to think this a bit inappropriate, bearing in mind DS is 10

[stoppinattwo]

he has an email address which he has obviously given out in school to his mates.

One of the girls has emailed him with rather a forward email, which he was a bit embarrassed about, I have told him to be polite about it and just pay no attantion to it but I think if I was this girls mother I would want to know she was sending such emails.

I have checked with DS and she doesnt have any older brothers or sisters who could have sent it as a joke. I would be shocked if DD is sending stuff like this out at 9/10

maybe Im just a bit stuffy, but I dont think so.

I had some experience in a year 6 class at my DS's school last year (for the whole year).

The kids were just starting to mention bf/gf and "dates" (ie dinner at Mcdonalds whilst their folks were on another table!)

It was as much as they could do to hold hands, they were that shy - regardless of all the playground bravado / text messages or emails sent between them (yes, they were discussed openly in the classroom on rainy day play times!)

I don't think you have much to worry about - just make sure he knows who he's handing his email address out, or else it COULD be as dangerous as an indiscriminate handing out of a phone number.

UQD.....I couldnt let your posts go un noticed pmsl.....

TR why is having and email address worrying...genuinely interested in your concerns...DS has one simply to contact his freinds, relatives etc...

But the girl could just as easily slip the lad a paper note at school saying the exact same things, do we expect parents to closely supervise that kind of thing, too, so much so that it could never happen without the girl's parents knowing? Bit of control freakery if you think that's possible...

My 9yo DS gives out his email addy to friends, too, although we have talked about keeping it private for things like signing up for services on the Internet, etc.

I take back my previous remark about the internet as I realise I was being a little OTT. Alardi is right. We have no evidence that either the OPs ds or the other girl is handing out their email address to anybody other than the kind of person who has access to them anyway. Other children could just as easily slip a note into his book bag, there is nothing about them using the internet that makes it intrinsically more dangerous or sinister.

My dd is allowed to email her friends- doesn't mean we haven't talked about internet security or that I don't check who she is sending emails to. The fact that I do not read every email she sends a bone fide friend does not mean that she is unsupervised, and it certainly doesn't mean that she is so unsupervised that she could be contacting dirty old men instead.

It is possible to do the silly giggly act over a handsome lad (haven't we all done it) and be fairly clued up over genuine dangers at the same time.

I think all the parents who say 'Oh my daughter would never do that' might want to wake up and smell the coffee.... don't any of you remember being that age?? OK, so it was all little notes in those days, so it's email now... so what? It's silly, it's fun, it's normal....

Me, I spent an entire winter at this age reading Japanese haikus: I think that's as good a sign as any that there were hormones about. All cherry blossoms and lonely footprints in the snow. I think my parents may just have suspected that this sudden interest in Oriental literature was not entirely academic

Yes her grammar is shocking for her age

Nothing worse than anything you'll find on any valentine card around at the moment.

can't exactly put my finger on it to be honest

dd1 is 8, she has an email address so that she can use messenger but she is inaware of how to access/use it

I haven't told her on purpose

spam mail is I guess one reason, no idea what she might get sent

and she is a very good girl generally BUT she may start emialing aomeone without asking me first and then.....oh I dont know
seems too impersonal, easy to hide behind

she is too naive to not beleive anything she was told in a email + not old/mature enough to have adoor opening into the world of spam and other yucky thing right onto her lap

*unaware....oops

I might want to wake up and 'smell the coffee' wrt dd? Thanks for the advice - I've only got 3 dc after all..

I'm well aware all this is on the horizon and I do remember it well, also. But some mothers I know seem to actively encourage it.

9/10yrs might not be too young for some who wish to sound like 15, but for many (shock horror) they are still happy to be children.

I mean to quote the original Email 'You have the best body'. At 10? That's quite a precocious thing to say.

It's a shame. Imo.

I am not one of the mothers that actively encourages this and we have absolutely no evidence that the girl mentioned in the OP has such a mother either.

You have the best body seems a quotation used by a group of giggly girls who really are so innocent that they wouldn't have anything of their own to put in a love message. I am afraid I at this age would have had far more of my own to contribute - I would have sounded less precocious because I was more so.

But I think my own dd's interpretation of the OP is right and that this is more a social/giggly/girlie thing. These girls are probably not yet at the stage where they are hiding away and reading Japanese haikus.

The point is that most of them are not taking it terribly seriously at this stage. Dd certainly was not when she was asked out as girl no 4 on the same afternoon.

