At the end of the week, the fourth and fifth graders will be engaging in a series of three lessons on puberty education. Some of the kids call it "The Bad 'PE'" (as opposed to "Physical Education" which is the "good PE") and there is much giggling and groaning when it is brought up in class. However, it's been my experience that the conversations aren't as cringey as they are expecting and, in fact, kids are very curious and have A LOT of questions about the process of growing up.
There are times I think we might do well to reframe the conversation as one about "growing up." While we do talk about bodies and changes to bodies during puberty, that's only about 1/3 of the content. We also talk about brain development and social development. We talk about the growing importance of peers and strategies on how to handle peer pressure. We talk about personal safety - both on-line and in person. We talk about the role of trusted adults and how important it is to have someone you can ask questions of who will give you true information.
The structure of the conversation is a little different than most of our learning - but we hope it's still authentic in that students feel a need for the information. We encourage students to write questions on index cards. This enables us to combine questions and also insures that questions that are beyond the scope of what we talk about aren't awkwardly denied answer. Instead we explain to students that if we don't answer a question they have it is one that is best asked of their trusted adult. We get hundreds of questions over the course of the lessons.
This is the perfect time to start (and continue) conversations with your child about growing up. It can seem like a big leap for some families and, instead of thinking of it as THE TALK, it can help to think of it as many, many small talks. A great place to start are stories of what you remember from middle school. We have a list of resources - some are geared toward children, some are designed to help parents engage with their children. Because every kid develops at a different pace, what we share at school is really just a starting place. Your child may have questions that are beyond the scope of our school conversation and asking them about those questions in the course of the coming week will help establish being a "goto" person for your child.
One new resource I've added is a podcast about "the liking gap" that was on Hidden Brain. It's about how our perception of others' feelings toward us is more negative than how they actually feel about us. The research was done about adults but I think it's even more true of middle schoolers. Listening to the podcast together might be another great entre into conversation. -mmm