Tuesday November 3 2009 938 am
What’s Up with Seven-Year-Old Boys?
Posted by Tracy Hahn-Burkett under Parenting on a Daily Basis[3] Comments
This post is directed at the mothers of boys out there, or child-development types, or even the men who remember what it was like to be seven or eight years old.
In general, I’ve found seven to be a great age. I’ve had such a delightful year listening to “Jack’s” increasingly sophisticated ideas, his application of actual reasoning to his arguments, the beginning of his inevitable joke-and-riddle phase. He can stump me sometimes, he catches me off guard with his humor and we’ve begun to find a few common interests. I’m hoping to hang on to this phase of his development for as long as possible.
There is, however, one exception to my infatuation with seven-year-old boydom: the child’s lack of coping skills. (Yes, I know I made up a word there, but I like it.)
Jack and I can be in the midst of a perfectly rational, enjoyable discussion about dinosaurs or the recounting of a funny antic performed by some kid on the bus, and then something subtle occurs—like his four-year-old sister doesn’t understand the last thing he said, or he discovers that the clock over the stove is off by a minute or two and thereby just gave him an incorrect time—and Jack dissolves. Rain when the weatherman predicted a dry day, a rule broken during a board game, a toy falling off a precarious pile where he just placed it in an effort to put it away—any of these, or anything at all, is cause for a full-blown, no-holds-barred meltdown.
At first, I thought that it was only Jack who is as volatile as a peppermint Mento dropped into a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola. But as I began to talk to the other moms in the bleachers at soccer practice (yes, thank you, I am officially a cliché), I discovered that many of them possess stories to match my own. Moreover, some of them had been through this stage of boyhood before and/or knew others parents who had and expressed the uniform opinion that this volatility is a classic characteristic of the seven-year-old boy.
What is it about seven-year-old boys that renders them incapable of coping with, well, anything? I’ve been trying to puzzle this out. We know, for example, that girls tend to develop emotionally more rapidly than boys. I’m wondering if perhaps seven-year-old girls then generally have more emotional tools at their disposal to grapple with the emotions generated by their increased cognitive skills and more complex interactions with the world than do boys wrestling with same thoughts and interactions. I think it’s a plausible theory, but I don’t know if it’s true or if some other dynamic is responsible.
In any event, whatever the cause might be, we parents have to deal with the rumbling volcano that is the seven-year-old boy. (Or eight-year-old; much as I’d like this phenomenon to end on Jack’s upcoming eighth birthday, I think it’s a fairly safe bet that it will continue.)
What are your experiences with boys this age? Have you got any tips for those of us who are trying to help our seven-year-old boys cope with the world around them?
November 4th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Do they inherit those tendencies from their dads?
December 6th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Okay, folks…here we go. My husband and I are foster parents to two boys, very close in age, born in early 2001 and in late 2002. The younger of the two, now 7, sometimes acts as if he’s finally going through his terrible twos and stubborn threes stages: we truly believe he was never really “allowed” to before, but he is at this time, now that he is in a safe place where people actually want him. He throws the occasional tantrum in which he is wont to state an emphatic “No!” to every request. He also gets himself into difficulties trying to physically hurt his brother. Tonight, he did both, and I took away a school field trip. My husband thinks I should give him a chance to earn it back, I do not. Complicating the matter is the fact that when I was trying to get him to do the things to which he was emphatically saying “No!” my husband felt that he had to come into the bedroom and rescue me, which he didn’t have to do. The boy did not do what he needed to do until my husband said he was going to take away four week’s T.V. if he didn’t. I say giving him a chance to earn back his field trip will undermine the expectation that he listen to me, as well as to his father, and, as I’ve said, my husband thinks he should be given a chance to earn back the trip. Advice?
December 7th, 2009 at 7:52 am
Margaret,
Thanks for reading and for asking your question.
The piece of your comment that jumped out at me, in front of everything else, is where you say that one of your boys tries–and in this case, succeeded–to hurt the other. This behavior needs to be addressed immediately, and probably with professional assistance. You could try working with or through your social worker and/or seeking private counseling, but a specialist needs to be brought into the situation to make sure that your other child is not physically in danger.
As for the disciplinary question: any child in the foster care system is likely suffering from a lack of consistency, and you and your husband will help him immensely by providing consistency and stability to the extent you are able. You will make an impact on him regardless of which strategy you choose; it’s more important that you and your husband present a united front and don’t undermine each other in your disciplinary techniques.