Results tagged “tween” from Momtourage: Need Advice?

There is no "right" answer to this question -- only the one that fits your family's needs and beliefs. Many girls will start to experience darkening and coarsening of their hair sometime between the ages of 10 and 13, with lots of cultural variation. In the melting pot that we've become in the U.S., this is now even harder to predict.

How unfair — and perfectly ridiculous — it is that people make assumptions about others based on something as simple as the way a person's pants hang or the way he styles his hair? As if intelligence can be measured in the inches between a boy's waist and the top of his jeans, or kindness, honesty, and trustworthiness be determined by the length of one's hair. Really, it's quite infuriating to think that in this day and age, people still take it upon themselves to make mass pronouncements about a massive group of people based on something so simplistic as the way they dress.

When young girls first start wearing makeup, they usually wear too much. She's lucky to have you to guide her. Explain to her that beauty comes from within and that too much make up can actually distract from her natural beauty. At age 11, lip-gloss and a tiny bit of eye shadow should suffice.

Many researchers feel 10 is the "most fearful age," so your daughter may just be living up to that adage. To determine if you need professional help with her anxiety, it's critical to determine how much her fears are getting in the way of her daily activities.

Age twelve is not too young to make this decision, and it provides her with an ideal opportunity to take on a little more personal responsibility -- very important as she moves into the teen years. There are two major considerations here: what she needs to be a healthy vegetarian, and how she'll get the foods and nutrients she needs in a family that isn't vegetarian.