Who Are You, and What Have You Done with My Little Girl?.

What It Looks Like.

She comes home from the sleepover Saturday morning with a scowl that's obviously the result of something more than just lack of sleep. Snapping at her brother for looking at her a millisecond too long is evidence of that. So are the near tears because you're out of Froot Loops, and the length of time she's been holed up in her room.

You give her a few more minutes, in the hope that she'll emerge sunny-faced, as she so often does lately after an emotional thunderstorm. When she doesn't, you gain entrance by announcing outside the bedroom that you found a backup box of Froot Loops. She doesn't want them anymore, but she lets you in anyway, taking elaborate care to close the door behind you. Her eyes are puffy from crying-zero percent chance of sunshine there-and she retreats to her bed where she has apparently been alternately hugging her teddy bear and beating the stuffing out of a pillow. Your suspicions were correct: All is not well in Tweenland.

Your first attempt to find out-"What's wrong, honey?"-is met with a stony "Nothing," followed by a sideways glance which indicates her hope that you'll continue to pursue this line of questioning. Your next query-"Did something happen at the sleepover that upset you?"-gets you a "No." And then, "Yes!" And then it all floods out.

At the sleepover, Anna said periods were painful-except SHE still isn't actually sure what a "period" even is except the dot at the end of a sentence-and Sydney's started wearing a bra-but SHE hadn't even noticed Sydney needed one-and Kayla's been shaving her legs and armpits-which really does sound painful-and nobody wanted to tell ghost stories like they used to-all they could do was talk about boys and going on a diet-and SHE spent the evening sorting the Peanut M&M's by color.

Still wailing, she reveals that she has just checked out her own body in the mirror, and Mom, she has hair in weird places and her hips are big and when she took a sniff at her armpit-ewww!

"I don't even look like me anymore!" she cries.

There has never been a truer statement.

You wouldn't have been faced with a situation like this a hundred years ago, at least not when your daughter was a mere tween. In the early 1900s, the average age for the onset of puberty (not even periods) was fourteen.1 But moms have to deal with puberty and all its issues much earlier now, often long before they're ready. Today the average age for the hormones to begin their dance is nine, with periods usually starting within two years. That's a full year earlier than in 1960,2 when I was nine years old. A study of more than 17,000 girls in the US found that 1 percent of Caucasian girls and 3 percent of African American girls showed signs of puberty by age three. By age eight, roughly half of African American girls and 15 percent of Caucasian girls show clear signs of sexual development.3 The reasons for the shift are still unclear, but the point in presenting these statistics is to show that the time to talk about puberty arrives sooner than many moms think. You and your daughter will fare best if you're informed and prepared, and, more importantly, if you use this time to talk about womanhood in ways that open your daughter up to a lifetime of loving that temple of a body.

That's how I want to help in this section. During puberty, a girl experiences more physical growth and change than at any other time in her life except for the span from birth to one year. It can be confusing, awkward, embarrassing, humiliating, and the time most likely to make her cringe even twenty years later. Or it can be interesting, exciting, confidence building, bonding, and the time remembered as a celebration of becoming a woman. Your daughter's experience can be the latter, because once again you are the single most important influence on this phase of her development-and you are the one best equipped to walk her through it with intelligence, humor, compassion, and empathy.

You can do this. What I think you'll need are the following: Information on what to expect Suggestions for talking to her about the various aspects of her changing body A plan for helping her shape her beliefs about what it means, physically, to be a woman Preparation for the practical side A tween recently sent me a one-line email: I wish my mom knew I am growing up.

You can be the mom who knows-really knows-and the one who can make it the best time she's ever had.

7.

The Biggest Deal Since Potty Training

Learn to appreciate and give dignity to your body.

1 Thessalonians 4:4 "When I had questions about puberty and growing up and all that, I was afraid to come to my mom because she never invited me to tell her everything. Even now I have trouble being open with her and telling her my problems."

age 15 One day when I was about ten-just a few weeks after I got my first bra-I came home from school to find a pamphlet on my dresser. The cover was plain and uninviting, but being the kind of child who read everything from Nancy Drew to the back of the cereal box, I immediately snatched it up. Within minutes, my little heart was pounding, and I could feel my face sizzling with embarrassment, even though there was no one else in the room. I had just been introduced to menstruation.

