough to make the one big purchase he’s been saving for for almost a year. He had been planning to get Lego Mindstorms NXT, but just the other day he saw the PicoCricket and he says he’s pretty much decided on that now.
But in any case, he’s making those decisions just like his parents do: with some thought and a lot of consideration about where he wants his money to go. Marketer’s headache, Mommy’s dream! Happy birthday, double-digit boy!
