The topic of which age you should let your child read each Harry Potter book keeps circling around in my life, and I decided to throw up my thoughts here in case they are helpful to anyone else.  I came up with these guidelines as a former teacher (looking at similarly thematic literature presented to kids within the classroom), as a writer who knows that readers tend to “read up” (books for teenagers tend to be read by preteens), and as a mother to sensitive kids.

All of this is to say that you may find your child is ready much earlier, or you may find your child is ready much later.  But this is information (without containing any spoiler details) to help you make a decision that works for your kids or students.  Wait, actually, scratch that.  While there are no exact details, I broadly discuss plot.  So if you are super-sensitive to spoilers, stop reading this post.

One more note: I chunk the books with age chasms in between.  If you can read Book One, you could also read Book Two.  But there’s a maturity chasm between 2 and 3.  To indicate which books can be read back to back without a time gap to account for maturity, I’ve made asterisks between where I see the breakdown and explained why.

Image: Sonia Belviso via Flickr

Book One: We started reading the series together when they were six years old.  I based the decision on a few things: what they had already been exposed to within books and movies, how these particular books were constructed (the most terrifying parts, until you get to the last few books, are always at the very end), and how fearful/not fearful they seemed as we started reading.

I started the series by telling the twins that before we began, I wanted them to know that Voldemort was no longer in this world.  I wouldn’t tell them if any other character was alive or dead, but I wanted them to know that no matter how scary Voldemort sounded, he was gone.  As a result, our evenings were nightmare-free, though the books themselves weren’t ruined.

The first book is constructed with two “scary” scenes that are sort of the fear-equivalent to the kiddie roller coaster: small dips and twists.  In the middle of the book, there is a troll fight that cements the friendship of Harry, Ron, and Hermione, and at the end of the book, there is the requisite fight scene.  Again, the end scene is creepy, but nothing more upsetting than what you would get from a bad guy in a Disney film.  Your child has already been exposed to the concept of parental death via any Disney film as well.  Er… unless you haven’t encountered a Disney film yet.

Book Two: Can be read immediately following Book One, which means that it’s okay for a six-year-old child.  The scary scene is at the end, and it mirrors the intensity of the first book’s fight scene.  The only change is the introduction of the idea of a child dying.  A girl was murdered in the school years earlier by a magical animal, and her story is told in this book.  Personally, my kids glossed over that fact because it’s a tangential character.  But Rowling puts that concept out there in this book: kids can die too.

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Book Three: There should be a small age jump between Book Two and Three, unless it has taken you a long time to read these books and your child is now seven or beyond.  My kids had just turned eight when we started reading this book.

This book introduces the concept of a serial killer, as well as someone who kills impersonally.  Up until this point, in all the stories about death contained in the series, the murder has always had a purpose and the murder and the murdered always knew each other (or “of” each other) somewhat.  In the case of the murder discussed in this book, the killer didn’t know most of his victims because he took out a street full of people.  Again, the twins sort of glossed over the enormity of this idea, but Rowling is setting the stage at this point to introduce the ideas in Book Six.  The scariness of the series is still in the kiddie roller coaster zone, though the pace is picking up somewhat.

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Book Four: There is a steep drop-off in scariness between Book Three and Book Four.  We waited until just before they were turning nine.

This book introduces the first two character deaths.  The first one occurs at the beginning of the book.  The characters is a stranger, but the child is reading about the murder in real time vs. hearing about it in retrospect.  The second death happens about three-quarters of the way through the book.  It’s a lesser character, one your child probably won’t be very attached to, but it’s a student’s death.

Additionally, this book has a twist at the end, which my kids found much scarier than the death of the student.  The idea of an adult violating the trust of a child — or really, anyone violating anyone’s trust — hit much closer to home than murder by magic.  Additionally, this is the book where I think it really hits home that our world can be be permanently changed by the actions of others.  That even if we do everything right, there are others who can negatively impact us.  I know my kids struggled with seeing this idea in such stark terms.

Book Five: If your child can handle Book Four, they can probably handle Book Five, hence why I didn’t put a gap between these books.  Again, the scary part takes place at the very end.  The death, this time, is of a “major” character.  It’s a character far enough away from the action that the reader won’t feel the loss as acutely as they would one of the main people in the book, but still, if Harry loves this person then we love this person.  So it’s the first close death.