Not a word was spoken on the subject until two years later when, while at the circus with my grandfather, I went to the restroom and found blood on my underwear. I went home after the grand finale, crawled into bed, and cried until my mother came in to investigate. Pads and a belt were produced, and we returned to our silence on the matter of womanhood.

That was 1964. Fast forward to 1989. Marijean, age ten, and I were hanging out on the couch after watching a movie when she suddenly pulled up her shirt and said, "Look, I'm getting breasts-only one of them's bigger than the other one. Is that weird?"

That wasn't the first of our discussions about what was happening to her body, or the last. Those talks were funny, unpredictable, and sometimes awkward (for me, not for her!), but I was glad we'd had them when two and a half years later, at almost thirteen, she strolled casually out of the bathroom and said, "Well, we knew it was going to happen soon, and it finally has." When I offered to help her with a pad, she looked at me blankly and said, "I'm already wearing it." There was only one thing to do then. We had a celebration. There was much chocolate.

I'm not saying that I was a better mom to Marijean than mine was to me. My mother was born in 1916, when I don't think "sanitary napkins" had even been invented. For her to talk to me about anything even remotely related to-shhhh-sex would have shattered the silence she was raised in like a soprano shrieking a glass into bits. And as an ultrasensitive, easily mortified tween, I probably would have required psychiatric care if she'd launched into an explanation of where babies came from. Although I had a vague idea of what went on-and knew that a girl getting pregnant in high school was not good-I didn't get the details until my college roommate filled me in. I'm serious.

When I had a daughter of my own, however, I was determined not to follow the family tradition of being closemouthed about all things womanly. I didn't do such a great job with potty training, and when it came to teaching Marijean how to keep her room neat, I was a complete failure, but this was one area where I wanted to do right by her. By then, in my late thirties, I had come to appreciate my own sexuality and was emerging from anorexia with a deeper love for the body God had given me. I didn't want my daughter to view the natural, beautiful workings of her female self as something to be ashamed of and frightened by. If I did nothing else right as a mother, by the grace of God, I was going to teach her to love being a woman.

Fast forward to today. Marijean is happily married, ready to start a family. Two years ago, I held her hand as she was going into the OR with cervical dysplasia, a precancerous condition. Three months ago I held all of her in my arms when she was told she was having a miscarriage. Her husband was there both times, and her dad and friends and cousins were at the ready to comfort her. Yet the bond she and I forged at the first sign of those little breast buds was the bond she reached for in the darker hours of her womanhood. I hope it will be the one she relies on when she does indeed bring home a child of her own to raise. What I didn't get right I learned from, and I've intentionally learned more in order to write three books for girls about puberty and to work with them and their moms through workshops and blogging and individual mentoring. I'm not an expert, but I now know some things that can be helpful to you in guiding your own mini-woman.

Getting Clear: On Puberty

Let's start with what you can expect from puberty. Since most of this happens before a girl actually begins having periods, the signs give you plenty of time to get her ready for the big event-and judging from the emails I get from tweens, Getting Your Period is right up there with either Getting Your Driver's License or Having an Appendectomy, depending on how she's being prepared.

The most obvious signs of puberty are: Breast buds that seem to suddenly pop from a flat chest and then go through the stages of developing at various rates.

New hair under the arms and in the pubic area, starting straight, light colored, and fine; ethnic background will have an effect here.

Thicker, coarser hair elsewhere, especially on her legs, which may lead to a sudden interest in your razor.

Sweat that has a less-than-lovely odor, a development you will probably notice before she does.

A thicker waist and wider hips as her pelvic bones grow and normal fat gathers around them. This isn't as noticeable in the little waif body type until you go to shop for jeans and discover she's slightly changed shape.

