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Notes on Upper School Parent Cafes
By Michael Pastor
On Friday morning, March 28, I met with a small group of 7th and 8th grade parents for our latest Café. The topic was announced as, “Kids growing up: Balancing staying involved vs. promoting independence.” We discussed the difficulty of determining which battles need to be fought and when parents might allow kids more of a voice in decisions. Examples raised included bedtime, weekend curfew, wandering the neighborhood, high school selection. Naturally, children are at different stages of development so some parents are confronted with more assertiveness/defiance than others. One mother suggested the need to move from parent as CEO to parent as consultant during adolescence. It was also noted that parents can have a hard time accepting the need for their children to separate from the family; the emotional turmoil was compared to the grieving process outlined by Kubler-Ross. The discussion left me thinking about the complex emotional and logistical issues we face as our children reach early adolescence.
The latest 5th/6th Café took place on the morning of April 4. The topic for this Café was, “Tween social relations: bullying, teasing, peer pressure, friendships.” Grist for the mill was provided by the recent 6th grade dance, as a number of parents reported their children feeling pressured to attend and experienced teasing after the dance about who was dancing with whom. Parents were reassured when I told them that school staff at the dance thought it had gone extremely well, and they relaxed even more after Jason Stone, who had been at the dance, joined us and added how impressed the adults had been by the behavior of the 6th graders. Of course, this is not to say that peer pressure and teasing were not part of the dance experience to some extent. Some parents wondered if children are growing up too soon and if it was premature to have a dance for 6th grade. Another issue discussed was how children may move between different groups of friends at this age, sometimes saying that one group is too intense or one group is pressuring him/her. 6th grade is often a time of a fair amount of social turmoil: romantic feelings emerge for more children, friendships shift as maturity levels develop differentially, academics become more serious as kids move into upper school proper.
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