Julie A. Ross - How to Hug a Porcupine: Negotiating the Prickly Points of the Tween Years

Copyright 2008 by Julie Ross. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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DOI: 10.1036/0071545891

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Steve, you are my soul mate.
Thanks for sharing the adventures of parenting with me.
You are a brilliant writer and artist, and you always inspire
me to do my best work.

Emilie and Daniel, this is also for you,
for teaching me what I need to know
as a parent and as a person.

"YOU NEVER LISTEN TO ME ANYMORE.
I HATE MY LIFE!"

I want to thank my agent, Karen Gantz, who introduced herself to me after one of my lectures and began what has become a terrific and fruitful relationship. Her directness, enthusiasm, energy, and hard work helped get this book off the ground. I couldn't ask for a better literary agent, and I look forward to continuing to work together.

I also want to thank my editor at McGraw-Hill, Sarah Pelz. Sarah, your enthusiasm and bubbly spirit are contagious and are infused throughout this book. Thank you for always making me feel that this book was the highest priority in your day. Your corrections were brilliant, and I hope that I'll have the honor of working with you again someday in the near future.

I would be remiss if I didn't also thank all of the parents with whom I work, both privately and in ongoing groups. Their openness to learning new things, their deep compassion and love for their children, and their willingness to work hard at being the best parents they can be are inspirational to me. I'm eternally grateful for their willingness to share their stories, their successes, and their failures. Their contributions compose the bulk of this book.

Many thanks to my "readers"Steve Ross, Kim Yerly, Wallace Andersonfor their honest opinions and feedback during the writing of this book. Thanks to my family, near and far, for brainstorming and sharing thoughts, quotes, and ideas with me. Thanks to my daughter, Emilie, for being my most enthusiastic cheerleader, and to my son, Daniel, for his expert grammatical advice.

Thanks to my terrific office assistants, past and present: April Glassey and Sonia Tarbill. I couldn't have done this without you guysthanks for keeping everything else organized so I could take the time to write!

Finally, many thanks to Olivia Wiles, a middle schooler who came up with most of the chapter titles, for lending her authentic voice to this work.

In her timeless account of growing up, Miss American Pie, Margaret Sartor says that she began writing her diary in "the commonly acknowledged worst year of life, the seventh grade."

Seventh grade, part of the "tween" years and smack in the heart of middle school, is remembered by most of us in exactly the same way. That year epitomizes the middle schooler's reality: confusing, awkward, tough, and very, very uncomfortable. No small wonder, then, that our child's personality during these years resembles the often misunderstood porcupine. What looks like soft, cuddly fur is actually a strategic defense system, locked and loaded. That's why, one morning when your own little porcupine is happily humming a song from "The Little Mermaid" while putting her dishes in the sink, you can wind up with a face full of quills just because you asked her to take her shoes to her room. Or, on Friday you may end up consoling her for an hour when she's weeping because she has no friends, yet on Saturday she's made plans to go to the mall and hang out with six girls from school.

It's enough to make your head spin! Yet this is the very reason I love this age. I'm like a sailor drawn time and again to the high seas: I find the pitch and yaw of middle schoolers exhilarating. When they're excited, they are totally and completely committed to that excitement. When they are angry, they are unreservedly committed to that anger. They're equally silly and serious, childlike yet mature beyond their years.

Are they exhausting? They can be. Are they maddening? Sometimes. Are they intense and sometimes just plain loony? Yes! Can they be difficult to parent? You betcha.