A growth spurt (in some girls more like a long, steady stream) in which she puts on weight and grows taller at a faster rate (as much as four inches a year) than before (two inches a year on average); this slows down by the time she has her first period, at which point she's probably grown about nine inches since she started puberty.

A thick, clear discharge on her underwear, the sign you're least likely to know about, since she's probably not going to bring it up over lunch.

Changes in her face. The lower portion usually gets longer, her chin juts out more, and her forehead gets wider as she begins to look slightly adult-ish. You get your first real glimpse of her as a grown-up.

A sudden increase in shoe size, because the bones in her feet start to grow before the others-which means her feet will reach their adult size before the rest of her does (Marijean was in a size 10 at age twelve!) This accounts for some of those unexplained six-point landings in the middle of the kitchen floor.

Changing moods, often giving one the image of a theme park ride gone out of control. Hormones bounce moods around to varying degrees in different girls, depending somewhat on their natural temperament.

As for exactly when each of these signs will appear, that I can't tell you precisely. In fact, the part of puberty that seems to cause the girls I work with the most distress is why SHE has breasts/pit hair/her period and I DON'T. They're often convinced that something is terribly wrong with them. One eleven-year-old wrote to me recently, asking if I thought maybe she wouldn't be able to have children, since she hadn't started her period yet and all her sisters got theirs when they were ten. Even the age at which you started yours isn't a guaranteed predictor for when she'll have hers.

Whenever estrogen kicks in, the changes it causes are a lot to cope with in a relatively short time. Add the progesterone and, as a result, new monthly periods to that, and life becomes a delicate balance for a while. Just as in any woman, clear signs that menstruation is imminent appear in a tween too. Some may include: puffy, bloated abdomen tender, swollen breasts an attack of the munchies, especially if sugar is involved lower backache more than the usual crankiness or tears for reasons even she can't name outbreak of pimples (precipitating said crankiness or tears) fatigue and a recent morphing into a couch potato Basically she'll experience what one mom I know calls Baby PMS. Cramps, bloating, and the urge to rip everyone's lips off is hard enough for us even when we know what it's all about. If she doesn't have a clue, the whole experience can be pretty miserable.

Especially because she has even more going on. One confusing issue on her mind is yet another natural pubescent development: a change in her attitude about boys. Where once she was convinced they were all possessed by demons, or at the very least had cooties, she now finds herself wanting to look cute for them. Or she secretly enjoys it when the one least likely to actually have cooties unties her tennis shoe for the forty-third time. All of the following is completely normal for a girl who's entered puberty (although if she expresses none of these, that's normal too): Commenting that a certain boy is "cute"; she may even use the word hot, just because she's heard it, not because she necessarily comprehends what it implies.

Having a friend who's a boy and remarking that she likes him because he doesn't gossip or get jealous of her other friends, the way girlfriends do.

Having a crush on a boy her age, daydreaming about him, wondering what it would be like to be his girlfriend, especially after he's just looked at her or said hi for the first time.

Having a crush on an older or famous guy, experiencing fluttery feelings about a handsome male teacher or a youth director, daydreaming about meeting the Jonas Brothers or Taylor Lautner or some other luscious celebrity whose name will go up in lights before we can get this book into print. * Saying she's "going out" with a boy, indicating that she and a same-age boy have agreed that they are boyfriend and girlfriend, which means exchanging texts and smiles until they "break up," usually within a twenty-four-hour period because they have exhausted everything that "going out" can entail at their age.

"My mom's great. We talk about everything and she seems to understand everything. Except the boy topic. She doesn't realize that's what I hear all day at school from my friends and classmates so I don't really have anything else to talk about except who's going out with who and who broke up with who."

age 12 All of that is perfectly and delightfully normal, and it just as normally leads to wondering about sex. Not because she's planning to have it, for Pete's sake, but largely because she wonders what the connection is between the hand-holding and starry-eyed gazing she's beginning to envision for herself and the fuss being made over this mysterious Thing everybody's trying to keep her away from. Her questions about sex-spoken or kept hidden-arise quite normally from what she needs to know as her body turns her into a woman. These are the kinds of questions I hear from tween girls in emails weekly: "Why don't my parents want me to watch PG-13 movies? What's in them that's so bad?" (age 10) "I have my period now. Does that mean if I kiss a boy I could get pregnant?" (age 12) "I know this might be a strange question, and I'm not sure if we should be thinking about this...but I was wondering if it is a sin to be excited about, well...umm...having sex with your husband (the right one), when I get married of course (I would NEVER do it when I am not married, and I am waiting for the right one). Please, I am just wondering." That one was signed "Homeschoolchick, age 13."

