Girl, You'll be a Woman Soon

Excerpted from
Boy Crazy! : Keeping our Daughter's Feet on the Ground When Her Head is in the Clouds
By Charlene C. Giannetti, Margaret Sagarese

Have you ever noticed one of the first things nearly all girls do at the start of early adolescence? They let their hair grow-longer. Hours evaporate in the care of hair: shampooing, conditioning, blow-drying, highlighting, color-streaking, curling, straightening, thickening, braiding, beading, dreadlocking, cornrowing, crimping.

It's as if they've gone up into the attic of childhood and dusted off that tale of Rapunzel. Girls head toward their bedroom whenever they feel a parent's disapproval. It can feel like a lonely tower. These little princesses spin fantasies about handsome princes. Longer hair feels right. Mythically and methodically, girls grow those tresses, coiffing themselves for escape from the confines of King Daddy to fairy-tale happily-ever-after endings.

Like coveting long hair, much of a girl's romantic awakening is instinctive, too.

You may be thinking: I already know that. Everyone gets the connection that raging hormones propel girls toward love. We tend to think of girls in early adolescence as getting boy crazy overnight, preoccupied and totally obsessed. Many mothers have used expressions like "a switch flipped," as in one day she was my little girl and at the flip of a switch she changed. Truth be told, though, a young adolescent's social coming of age happens in layers.

Girls under the influence of preadolescence and puberty definitely chase after something, but it's not exactly what you assume. As this chapter unfolds, what girls are really after will become clearer. If you hope that this boy-crazy behavior is just a phase, you will be reassured by what follows.

A young adolescent girl's interest in romance is natural. This fundamental development fact unnerves many parents. As a parent, you will be relieved to know that on the inside tweens proceed in stages. Social and romantic behaviors truly follow a pattern of phases. If you've never heard this before, that's because research tends toward the negative. Rather than teach us how to understand the young, it tries to show us how to "fix" them. Rarely do social scientists delve into the behavior of ordinary teenagers. The details of perfectly normal emerging sexuality get short shrift, according to scholar B. Bradford Brown. Remarking on this shortcoming in The Development of Romantic Relationships in Adolescence, she says, "Adolescents may belabor the intricacies of teenage romance hour after hour in songs on the radio or shows on television, but most adult researchers seem to be tuned to a different channel. It is high time [to] dive into this intense, emotional, and fascinating aspect of the adolescent experience."

And so we will. We will explain the ages and stages of romantic thinking and actions, what really happens underneath the surface of giggling, lovesick ordinary' tweens. A girl's forwardness, her jealousies, her dreaming, scheming, and mooning over boys have a pattern. Rather than spending your time and energy trying to turn back the pubescent biological clock, an enlightened and better strategy will be to digest the changes. Grasping each of the stages one by one will provide you with a useful perspective. Once you have this framework, you will become better equipped as the romantically savvy mentor, the sage with good advice that your little girl needs.

According to Brown's research, preadolescent girl crushes and romantic dramas actually unfold in a sequence of four phases. Within each phase, girls are driven by typical motives. They hold and harbor specific intentions. Their behavior is geared toward a target audience. Learning what occurs in the course of each phase enables you to monitor your daughters romantic readiness and growth. Furthermore, you then can help her process this precious time and part of her life as a young woman.

The Phases of a Girl's Mooning

Phase One: From Cooties to Cuties

After pre-K and prior to early adolescence, children prefer the company of their own gender. Girls stick with girls; boys stick with boys. Genders are apt to squeal about "cooties" when the opposite sex enters the picture. Then a shift takes place. Young adolescents are no longer content with same-sex company. Mixed company becomes compelling. Usually, girls' flirting radar engages first. This change of heart can hit a girl at ten, even eight, or not happen until she's older.

This happens partly because of biology, as puberty engineers the attraction, but not entirely. Peers can push one another into socializing with the opposite sex. Even a girl who has not entered puberty can become immersed in boy-crazy scheming because her girlfriends are. She may not personally feel the pull toward boys because her hormones have not ignited yet, but she does understand the pull of wanting to fit in with whatever the group does.

Phase one serves as a girl's initiation into the game of love. Think of this step as a kind of announcement, her social coming-out party. With the onset of this phase, a girl's identity embraces a new characteristic-feeling and acting romantic.

Ten- to fifteen-year-olds wrestle with questions about identity. Who am I? Am I lovable? As much as parents would love to be able to answer these questions for their children, they cannot. At least not in a way that will satisfy their daughter. The answers to such pivotal, psychic queries about personality, worth, and lovability come from other children. As they put together the pieces to their personal puzzles, girls and boys compare and contrast themselves to one another. They begin to develop an image of their romantic selves.

Socializing resembles a performance and becomes paramount to their quest.