by Gary Ezzo & Dr. Robert Bucknam
Synopsis: The middle years, eight to twelve years of age, are perhaps the most significant attitude-forming period in the life of a child. It is during this time that the roots of moral character are established. From the foundation that is formed, healthy or not-so-healthy family 
relation-ships will be built. During the preteen years, patterns of conduct are firmly established patterns that will impact your parent-child relationship for decades to come. Rightly meeting the small challenges of the middle years significantly reduces the likelihood of big challenges in the teen years. In other words, the groundwork you lay during your child’s middle years will forever impact your relationship even long after he or she is grown. Included are discussions related to the eight major transitions of middle years children including how to create a family-dependent and not a peer-dependent child. How to lead by your relational influence and not by coercive authority. What discipline methods work
Introduction: A small woman huddled on the floor in the parenting section of a trendy bookstore. Frantically, she searched the titles at ankle level. “Don’t worry. You can step on me,” she said to a shopper headed her way. “It probably wouldn’t phase me.” The passerby, who noticed the woman’s puffy eyes and disheveled appearance, discreetly asked the frazzled woman if she was suffering from allergies. “No,” she said, “My nine-year-old just told me to get out of his life. So, I picked up my bag and came here.”
Here. To the answer mecca of the universe: the bookstore. To find yet another book on how to handle her nine-year-old. Yet, she left empty-handed. After skimming the childbirth and first-year sections and looking through those oh-so-encouraging torturous-twos volumes, she undoubtedly noticed a major leap. Suddenly she landed in the teen section, which put forth countless theories on dealing with troublesome teens and their painful problems like bulimia and body piercing.
As for books on the family, she may have noticed titles such as The Vegetarian Child, Carbohydrate-Addicted Kids, Children with Work Inhibitions, and Children of Third Marriages. Nope. Nothing here. No hope. No clues-only the inference that this woman could meet her perceived needs with a good cup of java. She has plenty of time. According to the shelves, there’s a whole four years till she really needs help.
Trying to find a book written about children living in the growth-packed years between the ages of eight and twelve can be an eerie experience. Why the literary silence? If your experience is like ours, you may have to ask the manager for some help. We recently visited seven major book dealers within a three mile radius of our home: a Super Crown, two B. Daltons, one Barnes and Noble, one Waldenbooks, and two Christian bookstores.
Amazingly, not one of these stores carried a single book written specifically about parenting a child through the middle years. The closest we found was a few random volumes of the Gesell Institute of Human Development series by Dr. Louise Ames. Even these titles were limited to one-year periods of development.
Why such a dearth of information on the middle years? One possible explanation lies in the character of our society, which seems very willing to spend time and money to fix its problems, but very little of either to prevent them. When we are in a crisis, we have incredible resolve to find solutions for our problems. If we had the same resolve to prevent those crises, we might avoid many trials and much pain.
This book is based on the familiar axiom that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It’s much easier to avoid making mistakes that it is to correct them after the fact. This is particularly true of parenting. Just ask any mother or father continually challenged by a contentious or rebellious teen: Given a choice to go back and start over, would you work toward prevention or maintain the status quo and manage in a crisis? It is our firm conviction that rightly meeting the small challenges of the middle years significantly reduces the likelihood of big challenges in the teen years. In other words, the groundwork you lay today will impact your relationship with your children in their teens and even long after they’re grown. Therefore this book is as much about building a strong relationship with your middle-years child now as it is about preventing serious teen-parent conflicts in the future.
I can confidently tell you that close, intimate family relationships don’t have to end when your children hit adolescence. On the contrary, parents and children can establish a healthy relational foundation that will see them through the teen years and beyond. The best time to do so is now, during the critically important middle years. This book is a deposit on that return.
Before moving any farther, there are three matters to discuss. First, when clinicians talk about preadolescence, or the preteen years, they are generally referring to children between the ages of ten and twelve. This book, however, includes children who are eight and nine years old. This is because the hormonal changes experienced by preadolescents actually begin by age eight. To stay consistent with contemporary terminology, Gary and I will use the word preteen when referring to ten- to twelve-year-old children, but we will refer to the broader five-year period, ages eight to twelve, as the middle years.
Second, throughout this book we refer to our previous book, On Becoming Childwise. There we laid down certain principles that are very applicable to this subsequent stage of growth and development. We have adapted some core strategies from Childwise for use in this book.
Third, we would like to acknowledge and thank Anne Marie Ezzo for her wonderful contribution to chapter 14. As a nurse, childbirth instructor, and mother, her practical insights and gentle, conversational style put moms at ease with preparing their daughters for biological maturation and communicating the all-important message about the journey to womanhood.
Now it’s time to begin the process of growing together through the middle years. If I have learned anything from my pediatric practice and my own children it is this: The middle years, even more than the teen years, are crucial for preparing a child for responsible adult living. The fifteen hundred days of preadolescence are all the time you have to prepare your kids for the nearly thirty-seven hundred days of adolescence.
Let’s make the most of every minute.
Robert Bucknam, M.D.
