Is She Herself, or Is She You?

[Jesus] said, "Why were you looking for me? Didn't you know that I had to be here, dealing with the things of my Father?" But they had no idea what he was talking about.

Luke 2:49-50.

Near your birthday, the mom and the daughter should have a mommy/daughter day. Moms should do that often to get to know their child.

age 10.

When Marijean was eight years old, she and I visited a friend of mine we hadn't seen since Mj was a toddler. My friend and I watched Mj interact with her kids, and after only about an hour, my friend turned to me and said something that rocked my maternal world.

"The learned behaviors are definitely you," she said, "but the raw material? Totally Jim."

There it was. I'd molded and shaped, chiseled and refined-and my child was still turning out to be just like her father.

Not that being like Jim Rue is a bad thing, mind you. Both he and Marijean are passionate, opinionated, generous, energetic people who never leave you in doubt as to where you stand with them. No pair of people could be more loyal, more fascinatingly verbal, more full of the love of life. Between the two of them, I'm kept in joyful hysterics hourly, and when a crisis occurs, there is no one else I want there, because they will have the situation under control before the paramedics arrive.

Still, the years have proven that Marijean is neither completely "her father's daughter," nor is she a dead ringer for me. She is her own person, in many ways a combination of her parents, and in many more ways a unique, one-of-a-kind individual. Neither Jim nor I possess her instinct for healing. Her stand-up-comic sense of humor is unmatched by either of us. And where on earth did she get her financial sense? She is not a photocopy of her parents.

No daughter is.

Yet so often we try to raise them as little Us-es. You want to go in with me and take a look at what that's about?

Getting Clear: She's Not You

It's evident early on.

You've known who your daughter was from the first weeks of her life. She demonstrated right out of the womb whether she was a cuddler or a straight-armer. It took only a few days to determine whether she was going to be sensitive to loud noises or snooze her way through the Fourth of July fireworks. By the time she was a month old you were saying things like "She has a temper" or "She's a laid-back baby." Although your mother may have claimed that as an infant you were just like your newborn, she wasn't to be believed. If you've had more than one child, you know every baby is different.

That means not only different from every other baby, but from every adult. Including you.

I recall sitting next to Jim with two-day-old Marijean positioned on Jim's propped-up legs and watching her glare-I'm serious, glare-at us, the skin between her little eyebrows pinched, eyes suspicious, as if to say, "Things better improve a whole lot around here, or I'm going back where I came from. And don't think I won't."

We recognized her intensity then, and it's been present ever since as a force to be reckoned with. The basic personality is there, pre-birth, in every baby, and it has nothing to do-yet-with anything you've done or haven't done. Doesn't matter whether you listened to Mozart or Alan Jackson or Celtic Woman during your pregnancy. That kid is who she is. And she's not you.

Mom's own personality, however, is her natural, first-instinct approach to parenting.

As a child I was a pleaser, a personality trait I still struggle with at times. Praise, approval, and the threat of shame "worked" in raising me. At least, that approach kept me on the straight and narrow, kept me from giving my mother an instant of trouble during my tween years. Thinking back, I must have been an incredibly easy child to have brought up. I let my mother off way too easy.

It was natural, then, for me to expect that the same style would work with my daughter. Uh-huh. When she was two, I was already asking: Why aren't praise and approval motivation for her? Why does she have to have the last word (yes, at two) when she knows that's going to make me want to flush her down the toilet? Why isn't she a pleaser? I hated that in myself, but it would have been so much easier if the very thought of making me frown was enough to pull her away from that wall with that crayon.

By the time she was eight, I had more questions: Why doesn't she seem to care what her classmates think of her? Why doesn't it bother her to get an "unsatisfactory" on an assignment? Why will she endure an endless lecture from me and still say, "Okay, but that doesn't mean I think you're right, Mom."

I knew that what worked for me wasn't tailor-made for her, and yet, what else did I know? I didn't get somebody who wasn't motivated by the promise of approval and the threat of shame.

You may have a daughter who would do cartwheels (perhaps literally) for a compliment, and yet you aren't one to dole out the praise because you yourself don't need much of it. Yours might do best when she has clear-cut rules, presented in triplicate, while you are more one to wing it. That doesn't mean you have to become like her in order to parent her effectively. I think you just have to know what does work for her, and somehow pull that off using your particular set of traits. Not to panic-I'll give suggestions shortly. For now, just know that she's going to respond best to mothering that takes her individuality into account.

