Tweens: 10 going on 16
by Kay S. Hymowitz
PARENTGUIDE News
May 2004
When my youngest morphed from child to teenager, down
came the posters of adorable puppies and the drawings
from art classes; up went the airbrushed faces of Leonardo
Di Caprio and Kate Winslet. CDs of LeAnn Rimes and Paula
Cole appeared mysteriously, along with teen fan magazines
featuring glowing movie and rock-and-roll hunks with
earrings and threatening names like Backstreet Boys.
She started reading the newspaper— or at least
the movie ads— with all the intensity of a Talmudic
scholar, scanning for glimpses of her beloved Leo or
Matt Damon. As spring approached and younger children
skipped past our house on their way to the park, she
swigged from a designer water bottle, wearing the obligatory
tank top and denim shorts as she whispered on the phone
to friends about games of Truth or Dare. The last rite
for her childhood came when, embarrassed at reminders
of her foolish past, she pulled a sheet over her years-in-the-making
American Girl doll collection, now dead to the world.
So what’s new in this dog-bites-man story? Well,
as all this was going on, my daughter was 10 years old
and in the fourth grade.
Across class lines and throughout the country, elementary
and middle-school principals and teachers, child psychologists
and psychiatrists, marketing and demographic researchers
all confirm the pronouncement of Henry Trevor, middle
school director of the Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn,
NY: “There is no such thing as preadolescence
anymore. Kids are teenagers at 10.”
Marketers have a term for this new social animal, kids
between 8 and 12— they call them “tweens.”
The name captures the ambiguous reality: though chronologically
midway between early childhood and adolescence, this
group is leaning more and more toward teen styles, teen
attitudes, and sadly, teen behavior at its most troubling.
Perhaps the most striking evidence for the tweening
of children comes from market researchers. “There’s
no question there’s a deep trend, not a passing
fad, toward kids getting older younger,” says
research psychologist Michael Cohen of Arc Consulting,
a public policy, education and marketing research firm
in New York. “The Toy Manufacturers of America
Factbook states that, where once the industry could
count on kids between birth and 14 as their target market,
today it’s only birth to 10. “In the last
ten years, we’ve seen a rapid development of upper-age
children,” says Bruce Friend, vice president of
worldwide research and planning for Nickelodeon, a cable
channel aimed at kids. “The 12 to 14-year-olds
of yesterday are the 10 to 12s of today.” The
rise of the preteen teen is “the biggest trend
we’ve seen.”
Scorning any symbols of their immaturity, tweens now
cultivate a self-image that emphasizes sophistication.
Friend reports that by 11, children in focus groups
say they no longer even think of themselves as children.
They’re very concerned with their “look,”
Friend says, even more so than older teens. Sprouting
up everywhere are clothing stores like the chain Limited
Too and the catalog company Delia’s, geared toward
tween girls who scorn old-fashioned, little girl flowers,
ruffles, white socks and Mary Janes in favor of the
cool— black mini-dresses and platform shoes. In
Toronto, a tween store called Chickaboom, which offers
a manicurist, and tween-trendy music on the sound system,
hypes itself as “an adventure playground where
girls can hang out, have fun and go nuts shopping.”
Teachers complain of 10 and 11-year-old girls arriving
at school looking like madams, in full cosmetic regalia,
with streaked hair, platform shoes and midriff-revealing
shirts. Barbara Kapetanakes, a psychologist at a conservative
Jewish day school in New York, describes her students’
skirts as being about “the size of a belt.”
Lottie Sims, a computer teacher in a Miami middle school,
says that the hooker look for tweens is fanning strong
support for uniforms in her district. But uniforms and
tank-top bans won’t solve the problem of painted
young ladies. “You can count on one hand the girls
not wearing makeup,” Sims says. “Their parents
don’t even know. They arrive at school with huge
bags of lipstick and hairspray, and head straight to
the girls’ room.”
Though the tweening of youth affects girls more visibly
than boys, especially since boys mature more slowly,
boys are by no means immune to these obsessions. Once
upon a time, about ten years ago, fifth and sixth grade
boys were about as fashion-conscious as their pet hamsters.
But a growing minority have begun trading in their baseball
cards for hair mousse and baggy jeans. In some places,
$200 jackets, emblazoned with sports logos like the
warm-up gear of professional athletes, are the norm;
in others, the preppy look is popular among the majority,
while the more daring go for the hipper style of pierced
ears, fade haircuts or ponytails.
After completing her toilette, your edgy little girl
might want to take in a movie with a baggy-panted, Niked
dude. They won’t bother with pictures aimed at
them though. “When I hear parents complain about
no films for their young kids, it kind of gets to me,”
says Roger Birnbaum, producer of such films for preteens
as Angels in the Outfield and Rocket Man,” because
when you make those kinds of films, they don’t
take their kids to see them.”
No aspect of children’s lives seems beyond the
reach of tween style. Even the Girl Scouts of America
have had to change their image. In 1989, the organization
commissioned a new MTV-style ad, with rap music and
an appearance by tween lust-object Johnny Depp. Ellen
Christie, a media specialist for the organization, said
it had to “get away from the uniformed, goody-goody
image and show that Girl Scouts are a fun, mature, cool
place to be.” The Girl Scouts?
