The Pre-Teens

In Massapequa, N.Y., Kathy came home from school and announced that she would need nylons and a garter belt to wear at her girl friend's birthday party because "all the other girls" would be wearing them. Kathy is eight years old.

In Los Angeles, Bill's parents gave him his first "sitdown" dinner and dance (live music) for his tenth birthday. Tuxedoed boys escorted dates who wore corsages. One boy showered too much attention on another's date. "I had to talk with him and remind him he brought his own little date," explained Bill's mother.

In Chicago's suburban Evergreen Park, a dozen girls from age six upward, whooshed into the local beauty shop for their regular Saturday appointments, emerged topheavy with "beehive" and "lioness" hairdos. Sighed Manager Warren Miller: "They've got more hair than they've got face. I'd call it a mop."

In San Francisco, Beverly, daughter of a Berkeley professor, asked her parents for a "training bra." She needed to feel a little glamorous, since she was planning to go to a drive-in movie on the back of her boy friend's bicycle. Beverly is nine, her boy friend eleven.

In short, dating, dancing, kissing games and all the rest of the natural delights that once were the preserve of adolescents, are becoming part of the everyday life of an increasing number of eight-to twelve-year-old grade-schoolers all over the U.S. The latest social discovery of the pre-teeners. particularly popular in the nation's suburb-nests, is "making out," a tentative version of adolescent necking: the boys and girls get together at somebody's home, and the parents discreetly disappear, leaving the room darkened and the boys at liberty to "make out." Pre-teeners in Los Angeles have developed a modern version of the post-office and spin-the-bottle kissing games. They call it "Seven Minutes of Heaven (or Hell)." The boy takes the girl who is "it" into a closet or some other room and, depending on his inclination, kisses her (Heaven) or hits her (Hell) for seven minutes.

This, according to the dominant theory of education lumped under the name of John Dewey, is a desirable development of their "social skills." By cutting short the pigtail pulling and stuck-out-tongue phase that kids usually go through, parents feel that they are helping their youngsters bypass the awkward age. Learning early how to handle themselves socially and dress smartly, the children become well-adjusted and popular.

Burned-Out Cases. But a growing number of sociologists and plain parents are beginning to show some concern with this trend. Says Carlfred B. Broderick, associate professor of family relationships at Pennsylvania State University, and one of the nation's top authorities on children: "Many parents appear to operate under the mistaken theory that sex starts at puberty. They assume that early kissing is meaningless. But pre-teen dating starts the youngster earlier on the road to progressive intimacy. By the time these children have reached their teens, they have pretty well covered the field, and are ready for nothing less than marriage."

And if early dating leads to early weddings (as it tends to do), the prospects of a successful marriage are statistically low. The divorce rate among people who married in their teens is about five times as great as for those who married in their mid 20s "We like our children to be popular, but we don't want them to be burned-out women at the age of 16," says one married parent.

Mothers at Work. Today's precocious children, titillated by the flow of sultry romance from television, movies and cheap magazines, tend to develop a distorted picture of reality. For another thing, there has been a continuous movement toward an earlier beginning of puberty in the last 100 years. In the U.S., for example, the average age of menarche (the time of a girl's first menstrual period) has come down from 14-plus in 1900 to 12-plus today. Thus the earlier physical maturity in girls, combined with early dating and going steady (which many of them equate with being in love), often thrusts youngsters into sexual and emotional situations far beyond their capaci ty. Writes Child Expert Benjamin Spock in the April Ladies' Home Journal: "The trouble is that Nature is working for a marriage at about 15 or 16 years. Early dating and going steady for months will encourage intimacy even before 15. But our society expects everyone to be in school until at least 17 or 18. Some children who aren't at all ready are forcing themselves to compete for partners and to play the roles of people in love."

Pushy Mother. When this happens, there is usually an overeager mother found hard at work in the background, particularly when she has a daughter to worry about. Says a San Francisco woman: "Some of the girls' mothers are terribly pushy. At dancing school, there was a terrible hurly-burly about how each girl had to have a 'date' before she was allowed to sign up. Dating now starts at the seventh grade, but there were some mothers who wanted to push it back to the sixth grade and even the fifth." Adds Mrs. Charles Eaton, a Pittsburgh schoolteacher and mother of an eleven year-old girl: "Some modern parents seem to feel that if their daughters don't begin to date in grade school, this indicates a lack of feminine appeal. They're afraid that their daughters will grow up to be old maids."

Most pre-teen boys would as soon spend their time knitting tea cozies as dance. Nevertheless, many of them are hauled off to boy-girl parties long before they are willing; to recognize the existence of the female sex. Dating usually follows, and the result, says a Denver psychiatrist, "is that the young boys are literally seduced away from their normal lives. At an age when the boy should be going through the badly needed period of competitive play with other boys and teasing girls when he notices them at all, he finds himself pushed into a relationship with which he cannot cope."

Parental Heels. The pressures are most acute in middle-class suburban communities, where the need for keeping up with the Joneses' little girl is most acutely felt. One successful counterattack against the trend is group action. In Charlotte, N.C., for example, some parents have organized a Parents' League to set up "recommendations" for social activities from the sixth grade on. By mutually standing fast, they have been able to fend off that age-old blackmail of the young, "Well, Susie's mother lets her . . ." Sixth-grade parties are all male or all female, and they end by 9 p.m. Seventh-graders can learn ballroom dancing, but social dances and dating are discouraged. Double dating is allowed in the ninth grade, single dating in the tenth.

Even without formal organization, that kind of parental judiciousness seems to pay off. Says Mrs. Cleo McNelly, a Cleveland mother of a twelve-year-old girl: "We owe it to our children to be unpopular with them sometimes. They have a right on occasion to think we are heels. When pressure is on them to join their group in something they know they shouldn't do, they should be able to say, 'I'd be glad to go along, but my parents are heels. They won't let me.' "

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