If any of you have read Anne of Green Gables- they are 11, and boys and girls names are being coupled at their school (causing a lot of trouble for the main protagonists). If I remember rightly, she gets a loveheart with some loving inscription. So I don't think it's exactly a new thing. The current email may have been expressed in terms that would not have been used in Avonlea, but that just goes to show that small children in this situation imitate the language used by adults. And most adults these days don't hand out pink love hearts as a sign of their affection.

I agree with Tsar - she probablydoesn't know what the word 'fit' means, but she shouldn't be using it at her age.

If my DD (11) called someone 'fit' I'd be appalled - and yes, I do think some mothers encourage all that early dating stuff - maybe they're the same ones buying Playboy pencil cases for their daughters.

The only reason I can fathom is that they want them to fit in with the herd - I just hope my DD isn't surrounded by little Lolitas when she gets to secondary school.

We don't know if the girl's mother encourages it. I don't think we should be judging this woman whom we know nothing about.

And falling in love when you are 11 with a child of your own age does not make you a Lolita. Lolita is being sexuallt abused by an older man- that is a totally different scenario from passing a love note to a boy in class. Children have always done this. Were the children in Anne of Green Gables a bunch of Lolitas?

And why can you not be a child and still fall in love? It's not like you have to enter the full adult world the day you notice that your heart beats faster when a certain boy steps into view. You don't have to do the teenage pregnancy. You don't have to start taking drugs. You can enjoy an innocent childhood and still be in love. I believe it is beneficial to have a long learning stage, when love is purely in the mind, before it has any consequences.

This sounds to me like the modern take on the old love note - which parents were unlikely to have seen.

I don't think anyone with a daughter that age would want them to be thinking/writing like that but the reality is most of them will at least be thinking it.

I do agree however with whoever said it was the unsupervised internet use that is the worrying aspect.

Well, the school where I work must be full of these little Lolitas then! You would not believe the number of girls AND boys from year 4, 5 and 6 who think they have 'fallen in love' with Joe/Danny/Jack/Chloe/Louise/Rebecca from their class. Every, and I mean every, day, I have at least one child coming to me in tears because so&so has 'chucked them' or so & so has 'stolen' their boyfriend/girlfriend. As has already been mentioned, the e-mail is just the modern day equivalent of a note that used to be passed between them in class, and often, still is.
We may not like the fact that they are using words like 'fit' to describe each other, or that they are aware of others bodies, sadly that is part of today's society. Many of them see and hear this sort of thing from the TV programmes they watch. TBH, I would not worry about it other than the fact your son is embarrassed by it. I would just advise him to reply politely and say thanks for the compliments, but at the moment he is too busy with football/whatever to have time for a girlfriend. You could possibly block her e-mails in future, but that won't stop her sending him notes at school. Maybe his embarrssent was because you saw it, not because of what it said per se!

Some people must have known about it in the past: think of all the children's books which hinge on 10-11-year-olds falling in love. Calf love, it used to be called. Every other Just William story has its plots based on this phenomenon. It's in at least one of the Nesbit books (The Treasure Seekers, I think). Anne of Green Gables I have already mentioned. There are plenty more.

And the one recurring feature is that children reproduce the language they have read in stories or that they hear about them. William doesn't talk about women's bodies, because that's not how his brother Robert talks about women: he sends them Valentine presents instead or offers to perform heroic deeds for them.

good grief some of you!

'fit' or 'fitty' is just like saying good looking or handsome or dare i say dishy...bleurgh.

I think it was the comment about having the "best body" that squeezed somewhere inside me in an uncomfortable way....this girl is 9 btw I have found out....so I do go back to my original feeling of being uncomfortable with the email. Uncomfortable for the girl, not angry or upset but just feeling that it is a bit young to be so forward....it is not like a note, that can be anonymous, or a thought that is completely secret...it is an email and she meant DS to know it was from her.

My DS....has the best eyes, nose toes, ears, hair knees...but he is my DS and so I tell him that everyday

I can see what you mean, but I reckon it's a bit like Just William's declarations of high faluting love to various teenagers. They're not actually things he is feeling, they are just words he has copied out of other people's love letters because he hasn't got any words of his own to express what he is feeling. I don't think this girl is actually mentally undressing your ds: she is just trying to write a love-note the way she has learnt that people do.

