A friend of mine has a daughter who just turned twelve, and the two of us talked about kids, and age, while we worked on redoing the deck. When a baby is born, years pass, a lot changes, but it’s mostly organic to the family. Kindergarten at five is one thing, but at six, the child goes to public school.

From six to twelve the kid goes from the first grade to the sixth grade, but they go from finger painting to reading books they like and then joining a clique of some sort, for good or evil. By the time a girl child is twelve, certain truths arrive about the society she lives in, and it’s about that age, or earlier, a female human realizes men are both creepy and dangerous.

Somewhere between twelve and eighteen, the world outside the family orbit becomes an insatiable gravity field. It is likely your daughter is going to start having periods, learn to drive a car, and start having sex. Hormones will very likely have more to say about how your daughter behaves than the years you’ve spent trying to teach her better than to make the mistakes you did. 

Think about it. Your twelve year old has no legal rights as an adult. Yet six years later she can join the military and kill people. She can vote in elections. She can move out of the house and into a college dorm room. She could get married and have children of her own.

Part of this is cultural, part of this is biological, and all of it scares the hell out of parents.

How does it feel when your twelve year old suddenly turns sixteen and drives off in the family car for the first time? Yes, she’s just going to the store and will be back in a few minutes, but wow, she’s alone in a world you know is hostile to women. Have you taught her well?

We talked about the world to come, and how to navigate the perils we never had to deal with. No one owned a video camera when I was eighteen and I am so very happy about this. Yet now, when a teenager is in a group, someone is recording everything all the time.

No one remembers or can recall the first time I was so drunk I puked, but the internet and cell phones can cover your life from the time you step outside your home until… Hell, it can even record you in your bedroom without you knowing it.

It’s a world no one can prepare for or do anything about. It’s more than enough for a twelve year old to wonder just where her limits should be set, but quite another to live in a world where every decision is subject to review on the internet.

Talking to someone with a twelve year old daughter is like talking to someone with two daughters. One is the little girl who has lived her life with her family and the other is someone who wants to step outside the circle.

Take Care,

Mike