Social-Emotional Changes

What Parents Can Expect: On Your Mark!

The teen years are known as a time when youth move away from their parents and toward their peers, and middle school is the beginning of this journey. Their focus shifts from spending time with family to spending time with peers, belonging to groups, and experiencing personal and intimate relationships with others. Terms like cliques, crowds, and youth culture are used to describe subgroups of young people with distinct styles, interests, and behaviors. It is during this time that their social group expands to include teens that went to different elementary schools, or live in different parts of town. They also begin to spend more time with the opposite sex. In today’s world, the middle schoolers’ social experiences are expanded to include the use of cell phones, Facebook, and the Internet. Your can expect your teen to be dealing with the internal struggle of wanting independence at the same time that they are seeking guidance, support, and boundaries. While it can be particularly challenging to feel pushed away, remember that teens are actively engaged in learning about themselves through their interactions with their peers.

What Parents Need to Know: Get Set!

As a parent, you may feel overwhelmed and afraid that your teen will stop sharing with you, or get involved with the wrong peer group. While these fears are real, rest assured that your teen still needs you. The difference is that they stop needing you for everything. Think about your own relationships. Most of us have friends that serve different needs. We may call one friend when we need to hear the blunt truth and a different friend when we need sympathy. On one hand, teens need freedom to try new experiences, develop new skills, make mistakes, and learn about themselves. On the other hand, they need structure and boundaries that put safe limits around their choices. Teens will look to you to help them find the right balance. Ideally, parents give their children roots and wings, providing them opportunities to develop the various parts of their personalities. Home should be the safe haven where hurt egos are soothed and batteries are recharged.

As we pointed out, the middle schooler’s brain is still developing. Therefore, teens sometimes lack the ability to consider all of the consequences of their decisions. The range of consequences they are able to consider depends largely on what they have experienced, either personally or vicariously through friendships and interactions with others. Since friendship is valued so highly, friends can be a primary influence in middle schoolers’ decisions. Being accepted by the “right” peer group may take priority over being grounded by their parents for a week. Decisions can also be values-driven. As young people mature, these values become a blend of their parents’ and their own, enabling a young teen to make choices and decisions that may differ from their parents.

If they haven’t already, your middle school teen is about to enter a social world that we did not experience. Chances are very high that your teen is going to have an online presence. The world of cell phones and social networking sites has changed the way teens grow up. Texting and Facebooking have replaced the old paradigm of talking on the phone for hours. If you feel a little confused, disconnected, and scared of this, you are not alone! As in other aspects of their social life, your middle schooler needs you to instill boundaries and provide guidance. You can monitor cell phones and social networking sites, talk about how to avoid online predators, and forbid any form of cyber-bullying. Establish an open dialogue where you can share your values and come to an agreement about their texting and online activity. Make it a priority to be familiar with your teen’s online world, but don’t be too discouraged. Teens who have healthy social relationships in their everyday life typically have healthy online relationships as well.

What Parents Can Do: Go!

• Stay engaged in your teen’s social world. This involves being informed of their friends, friends’ parents, online interactions, and relationships with other important adults.
• Find trusted adults with whom your teen likes spending time. Teens will share things with other adults that they will not share with their parents. Your teen needs to have a network of trusted adults.
• Make your home the ‘hang-out’. Provide a space that gives your teen the perception of privacy, but allows you to monitor. Stock your house with food, get popular games, and have a variety of music and movies around the house.
• Make the rules and the consequences for breaking the rules clear. Strategies, such as written contracts can be a useful tool for enforcing rules and consequences for breaking them.
• Don’t expect teens to make mistakes, but understand that they will.
• Provide safe ways for them to experiment. As tempting as it may be at times, you can’t say no to everything. Try allowing safe alternatives so that you can remain a part of the planning.
• Get to know your child. Acknowledge that they are changing and you like the person they are becoming.
• Develop a policy for their texting and online activity that includes an understanding that you will randomly check their accounts. It is critical to set a tone that you are on their team and checking their accounts to keep them safe rather than pry in their business.
• Get on Facebook. If your teen is on Facebook, you should be too. Become their “Facebook friend” so that you can view their activity and be a part of their online life.
• Talk with your teen about cyber-bullying. Discuss how damaging it can be and make sure they know to come to you if they ever feel bullied.

Summary

By middle school, your teen has communicated feelings, sat through classes, planned ahead to complete homework, participated in group activities or team sports, and assumed responsibilities around the house. They have already made important decisions, sometimes when you were not there to help them. Your emerging teen will be filled with passion, energy, and angst and they will embrace the increased freedom and responsibility that comes with middle school. They will still look to their parents to be the support structure and sounding block that helps them develop into their physical, cognitive, social and emotional selves. Pay attention to how your teen is developing and remember that they can be ahead of the norm in one developmental area, while they are behind in another. Help them understand and accept how they are changing, and do your best to provide an environment that will help them flourish.

Progress to Part 2: How Parenting Changes