Those who seek comfort in the idea that the tweening
of childhood is merely a matter of fashion— who
maybe even find their lip-synching, hip swaying little
boy or girl kind of cute— might want to think
twice. There are distributing signs that tweens are
not only eschewing the goody-goody childhood image but
its substance as well.
Tweens are demonstrating many of the deviant behaviors
we usually associate with the ranging hormones of adolescence.
The evidence of tween sex presents a troubling picture.
It seems that kids who are having sex are doing so at
earlier ages.
Equally striking, though less easily tabulated, are
other sorts of what Michael Thompson, an educational
consultant and co-author of Raising Cain: Protecting
the Emotional Life of Boys, calls “fairly sophisticated
sexual contact,” short of intercourse among tweens.
Thompson hears from seventh and eighth graders a lot
of talk about oral sex, which they don’t think
of as sex. “For them, it’s just fooling
around,” he says. A surprising amount of this
is initiated by girls, Thompson believes. He tells the
story of a seventh-grade boy who had his first sexual
experience when an eighth-grade girl offered to service
him in this way. “The boy wasn’t even past
puberty yet. He described the experience as not all
that exciting but ‘sort of interesting.’”
Certainly the days of the tentative and giggly preadolescent
seem to be passing. Middle-school principals report
having to deal with miniskirted 12-year-olds “draping
themselves over boys” or patting their behinds
in the hallways, while 11-year-old boys taunt girls
about their breasts.
Drugs and alcohol are also seeping into tween culture.
The past six years have seen more than a doubling of
the number of eighth-graders who smoke marijuana and
those who no longer see it as dangerous. “The
stigma isn’t there the way it was ten years ago,”
says Dan Kindlon, assistant professor of psychiatry
at Harvard Medical School and co-author with Michael
Thompson of Raising Cain. “Then it was the fringe
group smoking pot. You were looked at strangely. Now
the fringe group is using LSD.”
What change in our social ecology has led to the emergence
of tweens? Many note that kids are reaching puberty
at earlier ages, but while earlier physical maturation
may play a small role in defining adolescence down,
its importance tends to be overstated. True, the average
age at which girls begin to menstruate has fallen from
13 to between 11 and 12 ½ today, but the very
gradualness of this change means that 12-year-olds have
been living inside near-adult bodies for many decades
without feeling impelled to build up a cosmetics arsenal
or head for the bushes at recess. In fact, some experts
believe that the very years that have witnessed the
rise of the tween have also seen the first menstruation
stabilize.
Almost without exception, the principals and teachers
I spoke with describe a pervasive loneliness among tweens.
“The most common complaint I hear,” says
Christie Hogan, “is, ‘My Mom doesn’t
care what I do. She’s never home.” The more
resourceful and socially well-adjusted children stay
afterschool whether or not there is a formal program,
hanging around popular teachers and counselors. “We
have to shoo them home at six o’clock sometimes,”
recounts one New York City middle-school director. “They
don’t want to go home. No one’s there.”
Tweens really began to catch the eye of businesses around
the mid-80s, a time when, paradoxically, their absolute
numbers were falling. The reason was simple. Market
research began to reveal that more and more children
at this age were shopping for their own clothes, shoes,
accessories, drugstore items— even for the family
groceries.
How do parents view all this? While they may be out
of the house for long hours, parents still have the
capacity to break, or at least loosen, the choke hold
of the peer group. Many parents negotiate diplomatic
compromises— giving in on lipstick, say, while
holding the line on pierced navels and quietly trying
to represent alternatives. But a surprising number of
parents, far from seeking to undermine their children’s
tweenishness, are enablers of it.
The one theme that comes through loud and clear in talking
to educators and therapists is that, with parents and
their tween children, it’s the blind leading the
blind. “I’m hearing statements like, ‘What
can I do? I can’t make him read,’”
says one director of a New York City private middle
school. “And the child is in fifth grade. What
does it mean that an adult feels he cannot make a 10-year-old
do something?” A middle-school principal from
Putnam County, NY concurs: “I used to say to a
kid behaving rudely, ‘Young man, would you speak
that way at home?’ and he would hang his head
and say, “’No.’ Now I ask a kid, he
looks surprised and says, ‘Yeah.’”
It’s too simple to trace the trend toward passive
parenting back to the time and energy deficits experienced
by most working parents. Parents are suffering from
a heavy diet of self-esteem talk. In their minds, to
force a child to speak politely, to make him read, to
punish him for being out of line, is to threaten his
most primary need— to express himself. “You’ll
damage his self-esteem,” principals and teachers
often hear from parents of children who face discipline
for troublemaking.
Thus tweens, far from being simply a marketing niche
group, speak to the very essence of our future. They
are the vanguard of a new, decultured generation, isolated
from family and neighborhood, shrugged at by parents,
dominated by peers, and delivered into the hands of
a sexualized and status-and fad-crazed marketplace.
A second grade teacher told me that, at her school’s
yearly dance festival, she is finding it increasingly
difficult to interest her 7-year-olds in traditional
kid stuff like the Mexican hat dance or the hokey-pokey.
They want to dress up like Britney Spears and shimmy
away.
