For some years now I have been asking myself the same question. As a diligent mother, I read dozens of magazine articles on teenagers and prepared myself mentally for the onslaught of adolescence. But — unlike Harry Enfield’s Kevin — my girls did not wait until their 13th birthdays to start flinging themselves self-righteously around the room, or spending hours fretting in front of their bedroom mirrors. It started when they were still in primary school.
At ten years old, my first daughter, Frances, was more turbulent than a tumble dryer at full tilt. I remember complimenting her on a pretty top she was wearing. She walked out of the room to change it. I tried to empathise, but by the age of 11 she was increasingly determined not to take any advice or sympathy I might offer. “I hate you,” she stormed when I told her I had packed a couple of sanitary towels “just in case” into her rucksack before summer camp.
My second daughter, Alice, enjoyed ten sunny, outward-going, uncomplicated years before undergoing a personality transplant at the age of 11. She suddenly felt everything truly, madly, deeply. Overnight, she and her friends became vegetarian. They would walk through town signing animal-rights petitions and lecturing Big Issue sellers on the dangers of drugs. Hand in hand, they were entering the anteroom of adolescence: a place as unwelcoming as a doctor’s waiting room or an airport lounge.
It is not merely that our well-fed children arrive at adolescence earlier these days, although that is partly the case. Nor is it purely a question of commercial pressures forcing our nine-year-olds to conform to an advertised ideal. No, this is about hormones.
Pre-puberty is a developmental stage in its own right, says Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, who has just written a book called Tweenies about children aged between eight and 12 years old, who fall outside the remit of most childcare guides. And she is astonished at how little we know about this early crisis of change and instability.
“Hormonal changes start about the age of eight in girls — long before any physical signs,” she says. “There is an awful lot going on inside the child’s body and moods will be affected before the periods start.” With boys, hormonal changes occur later. “For them, it is much more a case of the gawky 14-year-old,” she says.
In fact, pre-teen children are not being awkward — they are simply high on invisible hormones, says Dr Peter Hindmarsh, a paediatric endocrinologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London. This discovery has come only in the past five years. “Before then it was impossible to measure hormone concentrations at low levels,” says Dr Hindmarsh. “But you can now see that the sex hormones are pretty quiet until about seven or eight years of age, then they increase gradually over the next three to four years.”
The hormones — oestrogen for girls and testosterone for boys — start being produced at night, from the time children fall asleep until about 4am or 5am. Levels are not enough to stimulate breast and hair growth or to trigger menstruation, but they do affect the brain, hence the mood swings.
In fact the situation for the pre-adolescent child is not unlike that for a woman in the first three months of pregnancy, who can feel terrible but appears outwardly normal — it is not until the fourth or fifth month, when her bump begins to show, that she starts to receive the sympathy she needs (for the child, this outward recognition comes with spots and other physical signs of adolescence).
“Flossie has been a nightmare for months,” says a friend from Manchester. “She will not take no for an answer. She is only ten but wants to get her ears pierced and is making a huge fuss about it. We suggested that she wait a while, but that is not good enough because ‘all’ her friends have had it done. She also seems to be watching what she eats and there is not an ounce of fat on her. But one word from us and she flounces upstairs, banging every door she passes. It is as though a teenager has come to live in my child’s body.”
Life can be cruel for modern pre-adolescents. No longer cute and captivating, nor yet terribly teenagery, they are assumed to be able to cope with a vast range of outside pressures. They have to deal with more school tests than previous generations and exhausting extracurricular timetables of organised “fun”. On top of all this there are image pressures from the beauty, fashion and pop industries. Yet they are still only children.
Hartley-Brewer says that the problems of the pre-teen are quite different from those of the fully fledged teenager. “The adolescent crisis is: ‘Where am I going to be as an adult?’ The pre-adolescent crisis is: ‘How do I measure up in the uncosseted world outside my family?’ Tweenies are struggling to separate from the family, to check out how they fit in the outside world.” The stress sets in long before parents expect it. Check out the noticeboard at www.preteenagerstoday.com and you will find behavioural problems more typically associated with youngsters of 19, not nine.
“My daughter is nine years old and has started puberty,” writes one mother. “She has been very difficult with everyone. I didn’t know that a nine-year-old could be so ‘PMS’. Her moods have been up and down for at least two weeks. She hasn’t started her period yet. Help!” Another writes: “I am at a loss. I have an 11-year-old son who will not eat. His diet consists of peanut-butter sandwiches, popcorn and bagels. Not to mention junk food. At one time he would eat cereal but now that is a battle.”
They may look like ten-year-olds, but our pre-adolescents’ heads are buzzing with friendship problems, gender questions, moral dilemmas and anxieties about body image. Soon their limbs will elongate, body hair will sprout and everyone will realise what they have been going through. Until then they fight a lone crusade to be respected as subtly older, suddenly different.
Pre-teenagers often latch on to causes and issues outside the family in an effort to make their mark, Hartley-Brewer says. “As children develop the capacity for abstract thought, they begin to forge their own morality.
“They may become concerned for the suffering of others but have yet to develop the sophistication to see shades of grey. They are very rule-bound. An interest in animal rights can go alongside a tendency to anorexia and perfectionism.” As one friend put it, after receiving an anti-alcohol lecture from her 11-year-old daughter: “Our house is turning into Ab Fab. Rachel is more sensible than Saffy and I am feeling increasingly like Edina. No one told me it happened so young. I find myself asking: where did Rachel’s childhood go? Then she comes to me crying about a scuffed knee and I think ‘she’s still my little girl’.”
Tweenies will be published by Hodder and Stoughton next year.
Letting Go as Children Grow by Deborah Jackson is published by Bloomsbury (£7.99).