The innocence and trust bring me to tears every time. How precious is that timid awakening into what will become such an important part of who she is? I'm always honored to be asked, and yet I struggle with how to answer. I always want to say, "Sweetie, where is your mother? Why aren't you going to her with your questions?"

It is absolutely vital that your tween daughter have total access to her most reliable resource-you. She has to know she can come to you with any question pertaining to the complex process of growing into womanhood. But there are a number of reasons why she may not come to you willingly and confidently. Girls tell me they're afraid their moms are going to "put them down" for asking about sex. They're embarrassed to go to them with questions about their periods because "we never talk about personal things in our house." They don't want to broach the subject of boys because they know their moms will "freak out." Some girls are just shy or private by nature, and even though they want to talk, they can't imagine how to start. All of those reasons make it much easier and less threatening for them to email me, a person they think they can trust but whom they have never met and probably never will. (How embarrassing would that be? Yikes!) "I wish my mom knew that sometimes my sister and I are afraid to ask a certain question because we feel embarrassed or stupid. I just wish she knew that."

age 12 That means that if dialogue about all things pubescent is going to take place between you and your daughter, you're probably going to be the one who starts it. And start it you must, for what I see as four extremely important reasons.

Reason #1: Her fundamental view of her womanhood starts here.

Please indulge me while I reiterate. It's hard to see your ten-year-old, who still sleeps with a stuffed animal, as a sexual being, but that part of herself is already stirring within her. Without even being able to name it, much less understand it, she knows something is happening to her. You know what it is, and you know that it's going to be a force within her for the rest of her life, just as it has been for you. I love the way Elium and Elium urge mothers to pay attention: Not to recognize that such a powerful, cyclical force wields tremendous impact on a female and all those around her is to stand in the middle of a cyclone and not notice the wind is blowing.1

Reason #2: She's up against a highly sexualized culture.

We've mentioned before that the so-called "youth culture" is the creation of non-youth who don't have the best interests of our kids at heart. (Their spending money, on the other hand, they're interested in.) But it's there, nevertheless, and we do our daughters a disservice if we don't talk to them about how they're going to deal with it. The good news is that the older members of their generation-the teenagers-are paving the way for them to deal with it. An article in Newsweek reports, "The culture at large may seem debased-sexualizing singers, actors, and models at a younger and younger age-but teens themselves appear to be thinking harder than ever about the potentially grave consequences of sex, namely unwanted pregnancies, disease, and death."2 As well they should. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the overall rate of occurrence of common STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) among girls in the US ages fourteen to nineteen is 25 percent.3 That doesn't include the rarer diseases such as HIV/AIDS, syphilis, and gonorrhea, which would drive that rate even higher. While the rate of teen pregnancy has steadily dropped since its peak in 1990, one in three teen girls in the United States is still estimated to get pregnant at least once before age twenty.4 The appropriate response from you in the face of all of this is not to put your daughter into protective custody-literally or figuratively-until you can find her a husband, nor is it to inundate her with warnings and statistics that convince her being a woman is the most frightening role a person could ever be saddled with. Now is the time to lay the groundwork so that she will respect her body and the God who made it. In order for that to happen, she has to know it and what it's capable of. If you talk to her about that now-in a way that is upbeat and accepting, emphasizing the potential joy of protecting her sexuality rather than the dangers of even acknowledging it-she will be prepared for the choices she's going to have to make in her teen years. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's hard to "just say no" to something you don't even see coming.

Reason #3: There is sexual harassment even in her world.