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Book Six: We will not start this book for a while.  The twins are turning 10 this summer, but they still feel far away from ready for this book.

Rowling introduces the concept of what murder does to a person’s soul, and how there could be people out there who want to have their soul wrenched apart.  We have enormous, unwanted responsibilities being placed on the shoulders of a child, and even his parents can’t protect him from what he’s being told he must do.  Both concepts are really scary ideas for kids to consider: that someone may enjoy taking someone’s life and the idea that your parents can’t protect you.

Because that is the theme of this book: there is no one on this planet who can protect you forever.

That there’s no space — not even a place as protected as Hogwarts — that is completely safe, and the people in charge of protecting us — such as parents — can be taken away at any moment.  That is a scary, scary thought for a kid.  That ending alone is why I would wait to introduce this book.  The death that occurs at the end is very intense and upsetting.

Book Seven: If your child can handle Book Six, they can handle Book Seven.  Yes, there are many many more deaths, but quantity shouldn’t be confused with quality.  Yes, there are beloved characters who die, and each one is disturbing in its own right.  But the reader doesn’t learn anything new in this book.  Let me rephrase that: they may learn a host of lessons about internal strength or what we can endure or the importance of the choices we make.  But all of the worst facts about death and murder have already been covered by this point in the series.  And maybe it’s looking at the good side of human nature that tempers some of the worst facts about life.

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A lot of people read this series with their kids for the enjoyment of being there as the story unfolds.  They enjoyed the books, and now they want their kids to enjoy the books.  But if your kids are reading these books on their own, you may want to jump in and catch up so you can discuss.  I think there are certain books — the Harry Potter series, Harriet the Spy, anything by Judy Blume — that scream out for a bit of adult guidance.  This is not to say that your child can’t read those books on their own — most of us certainly did.  But your child will get a lot more out of it with some discussion.

We use the same guidelines above for the movies, perhaps being more conservative age-wise with the movies since the twins seem to react more emotionally to the visual than the written word.  The movie comes at the child in a condensed, two-hour window.  The book unfolds slowly over many days, giving them time to process.

On a side note: the two Harry Potter tours we created for the kids in London (Harry Potter sites around London and visiting the Harry Potter movie set) were both done when the kids were on Book Three.  It’s possible to do both with a much younger kid who is in the middle of the series without giving away anything from the later books.

Anything you’d add about knowing when your child is ready for Harry Potter?

There’s a tiny point that I don’t want to have get lost inside why I read your blog, and that is a piece of advice that someone gave me while dating that applies to writing too.

There were plenty of ways to meet people while I was single.  Some of them involved attending events where all the people there would be people who were also looking for someone to date; singles events in bars, for instance.  On the surface, attending events like that were ideal because I knew for certain that the people I would meet were looking to date too.  There was actually only one problem with those singles events.

I dislike bars.

Sometimes I would suck it up and go, and sometimes I even met a nice guy and got a date out of it.  But most of the time, I went home frustrated because I had spent two hours doing something I disliked and had nothing to show for it.

On the other hand, I really enjoy sitting in coffeehouses, reading.  It’s what I did most evenings when I was single.

Most of the other people in the coffeehouse I frequented weren’t looking to hook up.  They were meeting friends or going out on dates already or getting work done.  But every so often, I’d fall into a conversation with a guy at the neighbouring table.  And every so often, I would end up with a date from it.  And really, those dates usually led to more dates since the guy and I had something in common: we both liked to read in coffeehouses.

What is the point of all of this?  And how does it apply to writing?

If you do the activities you like to do, you may meet someone great or you may not, but at least it will be time well-spent.  You’ll walk away from the activity feeling fulfilled, and if you meet someone great along the way, that’s the icing on the cake.  You can’t really force meeting someone anyway.  All you can do is put yourself out there so your paths can intersect.

If you write the posts you want to write, you may get readers or you may not, but at least it will be time well-spent.  You’ll walk away from your blog feeling fulfilled.  If nothing else, you’ll have a record of thoughts and some weight off your chest.  And if your words resonate with someone else, that is the icing on the cake.  You can’t force readership.  There is no magical formula where if you write X then you will get Y.  There are no shortcuts.  All you can do is put content out there that resonates with you, and hopefully you will find that it resonates with other people.

Like this post.  I wrote it for me.  To remember this advice lest it gets forgotten someday.  Because I’ve always found it an interesting frame in which to make choices.  Because it’s what I want to say.  Hopefully, it’s also something other people want to read.  But I can’t control for that.

