A Message from Ms. McMains

Dear 7th grade parents & guardians,

Welcome to pre-Spring! I would like to ease into beautiful mild temps and tulips but you and I both know Illinois has a few more weather punches in store. I’ve lived here since 1980. There’s a cold snap lurking somewhere in March or April…..possibly June.

As we gear up for 4th quarter, just a few thoughts. As always, take them or leave them and please let me know if there are other topics you’d like me to write about or provide articles and book references for. In February and March your students have been so BUSY. They have engaged in all types of learning, sports, music, theater, clubs, and community service. So much exploration! So many thoughts, opinions, and unbridled emotion. Watching them change and grow at such a rapid pace is a delight and really resonated with a book I recently read. Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren, was unique and quite a divergence from my usual type of book, but I ended up truly enjoying it. As a botanist, chemist, and university professor, the author draws remarkable parallels between human and plant experiences. This is how she described the teenage years of a beloved tree;

“It went through a ten year period where it grew wildly, with little regard for the future. Between the ages ten and twenty it doubled in size, and it was often ill prepared for the new challenges and responsibilities that came with such height. It strove to keep up with its peers and occasionally dared to outdo them by brazenly claiming the odd pocket of full sun.”

Sound like anyone you know?

In addition to some articles that recently caught my eye and are linked below, I wanted to extend a couple fun challenges based on my observations here at school and based on research from the incredible book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers by Lisa Damour.

Challenge #1: Parents of BOYS. Did you know that although boys and girls express a similar range of emotions in very early life, boys experience a drastic “narrowing of emotional repertoire?” The study cited on page 40 in The Emotional Lives of Teenagers states, “between preschool and the end of first grade, boys’ expressions of sadness and anxiety dropped by 50 percent.. “ Please note this narrowing of emotional repertoire does not mean boys are not feeling sad or anxious, it simply means they are not expressing it. So my question is, where do these emotions go? How do boys express emotions such as sadness or anxiety if not verbally or through facial expressions? My suspicion is that both sadness and anxiety tend to be expressed through the outward lens of anger, restlessness, hyper excitement, grouchiness and any other host of emotions. So my challenge to parents (looking at you Dads), is to occasionally work on your own expressions of sadness and anxiety/worry and to verbalize it to your 13 year old sons. Here are some examples in case this feels awkward to you.

“I’ve just been a little down lately. Some things are not going great at work.”

“I’ve been feeling kinda worried lately about your grandma and her health.”

“Sometimes I think about work and things that need to get done at the house and it feels overwhelming to me.”

A bonus challenge would be to then talk about how you manage feelings of sadness and anxiety. Try to point out not only the action based coping strategies (go for a jog, play guitar, watch TV as a distraction) but also that you sometimes express those feelings and talk to someone about them. Boys need to hear that it is ok to talk to a friend or family member about their feelings. It is ok to express feelings.

Challenge #2: Parents of GIRLS. In the same chapter of The Emotional Lives of Teenagers just a few turns away on page 43, Damour talks about how we tend to ask boys more about learning-related topics and girls more about interactions with classmates and teachers. Of course there is nothing wrong with wanting to know who your daughter sat with at lunch or how the dynamics are playing out in that CMA small group. My curiosity is simply, are we inadvertently telling girls that relationships, friendships, and getting along with others is vastly more important than academic exploration? So many girls struggle with anxious feelings related to peer relations - what if we are (very accidentally) contributing to that? The next time your daughter comes home from school or you are driving her to an activity, maybe try one of these questions.

“What unit are you studying in Science right now? What are you curious about with that topic?”

“Has your dystopian book in ELA sparked any curiosity about current events, politics, or things currently going on in our world?”

“What concepts are you tackling in Math right now? What works best for your learning when you are presented with a new Math unit?”

You are raising a young adult within the much larger context of a complicated world. There will of course be gender based influences that impact both your parenting decisions and your child's experience of school, friendships, and emotional expression and regulation. The challenge is simply to be aware of those gender based influences and recognize when they are helpful and when they perhaps need to be challenged or at least poked.

The President's Wife by Tracy Enerson Wood. Full disclosure: This is not a social-emotional book or a parenting book. It is historical fiction "fluff" and just sounded interesting. We all need an escape from the every day, right?