Leaving Elementary school, how teens change
Parents of elementary school children worry about their achievements in literacy and numeracy and whether they will be in the top sets in junior high and eventually high school. As children enter middle school, or junior high they can be classified as pre-teens, this age range are often referred to by advertising companies as "tweenagers", or "tweenies". The fact that these children are identified as a market segment should give parents a warning signal, their children are the consumers of the future and big business targets them at an early age.
These are the years at which children take their first steps towards adolescence and research shows that some enter puberty as early as 9 years old, generally girls, so their hormones start to affect them sooner than some other teenagers. Parents may be torn between being proud of their grown up child, but sad that their child has disappeared and no longer enjoys childish games. This is rarely the case, although the child may be asking for teenage privileges, they are still a child, and their maturity may be physical and intellectual, but emotionally they are still young.
This is part of the conflict that early teenagers experience when they go to junior high; the expectation is that they can display self control and self discipline, yet they are not quite ready. The new school is likely to be much larger than their elementary school and they will be mixing with new people, maybe from different areas. This may be the young teenagers' first exposure to bad influences and desperate to fit into this new environment, they may make some poor choices.
Junior high and high school may be a distance from home, and initially, parents may choose to drive their teenagers to school. This may be the first request for freedom made; to be trusted to make the journey alone and allowed to get to school by bus, or bicycle. These tentative steps towards independence from the parents will be followed by others, and the first seeds of conflict are sown. Parents are frequently caught unawares by their child's transition into teenage hood and are unprepared for the flood of requests and changes in their new teenagers' demands.
The young teenager is now testing the parents' boundaries, in their new environment they have a lot of comparisons to make with how other children's parents treat them and they will see their own parents in a different light. Parents mourning the loss of their amenable child and confronted by the new, challenging teen may resist at first and be quite rigid in their treatment of privileges and set tough rules. Junior high school is the time to establish a pattern of negotiation rather than conflict between parent and teenager. If this does not happen, then when the teen reaches high school, the parents may find they have lost all control and they have trouble on their hands.