Excerpts from "On the Fast Track" - Page 1 of 2

Educational changes and How They Affect the Tween

   It is certainly a change for our kids when they leave the nurturing, very sheltered environment of elementary school to enter the tween/teen world of middle school. They are leaving the building and playground that they have grown to know and become comfortable with, and for many kids this change has landed them on the opposite side of town. Kids who live in some of the most rural parts of the country may even find themselves being bussed long distances to larger regional middle schools and being mixed with kids from all of the other small towns within the designated mileage radius. For some this means leaving fourth grade to enter a school which includes grades five through eight, and for some it means leaving sixth grade to enter a junior high school which is sometimes merged with grades nine through twelve. Either way, these kids went from being the “top dogs” in their school to being on the low end of the teen food chain, and in most cases is quite a huge adjustment. They are also making the transition from a contained classroom where they had the same teacher every day, to a team or cluster where they change classrooms and have an individual schedule they need to follow. This transition is not a gradual one. Last they knew, they were having a class Valentine’s Day Party where parents made homemade cookies and they exchanged Barbie and Harry Potter Valentines. Now they are being shown puberty videos and wondering if anyone is going to ask them to the dance on Friday night.

Chapter 3

Middleschoolers and Sexuality

   “Children must be taught sexual ethics and responsibility, inside and outside the home, just as they are taught how to behave in any number of public and private arenas. Teaching children to have self-respect, to feel good about themselves, to make good decisions: to me, that is sexuality education.”

  - Dr. Joycelyn M. Elders
    author of foreward
    Harmful to Minors-the perils of protecting kids from sex   By Judith Levine

   Along with the educational, social, and emotional changes that your preteen is going through are the sexual changes that accompany early adolescence. Hormones are flying around recklessly and without direction, changing their orbit at any given moment. For girls, this means that they may have moments of being irritable, or actually being mean to someone that they know is a good friend and that they really care about. When the hormonal wave is over, they often feel badly about themselves and wonder what possessed them to say such a thing, especially since they did not mean to say it. It is a mild form of menopause, only in the reverse, and without the veteran ability to recognize its arrival, nor the ability to manage it. Instead hormones slowing down towards the end of a reproductive stage, they are just getting started, but with the same type of irregularity. Most schools and families now educate children on the early changes of adolescence, but many times the emotional implications are left out. At least if young girls are made aware of these potentially nasty waves, they will be better able to understand themselves and their behavior, and not feel that something is wrong with them, or that it is a newly developing defect of their character. As they become more experienced at being a teen, and more familiar with their body’s chemistry, they may even develop the veteran ability to ride the wave.

Chapter 9

Friends with Benefits

   "The new tribes are informal, dynamic, and frequently temporary alliances, centered around ‘their members’ shared lifestyles and tastes’ around feelings rather than a commitment to particular ideologies or beliefs.”

  - Body Dressing     edited by Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson

   One result, or might we say casualty of our media-dominated, sex-indulged, society where the majority of our children are being exposed to too much too soon, is what has been termed the friends with benefits relationship. I had the very fortunate experience of meeting with one of the leading experts on the subject, Dr. David Landers, Director of the Student Resource Center and professor of Gender Studies at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. Dr. Landers who has worked with teenagers and young adults as a college counselor for over 22 years, defines a friends with benefits relationship as one in which “people who care about each other and are friends, in some cases becoming sexually active with each other, but who are not looking for a long term relationship.”

   What happens, according to Dr. Landers, is that two people who care about each other as friends “are looking for companionship, and comfort, and in the process of comforting someone else, one or the other person gets sexually aroused. In that process they do something about it.” He goes on to explain that the relationship undergoes a change and leaves one or both parties questioning what just happened, as they are “not dating” and were merely “looking for comfort.” They find themselves in a situation where their friendship now has some kind of “sexual component.” Dr. Landers states that the sexual component can “be as simple as cuddling, to oral sex, to intercourse, but they are not defining themsleves as being in a relationship.”

Chapter 11

Teens, Temptation, and Moral Relativity

   “Postmodern societies emerged as a consequence of Modernization, which eventually gave rise to such a high level of existential security that survival came to be taken for granted by growing segments of those societies.”

  - Ronald Inglehart

    Author of Modernization and Postmodernization   -cultural, economic, and political change in 43 societies

   Basically, we have become very comfortable as a society. We have it all, per say, and because we no longer have to worry about day to day survival such as we did during the Depression era, we can now focus on our wants rather than our needs, and those wants have expanded. Relative morality, or moral relativity, refers to the shift or change in social norms as far as what we are willing to accept as appropriate feelings and behavior in our world as we know it. Basically, moral relativity, is the theory that anything goes as long as it does not hurt anyone, which in turn has caused the distance between right and wrong to grow shorter, and the line which differentiates them to become blurry and poorly defined.

   

"On the Fast Track"   1  2