Tween boys are going through their own changes-which you know well if you've ever raised one or are in the midst of that now. Part of their confusion arises from what seems to be happening to the girls around them. Their newly surging hormones tell them they ought to be doing something about that, but they haven't a clue what-but the same media blitz the girls are subjected to gives them plenty of suggestions. What used to manifest itself in pigtail pulling now appears in the upper elementary and middle school world as: bra snapping (to see who's "wearing" and how freaked out you can make her because of it) suggestive name-calling (even if they're not entirely clear on what a "ho" is) comment muttering (remarks like "nice boobs" out of the earshot of adults) drive-by touching (a pinch on the rear at recess, an "accidental" brush against the budding breast in the lunch line) "just kidding" (which is funny to no one but them and their cronies when it consists of dirty jokes and embarrassing pranks) It doesn't happen in every school situation, although don't think that the private Christian school always rises above, because many of my complaints from tweens and young teens express horror that harassment goes on "right in Bible class!" But when it does occur it's a violation that no girl deserves at any age, especially in a place she's required by law to go to every day.5 You won't know about a situation that is demeaning, humiliating, and a threat to your daughter's self-esteem if she doesn't tell you about it, and she isn't going to tell you if she isn't able to talk to you about the other hard things, like periods and body odor. And if you haven't talked openly with her about how boys are different from girls, she's going to think she has done something small and dirty to deserve that kind of treatment at school or, I'm sorry to say, even church. The stories some middle school girls tell me about the goings-on at youth group prompt an immediate reply from me telling them to go directly to their parents with that information-without passing Go.

Reason #4: If you can talk about all of this together, you can talk about anything.

And you will want to. The older she gets, the deeper the issues will be and the more serious the natural consequences if she doesn't make good choices. Establishing great communication now insures that your daughter will always be willing to come to you for advice and guidance, everything from what to do about a BFF problem today, to how to know she's in love seven or eight years down the road. And it's not only the tough stuff you'll hear about. Being the mom who listens, helps her process, shows her the bottom line, and doesn't go ballistic will also make you the mom who gets to know about her first crush, share the joy of a repaired relationship, celebrate a victory over algebra. Right now, you will often have to be the one who initiates conversations about growing from girl to woman. But once you've established that you're her go-to gal, the door will swing both ways.

From the Ultimate Parent

God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:27 NIV It seems to me that moms, particularly highly committed Christian moms who want so much for their daughters to be pure (and rightly so), tend to think of God at one end of the life spectrum and matters related to the body-particularly sex-at the other end. That often translates into a parenting philosophy of "If I keep her focused on the Lord, she won't care about boys and sex." I've had more than one twelve-year-old tell me that whenever she starts thinking about a boy she likes, she goes straight to her Bible as soon as she can because she should be thinking about God, not boys.

I always want to say, "Let me get this straight. God created men and women as gorgeous images of himself, and made them different from each other in amazing, creative ways so they could be partners to each other and have babies who will grow into more God-filled men and women. But when you're focusing on God, you're not supposed to think about how any of that applies to you?"

I don't say that to them-at least not that way!-but I am saying it to you. At some point in our history, we Christians got off track and turned sex and anything surrounding it into a specter that's always waiting on the horizon to grab us and drag us into sin. That has led us to think of God as being the opposite of the body and its functions, instead of the Creator and Preserver of them.

I do ask girls when we talk about periods and so forth to think about the divine care that went into the designing of a woman's body. I point out that puberty alone boggles the mind with all its details and the way everything works together to turn a tween girl into a woman.6 As a mom who longs for sexual purity for her daughter, you can tell her the same thing. God gave her exactly the body she's supposed to have. She has to love it the way God does. She's responsible for taking care of it. You can tell her that your job is to show her how to do that, by giving her the information she needs and setting an example and helping her make the right choices. You can tell her that the two of you will work together under God's love and guidance and grace to make everything about her young womanhood a beautiful thing, so that she will be ready very soon to make good decisions concerning her body on her own, with God.

You can tell her that, because that is what is true.

Test Your Own Waters