There is another very funny scene in one of the Avonlea books, where a little girl wants to express her romantic admiration for her (female) school teacher. So she copies bits out of a letter to her mother by a former beau. All about her eyes being like stars etc. Possibly appropriate for a young man wooing a grown-up lady, highly inappropriate for a little girl writing to her school teacher.

Chances are in a few years time this girl will not be writing to boys about their bodies, she will go lobster red and tongue-tied and mutter something incoherent, because those words will suddenly have taken on a meaning. That is when you need to start looking out

The girl's email sounds pretty awful to me. The sad thing is not the possible presence of inappropriately sexual language -- though 'fit' and 'best body' do seem like overly sexual language to me. The really sad thing is that at this age the poor little girl is already trammelled into thinking in terms of 'relationships', pairing off with boys, when there is so much else to do, and so much time for that in future.

Girls seem to have so little childhood. I know that this kind of friendship would be totally unwelcome by my 10 yo boy. I don't have girls, but if I did I would be really saddened by this foisting on to them (by media? By consumerism?) of a caricature of adolescent boy-girl behaviour.

he has just had two weeks of swimming lessons with this girl......arrghhhh................oh im going to be a nightmare MIL one day

So why is this different from the children of Just William's era, or the time of E. Nesbit, Threadworm? Read my earlier posts: this has always been around. Children have always passed lovenotes in class. There is plenty of evidence from all historical eras of childhood sweethearts, of children teasing each other by coupling names together, of children trying to vie for status by having a crush on the most desirable boy/girl in the class.

Children have always known that love is waiting around the corner. They don't need modern media: all they need to do is to observe the adults around them.

These early rehearsals do not signal the end of childhood. I had an absolutely beautiful childhood for many years after I had first noticed that one of the boys in the class was handsome and that it gave me pleasure to look at him. It was full of the ordinary happy childhood things: plenty of outdoor adventure, lots of playing, lots of stories.

As ever beautifully put Threadworm.

'Saddened'. Yes! That's how I feel about it too. Saddened because there are so many years ahead of the the real thing and at 9/10 it needn't be about 'relationships' or the masquerading of adult ones. And once you dip a toe in that pool there's no going back entirely. What's the rush after all?

No, of course I don't know this girl or her mother so I don't judge. Or the mums I do know who seem to collude with it in a nudge nudge kind of way. But it seems (to me at least) an odd way to be with your dd at this age.

I posted perplexed about this recently. A mother I am v friendly with was talking about this recently to me - her dd being (at9) quite boy concious.

I said dd hadn't really cottoned on yet to all that and she said - ok as a joke - but Oh is she a lesbian then. I'm sorry but it really did upset me. Has it really come down to that, from another mother fgs??

It's all so competitive, adult and I said it earlier - precocious .

Tbh I think there are two separate issues here.

The first is that at the age of nine/ten it is totally normal for boys and girls to be discovering each other. Not in an overtly sexual way but just noticing each other. And the language is generally what they hear from their friends or hear on the television programmes they watch/the books they read. It is normal. And just because a girl fancies a boy at age nine doesn?t mean that her life has been ruined. And it is not a new thing, it?s just that things like text/email is new and therefore we have more of an insight into our children?s worlds than our parents had into ours.

I first fell in love when I was nine. His name was Luke. It was the first time that my heart beat faster when a boy entered my space. I used to go to sleep thinking about him, imagining that he liked me too. But he didn?t, he fancied my friend . And then my feelings moved on to Clinten, and then someone else, and in reality I never had my first kiss until I was thirteen, and I never lost my virginity until I was 21. And as an aside, Luke was knocked off his bike by a car when we were fifteen and killed . And I wrote a song about him, because he?d been my first love, when I was nine.

The second issue IMO is that we are in an era now where children have access to technology that we didn?t have access to when we were growing up, so they don?t have anyone to look up to wrt appropriate use of said technology, because we haven?t been there, iyswim? IMO it is going to take a while for people to really become accustomed to the fact that children now have their own email addresses, their own mobile phones etc, and that they can communicate with one another 24/7 whereas we had to rely on pen and paper when we were children. It?s a learning curve for all of us.

But children only have their own email addresses, mobiles etc if parents allow it - and this in itself is part of the whole escalation out of childhood as far as I'm concerned.

On a separate theme - 10 year olds do not feel "love" for a member of the opposite sex, whatever they think they might feel and whatever children's literature might say: it may be an awakening of tenderness but it is not love!