On the other hand, there are plenty of topics I could write about that I think would bring readers.  They don’t really interest me; writing about them would be like attending those bar events.  If the readers didn’t come, I’d be cranky that I had spent my time on those topics.

So I don’t.  I stick to what I want to say, and I stick to reading in coffeehouses.

Both have served me well thus far.

The “Other” category on my iTunes account is back up to over 6 GB.  An Applecare technician was able to reduce it to a reasonable amount right before Christmas.  Unfortunately, she did this by giving me terrible advice that erased my phone completely, causing me to lose my contacts, calendar, and photos.  But… you know… the “Other” category was smaller afterward, so it was an overall win?

And then I synced my phone and it jumped to 2 GB.  I synced again and it was over 4 GB.  And today, I had to sync my phone, and now it’s over 6 GB.

I’ve tried all the suggestions I could find online: turning off the phone while it’s plugged into iTunes (this is supposed to reboot it?), deleting old messages, deleting the cache in Safari, deleting apps that I added recently.

Before I call Applecare again and risk losing what I’ve been able to reconstruct, does anyone know how to reduce the amount of space taken up by “Other” in the phone?  I’m assuming, by this point, that it’s corrupted files because the number jumps with each sync.  But how do I get those corrupted files off the phone?  Or maybe it isn’t corrupted files.  Has anyone else had a problem with the “Other” category on iTunes, and how did you reduce the size of that category?

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “A Bleak Choice” (Abigail Rieley)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I’m going to touch the third rail here and link to two posts that I think are important posts to read.  We will never move forward by sweeping our foibles under the rug.

A+ Effort has a post about positive adoption language, and the incident that happened on Facebook this week.  She explains, “Bottom line: language matters. We, the infertility community, KNOW THAT. We bristle at ‘just relax’ or ‘it’s God’s will.’ We spend a lot of energy educating those around us that we have a medical problem and that it’s unthinkably rude to suggest maybe we aren’t meant to be parents … The community of adoptive parents* has as strong of an interest in teaching people to use appropriate language about adoption…”  It’s a wonderful, respectful, thought-provoking post that points out that talking about difficult subjects doesn’t require perfection, but it does require the listener and the speaker to both be able to communicate openly with one another.

Additionally, From IF to When has decided to move to a new blog space, and also touches on the Facebook incident.  Her post shines light on the responsibility of a host.  If two guests started shouting at each other in your living room, you would jump into the fight and try to quell the hurt feelings.  You would maybe moderate the conversation between the two sides so they could come to a place of peace.  You wouldn’t stay in the kitchen, humming to yourself while you refilled the veggie dip bowl.  And the same goes for online gatherings.  When arguments bubble up, it is the host’s responsibility to address the tension: in another blog post, within the comment section, in individual emails, in a new thread.  There are plenty of options, but silence or saying that you don’t have time to monitor comments isn’t one of them when it comes to responsible hosting.  Or, silence/lack of monitoring is an option, but then the host needs to deal with the consequences of that silence.  In this case, the silence hurt the community, and as I stated above, the only way forward through hurt feelings is forward.  Yes, it may be upsetting to dredge up comfortable thoughts, but really, it weakens our community when we can’t speak openly with one another.  Ultimately, if people are willing to listen and respond, a lot of good can come from those tough conversations.

And now onto other topics.

A Greater Yes is moving from family building to family living in this post about being almost done (in 2015) with trying to conceive.  After being ensconced in this mindset for half of her life, she muses about how difficult it will be to stop thinking in terms of embryos and cycles after 16 years.  She writes, “Honestly, I don’t know how to be anyone but this one. Almost my entire adult life has revolved around trying to become a mother. And now to complete our family. Yet I look forward to letting this chapter close and just focus on the children that I do have. No more looking for embryos. No more saving money for treatments. No more comparing medication prices. Just living.”  It’s exciting and settling and scary, all at the same time.

Lastly, If You Don’t Stand for Something has a post about emerging from the long winter.  It’s been a hard period of time, and all of her energy has been going into getting through it. (Well, and her remaining energy is going to Girl Guides — thank you!)  I like this post because it’s a glimpse into someone else’s life, like looking through a window.

The roundup to the Roundup: Save me from the “Other” on my phone.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between March 14th and March 21st) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I want you to understand why I read your blog.

