When I was in fifth grade I was totally in love with Bill Buchanan.
He lived around the corner from me. Our parents were friends and we often vacationed together. When we were 3, we were in a play group together so we’d known each other for just about forever. I’d never really given him a second thought until I hit the age of 10, then my heart started flipping over when ever I thought about him. Other than Sean Cassidy, Bill was my first crush.
We have a story about how to parent preteen crushes. It can be an exciting but also painful time. It’s a time I will never forget (not that my family will ever let me). My older sister and Bill’s sister were constantly teasing me. Our parents were wondering if one day we might marry. My best friend and I would talk for hours about our feelings and write silly love letters. Poor Bill did his best to fly under the radar.
Nothing ever really came of the crush, but it definitely defined a point in my life when I went from hating boys to liking them, a lot. After a year or so, my feelings for Bill subsided. There were middle school dances and other boys to moon over. But I will never forget how I felt about Bill.
I hope that my experience will help me to better understand my kids when they start having their first real crushes. So far there hasn’t been much activity in that department. Jonah is the only one who is love struck right now, and he’s just 5. He’s in love with a preschool classmate named Colleen. My 9-year-old, Adam, recently admitted he wanted to kiss a classmate named Emily, but I didn’t get the sense there was a lot of emotion attached to it. Meanwhile Maggie, 11, has come home a couple of times upset because so-in-so said that somebody liked her. She didn’t quite know what to do with that information. It gave us a chance to talk about what happens when a girl has feelings for a boy or vice versa and what is appropriate at this age. I was so glad she shared her feelings with me.
A friend of mine told me a funny story recently when I explained we were writing about preteen crushes. Whenever she hears the word “crush” she thinks of a boy in her third grade class named Steven. He wrote her a note telling her he had a crush on her, but she had no idea what the word meant. When she showed the teacher the note — the teacher just laughed making it all the more confusing, she said.
So if your little one get’s a note from an admirer this Valentines Day, take the time to talk to her about preteen love. It might help her to know you are on her side when the inevitable happens and her heart gets crushed one day.
Betsy Stein