Amanda Craig - Who Are You & What Have You Done with My Kid?: Connect with Your Tween While They Are Still Listening

S o you have a tween or perhaps you know one. Whatever your reason for picking up this book, I welcome you to this dive into the puzzle that is our nine- to twelve-year-olds. Its crazy-making as they move from the calm of young elementary school through the mayhem of middle school. But there are reasons why and ways to navigate it, and we will cover it all together.

Is it a rewarding time? Yes! But it can cost usemotionally, physically, and spiritually. Theres so much going on! For our tweens, its a complex stretch tied to profound emotional, physiological, and neurological development with serious ramifications for their futureas teens and then as adults.

So often parents arrive at the tween years with a whoa-somethings-happening-here sense of the change before them. And theyre right. Something is happening a lot, in fact. But rather than doing anything about it, we park in uncertainty, unsure about this tween in our midstsometimes a stranger, but still that child we have always knownwhiny and complaining but also laughing at silly jokes, cuddling, and wanting to be around us. So we dont think much about it, and instead we move from focusing on the academics and social concerns of elementary school straight to worries about safety, drugs, sex, and the rebellious behavioral issues of the teen years. We miss the tremendous parenting opportunities before us when our kids are tweens.

We dont want to just survive the tween years. We want to be proactive in our parenting. This is a time for prevention parenting, for shaping the choices our tweens will make as they move into adolescence. By the teen years, its all about intervention, and the opportunity has passed us by.

And theres so much we can do!

So how do we keep our kids close while cultivating the confidence theyll need to grow up? How do we navigate the inevitable dips, divides, and potholes? Where do we find the strength, calm, self-awareness, and wisdom that amount to a path forward?

Surprisingly, there is very little accessible tween-focused parenting information available and certainly nothing that links emotional connectionthe cornerstone of it allwith what is happening in the tween brain and what we must know about ourselves to lay a solid foundation for the teenage years and beyond. There is even less that ties the science of this to the strength and wisdom available to all of us, secular and non-secular, in our faith teachings. Parents need a blueprint, something more than tactics and strategies, something deeper than that, something that will actually work.

While intentionally written for the faith-curious and spiritual as well as the faith-full, this book is driven by my faith. The initial draft poured from me, a calling to give parents the information and tools they need to create healthy relationships with their tween, head off problems before they happen, and address them when they do. It presents the wisdom found in faith teachings in combination with what we know from the fields of neuroscience and family therapy, specifically Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)a therapeutic approach centered on emotional connection (and the backbone of my practice)and applies them to parenting during the middle school years in a way that is accessible to the general public. After all, when eyes, minds, and hearts are open to it, it is easy to see that therapy is, in fact, a convergence of science and spirituality, beginning with the emotional connection modeled in our faith teachings and continuing through the spirit that lives in each of us.