By which I mean, the active, continuous reason why I read your blog.  Of course I came over in the first place because something piqued my interest.  You had a similar situation to mine.  Or you had a thought-provoking post that someone linked to.  Or you had an interesting blog name that made me click over for a moment.  There are plenty of reasons I could catalogue that make me give a blog a first look.

But what makes me keep reading a blog and add it to my blog reader?  Because there are lots of blogs that I visit once or twice.

There is really only one reason why I would keep reading a blog, and that is because I connected in some way with the writer and his/her voice.

I like the way the person writes — their choice of phrasing, similar to why I like certain book authors — or I feel like there is something in the voice or ideas presented that makes me think that if the person lived in my town, we’d be friends.  So I add their blog to my reader because I respect them as a writer, and as long as their writing style doesn’t stray too far from why I originally liked them, I’ll keep reading.  I expect their subject matter to change, after all, we are all in flux and have different aspects of our life come to the forefront at various times.  Some topics resonate with me more than others, but there is no one I read who writes solely about one thing and one thing only.  By which I mean, they may think they write about one thing, but really, they write about their life.  Or they write about cooking, but they throw in a lot of stories about their dog.  Or they have an adoption blog, but they also sometimes get a little political.

Yes, I will admit that I sometimes skim a post if the subject matter doesn’t hold my interest, but overall, my continued reading of a blog is directly tied to the voice.  The only constant I need is whatever drew me to your personality in the first place.

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There have been a lot of posts lately worrying about changes in the blogosphere and whether or not to keep writing and whether readers have floated away.  These are all legitimate thoughts, but they’re sort of touching-the-elephant musings.  We all have our personal observations, but they’re coloured by our own personal experiences, and that includes what we are doing or not doing.

The first thing I always ask when someone comments that the blogosphere has changed is “has your writing and reading habits changed?”  That usually points to the issue: they’ve become self-conscious in their subject matter and stopped writing, they’ve felt uninspired for topic ideas, they’ve run out of time to write, they’ve stopped commenting as much because they’re reading from a phone.  Actions have consequences: if you change the way you blog, you will see a change in the way people read.

And those actions are what you are feeling when you’re touching the elephant.  It’s easy to feel that trunk or tail or tusk and use it to describe the whole animal.  But elephants and the blogosphere are both huge.  You can’t really get a sense of them if you only look at your own experience or that of a few people around you.

If you stop writing, people will stop reading.  If they suspect that you’re not comfortable in your own space, they will not be comfortable in your space. (Have you ever been to a party where the hosts have obviously fought right before you arrived?  And they’re sitting around in frosty silence?  It affects the party; it has to.  And the same goes for writers who don’t feel comfortable with what or where or to whom they’re writing.)  If you stop commenting, new readers will stop finding you and your readership will drop.

Luckily, there are answers too: Write.  Build a space where you are comfortable.  Read other blogs and comment; regularly.

And also, along the way, recognize that even if your blog has changed with age, underneath it all, regardless of whatever feelings you have to the aging process, it’s still your story.  Just your life; in word form.  We’re all like that too: I may have more grey hair than when I started writing in this space, crinkles around my eyes and lines in my forehead.  I look older.  But I’m still me.  And this blog is still an extension of me, a receptacle for my thoughts.  So no, nothing really looks like how it looked back in 2006.  But that’s okay because the important things — the spirit of this blog and the readership at the core — hasn’t changed all that much.

And all of this is to say that I don’t think that blogging has changed as much as people fear.  Has it changed?  Of course.  Again, everything — including blogging — is in flux.  But anyone who fears that the end of blogging is nigh needs to ask themselves if they’ve done anything to change their blog or the way they interact with the blogosphere.  And as a test, go back — for an extended period of time since change always takes time — to reading and writing as you used to read and write, and see if blogging now resembles blogging of yesteryear.  I’m willing to bet that at its core, it does.

I’m writing this in case you need reassurance to find your voice again.  Your voice is why your loyal core readership reads you.  Are there people who come to blogs when a person is experiencing something difficult because they thrive off the drama?  Yes.  But those aren’t the people you want to cater to or worry about because they aren’t sustainable or retainable.  They will float away to the next blog and feed off the drama there like a mosquito drinks blood.  And just as you wouldn’t work to actively keep mosquitoes biting you, there is no reason to attempt to keep that sort of blog reader.

