Another important influence, experts say, is media and advertisements that encourage children to acquire the trappings of adulthood.
The school was concerned about the kids feeling pressured into relationships that were too mature for their stage of life.
How would they deal with being rejected, with ending relationships, or with having to hurt another person's feelings?
I thought very carefully about the issue, and initially, I sided with the school.
The kids were too young for these kind of experiences. " I asked."Well, Katy said that it doesn't matter what the school says, Jake is still her boyfriend.
If they were experimenting with 'going out' at ten and eleven, how would they be experimenting at twelve or thirteen? And I guess Matt is still my boyfriend, too."And I realized, whatever the school thinks, there's nothing they can do to stop the kids from dating - or at least, nothing that won't drive them further into each other's arms (metaphorically speaking**).
And I realised that it didn't really bother me at all. They're playing, testing out new roles, working out how they feel about the world and each other.
But sometimes the boy may have a very different personality than the others, but don't worry.
A couple of weeks ago I received an email from my daughter’s school, addressed to the parents of all Year 5 students.
The talk wasn’t on puberty – they'd had that talk the previous year. Over the past couple of months, boys and girls in the year have started asking each other ‘out’.
And it wasn’t on bullying, as they’ve covered that many times. This doesn’t mean actually going anywhere; at 10 and 11 years old, these kids are too young to go to the movies alone, let alone go out to dinner.
Getting Him to Notice You Keeping Him Interested Making it Last Community Q&A It's not always easy to know what's going on in the mind of an eleven-year-old boy.