Puberty, Periods & More: Helping Your Hormonal Tween Navigate a New School Year

Back-to-school time is always marked by big emotions. There’s the excitement of seeing friends, anxiety about new teacher expectations, and the sadness of saying goodbye to sunny summer days. Those big emotions can be tough for anyone to navigate — parents and children alike. But, for our tweens, with their changing bodies and changing hormones, navigating back-to-school time can feel extra difficult and can come with extra considerations.

Tweens and their parents can be caught off guard by how different it looks to navigate back-to-school time. After all, the shift from childhood to tweendom happens fast — truly a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment.

To equip parents with all the information they need to best help their tweens navigate the back-to-school season, SheKnows spoke to Dr. Cara Natterson, a pediatrician and New York Times bestselling author of ten books including The Care and Keeping of You series and Vanessa Kroll Bennett, a national bestselling author and puberty educator. Together, they are two of the most trusted voices on puberty, co-writing their bestselling book, THIS IS SO AWKWARD: Modern Puberty Explained, co-hosting their podcast of the same name, and running Less Awkward, the first company aimed at making puberty more comfortable with a membership for parents, an innovative health and sex-ed curriculum for schools, and game-changing products. Here’s what they had to say.

Understand That Being A Tween Looks Different Than What Parents Are Used To

Before being able to help our tweens, we need to understand that being a tween in 2024 looks fundamentally different than it did thirty years ago, when the word “tween” didn’t even exist. Not only has the world changed — hello, social media! — but childhood has changed on a physical level.

Puberty is beginning much earlier in children. On average, children are starting puberty about two or three years earlier than previous generations, according to Dr. Natterson. This matters for a number of reasons, but especially because those late grammar school, early middle school years are now marked by hormonal swings whereas they weren’t for previous generations.

“Our mood was different than their mood is. Our reactions to the way the world worked, to friend dynamics, were different because by and large we didn’t have estrogen or testosterone coursing through our bodies. And that makes everything fundamentally different for them,” explains Dr. Natterson.

The difference in response is physiological, and, she adds, “it’s a big deal.”

Prepare Them For Changing Bodies — Theirs And Others

Earlier puberty brings more than just new hormones — it brings changing bodies. The biggest issue in the tween years, says Kroll Bennett, is that there’s a “vast difference” in how and when kids grow. The average age for the onset of puberty today is between 8 and 9 years old for girls and 9 and 10 years old for boys. But puberty isn’t considered late until 13 for girls and 14 for boys. “That means there’s already a five-year span of when it can even start.”

“There are the kids who have grown — and there’s one kind of conversation to have with those kids, and then there are the kids who… haven’t really grown, and there’s that conversation. And we always think the kids in the middle don’t care, but they also have all sorts of feelings about what’s happening,” she notes.

A tween returning to the classroom after a summer away can feel like they’ve walked into a completely different room of people than the kids they left in spring. Parents can prepare their tweens to step into that new classroom by engaging them in conversations about growth spurts and how it feels to return to school. Make general observations and ask kids what they notice about their peers, suggests Kroll Bennett. They may say nothing, which is age-appropriate, or they may notice something that you wouldn’t expect.

“The through line is open-minded, non-judgmental, present curiosity,” says Dr. Natterson.

Help Them Feel And Look Their Best

One of the ways to prepare our tweens for back-to-school is by making sure that they have clothing and shoes that feel comfortable to them in changing bodies, says Kroll Bennett. And it’s not just about sizing. Tweens who didn’t outgrow their clothes may also need new items, especially if they feel like their old clothes are babyish and they want to fit in.

 “The temptation is to say, ‘Let’s change the whole culture [around needing to fit in],’ but kids just want to feel a little better,” she says. Recognize that while we want to empower our tweens to be themselves, we also want to be sensitive to the fact that they just want to feel good in their bodies.

In that vein, it’s also important to make sure tweens who may begin to menstruate are prepared, notes Kroll Bennett. Parents should put “period packs” in their bookbags and walk them through the logistics associated with getting their period at school: how to open a pad, how to place it onto underwear, and who they can go to at school if they don’t have a product with them.

Talk To Tweens About Things They May Get Exposed To

Middle school starts anywhere from fifth grade to seventh grade, which means that in an average middle school building, there may be kids who are nine or ten and also kids who are fourteen or fifteen. “It’s a massive range of development physically and big range of how kids socialize and what they experiment with,” Kroll Bennett says. “[Your tween] may be in situations with kids in a wide range of areas that are experimenting and looking at stuff you don’t necessarily want your kid involved in.”

For that reason, parents have to start conversations about things like vaping, alcohol, and pornography early.

While the conversations should start early, they don’t have to be comprehensive all at once. “People feel pressure to back up the dump truck and unload the entire bed of the truck onto their kid,” Kroll Bennett says. But that’s not necessary. She suggests a milder approach, first by beginning the conversation while engaged in an activity or sitting side-by-side to avoid full frontal eye contact, and second, by asking an open-ended question to gauge your child’s starting point. After that, parents can determine if their child has accurate information and can add a few relevant sentences and give advice, or correct any misinformation.

Build A Team Of Trusted Adults

While parents should be starting those conversations with their tweens, it’s possible that tweens won’t want to talk to their parents about those topics. This is when trusted adults become important. “We use the term ‘trusted adult’ a lot,” says Dr. Natterson. “That phrase refers to parents, but also grandparents, other family members, educators, health providers, mentors, coaches, and anyone who cares about a teen/tween.”

Dr. Natterson encourages parents to bring in the trusted adults in their kids’ lives — invite them to “come under the tent.” Parents should prepare those trusted adults ahead of time with the values they want to be reflected back to their child. Likewise, she urges trusted adults to ask parents about their values and ask how they should respond if the tween does come to them with questions.  

Once again, the old adage remains true: it takes a village.

Give Them Grace

The reality is that regardless of how well we prepare kids and how much we talk to them, they’ll probably make a few mistakes. Kids this age have a pre-frontal cortex that won’t mature for another fifteen years, notes Kroll Bennett. Because of that, they may make some bad decisions — text something they shouldn’t, forget an assignment, the possibilities are endless — and they may not be able to help it.

It’s important in those moments to give them grace, and also to model how to come back from a mistake. They need to know that a mistake isn’t the end of the road. “That is the north star of caring for kids at this age,” Kroll Bennett says.

The bottom line: Raising tweens is hard, and sending them back to school with changing bodies and coursing hormones is fraught with challenges. Approaching the challenges with empathy, information, and grace can make all the difference.

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This article was originally published on sheknows.com.