Even if she is a lot like you, she's not an extension of you.

You know that book-turned-film Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants? The premise is that one of a close-knit group of teenage girls buys a pair of jeans that look sensational on each of them, even though they all have completely different body types. (This is obviously fiction...) That's the way I view the daughter who seems to be so much like her mother. She may share some of your characteristics-your total generosity, your witty sarcasm, your love of all things girly-girl, your no-nonsense approach to just about everything. But even those traits are going to look different on her than they do on you. Just as fabulous, but different.

For instance, both Marijean and I love children and they, for some reason, seem to like us too. However, when I see a baby, I go ga-ga over the poor child. I am reduced to complete idiocy as I gurgle and squeal and use baby talk that no self-respecting infant should respond to-and yet they do, with gurgling and squealing and jabbering of their own. Marijean, on the other hand, never changes her tone or her facial expression from the way she presents herself to adults. "Hi, buddy," she says to a boy-child as if they went to graduate school together, and the baby breaks into a slobbering grin from one earlobe to the other. Go figure.

You may share a deep spirituality with your daughter, and yet while she expresses that by doing all the motions to "Father Abraham," you meditate whenever you find a spare moment. You may be the cliched two-peas-in-a-pod when it comes to being intelligent, but she's a math whiz, where you can spout history facts more accurately than a Williamsburg tour guide.

Many of those differences-in-the-sameness are due to age, of course. Your daughter may actually become an attorney or a social activist or a minister just like you because of the traits you have in common, but obviously she's not going to display those traits that way as a ten-year-old. Other variations on a theme arise from the differences in generations. For example, where your generation was often more into individual achievement, theirs tends to go for teamwork, group efforts, community building.

Whatever the reason, any personal characteristic she has that reminds you vaguely of yourself is clearly going to have her unique mark on it. Just as when she gets older and starts borrowing your clothes, you will find yourself wondering if they look that way on you. (Just a heads-up for the future: they don't. You might want to steer her away from your closet.)

Nowhere do the differences between mom and daughter become more apparent than when they're shopping for clothes.

Yeah, well, duh.

You may be blessed with a daughter who loves everything you pick out, or agrees to whatever you like because she wants to make you happy. That is a gift from God and you should cherish it as you do life itself.

For the rest of us, a shopping excursion can run the gamut from careful negotiation to all-out war.

That's because the clothes she wears are an expression of who she is, and she chooses her apparel accordingly even before she's aware that she's doing it. In that respect, why would she be any different from you? How many times have you yourself been shopping with a friend who pulled out a garment and said, "What about this?" and you've said, "That just isn't me."

"I wish my mom would understand who I am and what I wear and do-stuff like that."

age 10 Yes, naturally you're going to gravitate toward clothes for your daughter that you like. But you can't count on her liking them as well, especially if her personality is far different from yours. It's easy to be hurt when she turns her nose up at that adorable sweater set you've just presented to her, but I think it's wrong to assume she's just doing that to be contrary. Most tweens aren't there. They really do just want to dress in a way that makes them feel comfortable and cute and a part of the group. We'll talk more later about why they often want to dress like every other girl their age (see pages 91-92). For now it's enough to know that even that is part of who they are. The sense of belonging is vital, so much so that she'll wear purple Crocs because her BFFs all have them, even though she secretly thinks they border on hideous.

Instead of becoming a battleground, the girls' clothing department can be a great place for you to discover some things about your daughter you hadn't picked up on before. It was hard for me to bypass the cute little pleated skirts and cardigan sweaters when Marijean was nine and wanted to wear nothing but leggings and enormous sweatshirts. (It was the eighties, after all.) I look at old pictures now and think how darling she looked-big teeth, high-top tennies and all. At the time, it taught me that she was far less concerned about appearance than I was, and that her passions and pleasures required lots of free movement. I came to love that about her, and perhaps even envy it a little.

A mom's dreams for her daughter can't be whatever she hasn't fulfilled for herself.

We all want far better for our kids than we ourselves had. But trust me, you're providing that. In spades. I so admire your generation for the sacrifices of time and money and self that you're making for your daughters. It's inspiring, really.

I'd just be careful that "better" doesn't mean "what I wanted."

