X. Sum up the article and formulate its key idea.

XI. Is the person we become shaped more by the genes we inherit from our parents, or by our life experience?

SUPPLEMENT

WHAT’S GOT INTO THE TWEENIES?

My friend Sarah says about her 11-year-old daughter. "Sometimes she is childlike and just wants a cuddle; at other times it is like being mother to Madonna. She and her friends dress up in micro-mini skirts and spend hours on their hair. They have got micro-boobs, too - size 32 triple A or something. They are already having mood swings and scouring their faces for spots. Can somebody tell me what is going on?"

At ten years old, my first daughter, Frances, was more turbulent than a dryer at full tilt. I remember complimenting her on a pretty top she was wearing. She walked out of the room to change it. I tried to emphasize, but by the age of 11 she was increasingly determined not to take any advice or sympathy I might offer. "I hate you," she stormed when I told her I had packed a coupled of sanitary towels "just in case" into her rucksack before summer camp.

It is not merely that our well-fed children arrive at adolescence earlier these days, although that is partly the case. Nor is it purely a question of commercial pressures forcing our nine-year-olds to conform to an advertised ideal. No, this is about hormones.

Pre-puberty is a developmental stage in its own right, says Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, who has just written a book called Tweenies about children aged between eight and 12 years old, who fall outside the remit of most childcare guides. And she is astonished at how little we know about this early crisis of change and instability.

"Hormonal changes start about the age of eight in girls - long before any physical signs," she says. "There is an awful lot going on inside the child's body and moods will be affected before the periods start." With boys, hormonal changes occur later. "For them, it is much more a case of the gawky 14-year-old," she says.

In fact, pre-teen children are not being awkward - they are simply high on invisible hormones, says Dr Peter Hindmarsh, a pediatric endocrinologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London. This discovery has come only in the past five years. "Before then it was impossible to measure hormone concentrations at low levels," says Dr Hindmarsh. "But you can now see that the sex hormones are pretty quiet until about seven or eight years of age, then they increase gradually over the next three to four years."

The hormones - estrogen for girls and testosterone for boys - start being produced at night, from the time children fall asleep until about 4am or 5am. Levels are not enough to stimulate breast and hair growth or to trigger menstruation, but they do affect the brain, hence die mood swings.

"Flossie has been a nightmare for months," says a friend from Manchester. "She will not take no for an answer. She is only ten but wants to get her ears pierced and is making a huge fuss about it. We suggested that she wait a while, but that is not good enough because 'all' her friends have had it done. She also seems to be watching what she eats and there is not an ounce of fat on her. But one word from us and she flounces upstairs, banging every door she passes. It is as though a teenager has come to live in my child's body."

Life can be cruel for modern pre-adolescents. No longer cute and captivating, nor yet terribly teenagery, they are assumed to be able to cope with a vast range of outside pressures. They have to deal with more school tests than previous generations and exhausting extracurricular timetables of organized "fun". On top of all this there are image pressures from the beauty, fashion and pop industries. Yet they are still only children.

Hardey-Brewer says that the problems of the pre-teen are quite different from those of the fully fledged teenager. "The adolescent crisis is: 'Where am I going to be as an adult?' The pre-adolescent crisis is: 'How do I measure up in the uncosseted world outside my family?' Tweenies are struggling to separate from the family, to check out how they fit in the outside world." The stress sets in long before parents expect it.

"My daughter is nine years old and has started puberty," writes one mother. "She has been very difficult with everyone. Her moods have been up and down for at least two weeks. She hasn't started her period yet. Help!" Another writes: "I am at a loss. I have an 11-year-old son who will not eat. His diet consists of peanut-butter sandwiches, popcorn and bagels. Not to mention junk food. At one time he would eat cereal but now that is a battle."

They may look like ten-year-olds, but our pre-adolescents' heads are buzzing with friendship problems, gender questions, moral dilemmas and anxieties about body image. Soon their limbs will elongate, body hair will sprout and everyone will realize what they have been going through. Until then they fight a lone crusade to be respected as subtly older, suddenly different.

Pre-teenagers often latch on to causes and issues outside the family in an effort to make their mark, Hardey-Brewer says. "As children develop the capacity for abstract thought, they begin to forge their own morality.

"They may become concerned for the suffering of others but have yet to develop the sophistication to see shades of grey. They are very rule-bound. An interest in animal rights can go alongside a tendency to anorexia and perfectionism." As one friend put it, after receiving an anti-alcohol lecture from her 11-year-old daughter "I find myself asking: where did Rachel’s childhood go? Then she comes to me crying about a scuffed knee and I think 'she's still my little girl.

Deborah Jackson

/ From The Times, Nov.18, 2004/

What are these observations suggestive of?

uyt

(from All Our Love. The Facts of Love, Lots of Love, The Best of Love and Vote for Love, compiled by Nanette Newman)

"To cane" or "not to cane" is still a question in an English school. Some English teachers, who are reluctant companions to this approach to education, say they simply need the cane "to be held back in reserve to maintain discipline among the troublemakers".

A Reader's Letter

It is characteristic of our society in Great Britain that the only persons who can be legally assaulted are children - one of the weakest sections. Empirical evidence has shown that corporal punishment does no good, can be positively harmful to some children and hides incompetent teachers and otherdeficiencies in our educational system. Britain and Ireland are the only countries in the world where it is allowed. In Scotland corporal punishment is more prevalent than in England and Wales. We are at present conducting a campaign for abolition and are taking a test case to the European Commission on Human Rights.

In support of our case we sent the Commission a tawse, one of the leather belts, 2 ft long x 1, 5 broad, 3/8 thick, which are used to inflict punishment - the Commission have written back, inquiring if we are sure these are the instruments used.

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