Do you know how every person has a base weight that your body strives to return to; a happy weight that is easy to maintain?  Your blog has a base readership.  The numbers may go higher or lower based on external factors such as people linking to a post or getting a lot of Google juice or taking a blogging break, but overall, there is a base readership your blog strives to maintain.  That is your core.  When you push too hard to try to get that readership to go up, the core pulls you back down.  If you go away for a long time, starving your blog, your core pipes up when you return to remind you that your blog has gotten too thin.

Every blog has a core, even if that core only consists of five people.  And they read you because you are… YOU.  Isn’t that a powerful thought?  That there are people out there who care what you have to say.

Think of all the people you meet in your life that you don’t retain as a friend.  All the hundreds of people around you that you don’t connect with.  The same goes for blogs.  There are hundreds of blogs out there written by Jewish women or vegetarian women or mothers of twins or those experiencing infertility: all topics which resonate with me.  But I don’t read them.  Because for whatever reason, I didn’t connect with the voice.

So if you ever believe that people only read you for your situation, think again to all the people around you who share your interests and yet aren’t your close friend.  We don’t connect solely over shared experience because there are way too many people out there who share our experiences.  We connect over shared experience coupled with something else, a je ne sais quoi, that tells us that we like this person; we like their voice.

I like your voice.

Keep writing.

Last one. (I think.)  So the party posts brought up some interesting thoughts about reciprocation.  What we expect of others or what we do because we think other people expect it.  That murky grey area where you wonder if you’re doing enough.  If you’re pulling your weight.  If you’re a good friend or community member or neighbour.

I have some pretty amazing friends, and it’s hard to keep up with their amazingness.  They do a lot.  It makes you want to do a lot too; not to compete but because you know how good you feel being on the receiving end of someone else’s care.  It makes you want to step up your care game so you can make someone else feel like that.  So you can let someone else know you have their back or you want them to be happy.

When I say reciprocation, I don’t mean keeping a spreadsheet where you look at the times when you’ve borrowed a cup of your neighbour’s sugar and balance it against the times when you’ve shoveled their walk.  It would be an odd relationship if it was always perfectly balanced.  Give and take isn’t like cars alternating lanes in a merge; it isn’t even.  But a good friendship is sort of like a good diet: you don’t look at an individual day to see if you’re eating well; you look at the entire week.  And you don’t look at a single day to see if you’re doing enough; you look at the scope of a friendship.

The reason you need to look at a long length of time is that some people do hundreds of tiny things while some people do two or three huge things.  And, of course, the weight of each act rests in both the hands of the giver and the receiver.  What I might perceive as the greatest thing ever done, the other person may not see as a big deal.  And vice versa.

So no, I’m not talking about keeping score, but I think we all do note from time to time whether we feel settled in the friendship; and sometimes we think to ourselves, “am I being a good enough friend?” or “are they a good enough friend?”  And invitations are mixed in with all of that.

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I think if you’re waiting to receive back exactly what you give, you’ll be disappointed.  If you’re waiting to receive back the sort of thing you give — for instance, you cook meals for others when they are ill, and you expect some sort of care like that when you are ill whether it be a meal or someone helping with your errands — you’ll be disappointed.  People answer you in their own care language.

Sometimes Josh says something to me in Hebrew, but I answer him in English.  English is the language I feel most comfortable using even though I understand what he’s saying.  That is a lot how our interactions with other people work.  We speak to them in our caring language, even though we understand theirs.  My caring language is food.  I like providing food for others.  It’s a way I show a person that I care about them, whether it’s offering to bring food to a party or cooking for them when they’re ill or making mishloach manot for Purim, I feel very comfortable silently conveying how much I care about another person through food.  I am less comfortable with other ways to show care; sometimes they don’t even occur to me until I’m on the receiving end of one of these actions.  And then I understand that is their way of saying they care about me.  But I tend to answer back in my own language.

And just as it is nice that we have so many different languages in the world, I think it’s a good thing that we don’t all show care in the exact same way.  It means there is almost always someone out there who fills a specific niche for you; who is your go-to person when you need comfort in a certain way.

But I don’t think it’s too much to expect to see something in return.  In the same way that no one wants to carry on a one-sided conversation, I don’t think many people look to carry on a one-sided relationship.  We expect to see some outreach on the other person’s part, even if that outreach differs greatly from our own.  Hence why I said that we still invite people who don’t invite the twins to their party.  If the friendship is there, I don’t see why you wouldn’t invite the child along.