An extreme example is that horrific reality show in which mothers of girls even younger than their tween years are carting them all over the country in a quest for beauty queen titles. "She loves it," they say to the camera-while their girl-children are screaming because they hate the curling iron and the false eyelashes and-come to think of it-them. Almost every one of those mothers has a wistfully beautiful face and a body she has long ago abandoned as she focuses on her young daughter's "perfection." I always want the interviewer to ask, "How many times did you not make the cut in your day?"

Most of us don't go that far as moms of tween daughters, but many move unconsciously in that general direction. "My mom makes me take piano lessons because she never got to," tweens tell me repeatedly. "I kind of don't like it." I've met miniature cheerleaders reliving their mothers' glory days, when it's so obvious they would rather be out there playing football with the boys and young soccer players who barely finish the season before they're on the court playing basketball, with an eye toward those softball sign-ups-all because their moms were pre-Title IX and didn't have those opportunities.

I am not saying that your daughter shouldn't be given the chance to excel at something you had high hopes in for yourself. I always wanted to act-something I didn't do until I was in my thirties. Once I received a second bachelor's degree in theater, founded a children's theater with my husband, and began teaching high school drama, Marijean was hooked too. In high school she excelled as an actress and did community theater when there wasn't something going on at her drama department. I've long since left the stage behind, and so has she, but we still share a love for live theater. I like knowing I instilled that in her. However, if she hadn't shown an interest, I would have been just as pleased with her playing volleyball or taking up pottery. What I loved was that she was a kid. I never saw any of it as a dream for the future-mine or hers.

What I am saying is that the real dreams come from God-his mouth to their souls. Our job is to provide the opportunities for them to pursue those dreams and to keep them from going off some tween deep end in the process. It's a whole lot more fun to watch that unfold naturally, and to recapture our own dreams for our own lives.

It helps to know how her learning style differs from yours.

You are a lot of things to your daughter-nurse, confidant, playmate, parole officer-but most of all you're her teacher. When are you not teaching her something, whether it's how to actually get the dirty clothes into the hamper or how to work through a rift with her BFF? You're teaching her even when you don't think she's aware you exist. Trust me, she's watching you.

So since you are her most influential instructor in the things of life for these few years, doesn't it make sense to understand how she learns, and how that jives-or doesn't-with how you teach? I know, I know, I've said I wasn't wild about pigeonholing people into personality types. But what I'm about to offer you is a really simple way to get a general idea of your daughter's learning style and your teaching approach. It's not hard and fast. Most of us are in fact a combination of styles. But to have a basic picture can be helpful in eliminating a lot of unnecessary battles. We're all about that, yes?

For the sake of simplicity, a group of professors at Brigham Young University assigned a color to each combination of the middle two letters of the Myers-Briggs designations.1 If your eyes are already glazing over, take heart. That's the last of the technical jargon. This is my interpretation, which I use to help homeschooling parents and which I've adapted for you.

Tween Girls' Learning Styles

BLUE.

Takes in information through emotions and instincts. (She just gets a feeling about something.) Hates to hurt other people's feelings or have hers hurt. (She may spend a lot of time crying during her tween years.) Prefers to talk about feelings and relationships and the effects of events on individuals. (In other words, she often tells you more than you really want to know about who said what to whom and why.) Has trouble with criticism. (Even if you give fifteen positive comments and one negative, she'll dwell on the negative. And probably cry.)

GOLD.

Takes in information in a very organized way. (She seldom forgets what you've told her, even when you wish she would.) Likes to know what the rules are, what the structure is. (As long as she knows what's expected of her, she'll usually do it, perhaps more efficiently than you would.) Has trouble just letting go and thinking outside the box. (One of the few times she cries is when she has to do a creative assignment.) Usually does things right the first time. (Often doesn't understand why everybody else doesn't too, which makes her anathema to the brothers she is constantly correcting and tattling on.)

GREEN.

Takes in information very logically. (Her favorite question is still "Why?") Likes facts, likes to know how stuff works, and likes to invent things. (Don't be surprised if she takes the toaster apart; that activity is not confined to males.) Will do just about anything you ask as long as there's a reason. ("Because I said so" is an invitation to an argument, which she will enjoy and may win.) Can take criticism straight out as long as it's not abusive and, again, there's a reason for it. (She does very little crying in her tween years.) "I wish my mom understood my personality better, the way I do things, and not get mad at me if I don't do it her way. That would save us a lot of fights."

age 10