Today's teens aren't boy or girl crazy. Really

 
Just because Justin and Selena are doing it doesn’t mean your kid wants to.
“It” being kissing, that is, and Justin and Selena being Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez, ages 17 and 18 respectively, but appealing to a fan base almost a decade younger.
With Abercrombie & Fitch peddling pushup bikini tops for tweens and the Disney Channel churning out lovestruck pop stars left and right, it’s tempting to believe kids are entertaining romantic notions at an increasingly younger age.
However, experts say many tweens and teens are entertaining nothing of the sort, which can lead to a whole other set of problems.
When all the signs and all your friends are telling you it’s time to start going gaga over the opposite sex, it can be tough for the kid who isn’t ready to enter that world. The one who wants to linger a little longer in the hanging-with-friends stage. The one whose vocabulary still includes “cooties.”
“It’s very common,” says child psychologist Jennifer Powell-Lunder, co-author of Teenage as a Second Language (Adams Media, $16.99). “Especially in the tween years when the developmental gap is so large.”
There’s a four-year spread during which kids enter puberty, Powell-Lunder says, which means one girl might start thinking about boys around 11 while another isn’t going there even at 14. Boys experience the same range, although their onset tends to be a little later than girls.
The possibility also exists that your child may be gay but the same development curve will be relevant for her or him too.
“If you walk into a middle school, you can see this immediately,” she says. “You’ll see the boys who are acting goofier, still doing things that seem really childish. And then you’ll see the bigger, early-developing boys kind of leading the way with the girls.”
Puberty aside, it’s also an incredibly confusing time for kids, one in which they’re sorting out the messages they’ve grown up digesting and the new messages they’re just now confronting.
“Sometime around middle school, boys discover MTV videos and the sexualization of girls,” says sociologist Michael Kimmel, author of Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (Harper, $18.99). “So girls have cooties, but they’re also supposed to be the objects of our desire. We’re supposed to like girls, but we aren’t supposed to hang out with them. We’re expecting an awful lot of our young children if we believe they’re able to navigate these utterly confusing messages.”
That’s where parents come in. “Parents should talk to their kids about the fact that they’re unique individuals who never have to feel like they should do something just because everyone else is doing it,” says clinical psychologist Roni Cohen-Sandler, author of Trust Me, Mom — Everyone Else is Going!: The New Rules for Mothering Adolescent Girls (Penguin, $19.50). “It’s a message hopefully parents are giving kids all the time, but really repeating during the tween years, when there are huge differences in development and what kids are ready for and what kids are interested in.”
Help them discover and pursue their particular interests, says Powell-Lunder.
“Encourage, empower and accommodate the strengths they do have,” she says. “Even if they’re into something that seemingly isn’t the norm, hear them out. Walk the line with them.”
Parents often fret, Powell-Lunder says, about their children fitting in with their peers. But their worry is often misplaced.
“You care about your child being accepted, but the most important person to accept your child is your child himself,” she says. “That’s the key to self-esteem. If you feel good about yourself, you radiate that.”
Besides, tweens and teens are often more accepting than we give them credit for.
“Parents often feel more discomfort for their kids than the kids feel for themselves,” says Powell-Lunder.
Cohen-Sandler says she recently counselled an 11-year-old girl’s mother who was worried that her daughter’s interests were no longer matching her boy-crazy friends, and those friends might leave her in the dust once they leave elementary school.
“I had to remind the mom that part of the reason her daughter wasn’t picking up on the other girls’ social cues is because she just wasn’t interested,” Cohen-Sandler said. “She didn’t feel left out. She just had no interest in that stuff yet.”
So if you’re daughter tells you she wants to skip the freshman dance in favour of a DVD and popcorn at home, don’t assume she’s angst-ridden inside.
“Make sure she doesn’t want to miss the dance because she’s being bullied or something,” says Powell-Lunder. “You can ask, ‘Oh, are any of your friends going? Do you want to have a bunch of friends sleep over here instead?’ But she may be very happy in her own world, and going to the dance might feel more tortuous because she’d feel like a fish out of water.”
Knowing whether your child is bothered by his or her romantic disinterest can be a guessing game, especially since kids’ emotions can change daily (or hourly). The best thing parents can do, say the experts, is normalize their child’s feelings, whatever they happen to be at that moment.
“If your kids are wanting to play board games or build forts outside, those are healthy behaviours,” says Cohen-Sandler. “You should never discourage your daughter’s activities just because some other girls are poring over magazines and gossiping about boys. It’s not a race.”
Know that the growing up, if that’s what you want to call it, will happen in time.
“They’ll learn both,” says Kimmel. “Boys will learn to remain friends with girls as well as see them romantically. And the best boyfriends are the ones who are able to be friends too — the ones you can talk to, share your feelings with.”
And don’t think for a second that the girls won’t figure that out.