Oh, I haven't read all the posts, but the 10-year-old part caught my attention right away. Ten has been called the "age of reason." I sort of call it the age of moral reason. Children begin to operate much much more in the outside world on their own, as individuals. Rules and being a "team member" in their society are big. Other places, other times, a ten-year-old could actually survive on their own on the streets. I remember a story on the radio, this lady's mother went into hospital and it was just the children alone at home. The children went to the hospital by themselves following the ambulance and they were let to go home again and fend for themselves. No adults at all. This was maybe the 1940s, East Coast.
Anyways, this is also the age where you begin to develop talents that before were relegated to potential only - or struggle to. You find your successes and failures. You really start to see where you're making it or breaking it in school, compared to other children. You will be finding out in no uncertain terms your station in life. No one likes to hear that, but it's true. By the end of grammar school, everyone will know who's class president material or not - but not why. It's when old playmates will abandon you and the tribal clique you'll travel with for the rest of school forms.
But anyways, there's what I call a certain moral element to this all. At age ten, if you see something you don't approve of or can't do, you actually have your first real choices that you can impose on other people. Age ten, if you steal a candy bar, you know you're stealing even if you don't know how much you're hurting other people. There's less reaction and significantly more deliberation, and where gaps in your knowledge frankly start to stink.
I remember when DD was about eleven. That was the age where we really established our understandings and the only period where I ever sharply reprimanded her. Flat out laid down the line intellectually. The things she'd say. In trying to refuse to practice her reading and writing, "I'm never going to be as good as you!" - as in, why should I bother? (My answer, btw, was that "I'm a professional. Very few are as good as me, that's why I have a job, and I'm professional enough to know it and what others can and can't do. And this you can do." I mention this because it embodied those gaps in knowledge, the real choice she had either to learn to write an essay or not - the real ability to stand up and fight back and enforce "No," and that exposure of talents and place in the world.)
She's also not my natural child, and was something of an urchin, and we got into it about her mother. Before and after I've always encouraged love and respect for her natural mother, but this one time I spelled out the reality of the mothering she'd been getting in the cold hard terms: what natural affection should NOT lead you to think is right and wrong.
Anyways, random thoughts. I do think boys are a bit harder because they're not generally as prone to girls to sit around and talk. My b.f., who was a teacher of young children, says with boys you tell it short and sweet and hold the line.
Ok. Sorry. Long post.
