Being single in Sixth Grade

That may seem like a strange title to use for my post - but this is what has been up in my house over the last few days. It's been interesting watching my children grow up. Each of them have gone to a certain school from the fifth grade on - and each class has had its own theme. My youngest daughter, now in sixth grade, has slowly been revealing to me one of the reoccurring themes in her class: relationships of attraction.

She has been dreading Valentine's Day because it was going to so prominently point out to her that she is "alone" and single. She's twelve. Kids in her class - some of them, at any rate, are "together" - that nebulous term that means that you exchange emails with each other and sometimes eat lunch together. But everyone knows that you like like the other and are officially an item. It is also a measure of your attractiveness - this odd mirror of external validation that I personally believe happens concurrently with puberty.

This peer reality of my daughter is heartbreaking. She's taller than the other girls and knows beyond a doubt that the birthmark on her face makes her ugly. She's tough and fairly savvy for twelve - being the younger sister to two older college age siblings - and yet hides her true emotions behind a mask of happiness and get along spirit. But she is single and alone in sixth grade.

I remember sixth grade and there was so little of this kind of stuff going on. That started up the following year in middle school. Sixth grade was still about dodge ball and girl scouts and slumber parties. And so I watch my youngest daughter trying to navigate through this culture and can only wonder at the cost to her self esteem. It's like watching a whole bunch of kids playing house. They are playing at having the more adult relationships of dating and partnership. But dating is part of the mating dance - and that hardly feels appropriate in the lives of children under the age of -well - fifteen. And why? Why play house at all? Is the need for external validation by the opposite sex so important for girls AND boys? Can we only see ourselves as whole in relationship to others? Is this what our enmeshed relationships are bringing forth in our children? As a culture, are we pushing our children so quickly into adulthood that we forget that they actually have to have the inner growth needed to match the privileges we seems to throw so readily their way?

I'm thinking about these questions as I hug my daughter and listen to her worries and pain. I can't change the world she lives in but I sure hope I can help ease the blows.