But here’s a question: suppose you extended invitation after invitation to the same person — to see movies, grab a drink, go on a trip.  Every invitation originates with you, and while your friend is enthusiastic to go along with your invitations, she never picks up the phone and calls you.  She never tells you about this great preview she saw and would you like to see the movie when it comes out.  At what point would you start to feel a little confused: does she like you?  Does she sort of endure you?  Why is this relationship lopsided?  Is it possible they really like you but they lack the confidence or social savviness to extend invitations (this describes me sometimes)?  Would you let this friendship go on indefinitely in this manner?  Would you give it a handful of invites before you started turning your attention to someone who seemed a little more eager to have your company?

In the currency of kids, the party is king.  As adults, we have a thousand ways of telling the people around us that they are important to us.  But a party — for a kid — is an important tool for conveying to their friends that they enjoy being with them.  Yes, they can ask them to play at recess, they can ask them on a play date if that fits into their parent’s schedule, they can share their Halloween candy.  There are other options, but the birthday party one is easy.  And at a certain age, they know the weight of a party.  To have or not have a party was a pretty easy internal question when they were five.  To have or not have a party is a trickier question at nine.  Obviously, the end answer will be different for each person, so it isn’t as if there is one “correct” answer.

But I do think that one of my jobs as their parent is to be their friend coach.  To help them understand how to navigate the social world.  How to be a good friend, a good community member, a good decision maker when it comes to spending social capital.  This helping-someone-else-grow-up thing is hard.  Keeping a kid alive: pretty easy.  You feed them, water them, give them a little fresh air, and all is usually fine.  Turning a kid into a good person: much harder.  It means a lot of tears, a lot of letting your child fail so you can help them do it better next time, a lot of talking out situations and role-playing and listening.  So if I maybe think too closely about parties and the like, it’s because I feel that is part of my job.  At least, the way I see my job, which may have very different tasks from another parent’s job.  Just as there is more than one way to be social, there is more than one way to parent.

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I didn’t have an easy time socially as a kid.  My parents had a lot of work to do as my friend coaches.  I spent a lot of time in tears, a lot of time feeling left-out, a lot of time working really hard and not seeing the pay-off.  They were great coaches, but I had shitty luck as a social player in elementary school.

When Josh met me, I was teaching middle school, and he couldn’t understand how I could stomach it.  How I could chew my sandwich and listen to child after child after child dump their middle school woes on my desk.  He didn’t even like to visit me there because it reminded him of how much he hated that time in life, but honestly, as much as my middle school years sucked, being around middle schoolers never phased me.  I was like a surgeon who could look at someone’s festering insides and then consume a steak dinner.  Their problems usually didn’t get under my skin.

Fast forward to my own children going through elementary school, and I seem to have lost all my coping mechanisms.  I mean, yes, I can still work with middle schoolers and feel unphased.  But when it’s my child coming home from school with that lip trembling, and they ask if they can talk to me alone… my heart stops.  I think back to all the times I pretended to be sick at school so my mother would pick me up and let me fall apart in the car.  Growing up is hard.  Navigating friendships when you’re a kid is hard.  And then, if you’re lucky, you get to go through it all over again with your kids.

Yes, it’s their problems and their social skills to learn, but I feel those growing pains too.  That why-aren’t-they-my-friend pain and that how-can-I-be-a-good-friend confusion and the how-do-I-make-someone-a-friend learning curve.  I’ve been there, done that.

When they were little, when they discovered that they weren’t invited to a birthday party, the only angle they considered was that they were missing out on fun.  They were missing out on Chuck E Cheese games or pony rides or jumping inside an inflated piece of plastic.  But somewhere around six, the twins started realizing what not being invited to a birthday party meant: you didn’t make the cut, friendwise.  And sometimes they totally get why they weren’t invited, but sometimes they wonder what the lack of invitation means; have they misjudged how close they are to the other person?  Is their friendship real, or did they misunderstand what playing together meant?

They are figuring themselves out, figuring the social thing out, and I can see them internally debating on a daily basis how much they want to keep up with the Joneses.  Or really, how much they want to speak the same caring language as everyone else and when they’ll be ready to develop their own caring language.  Right now, that party is an easy way to tell another group of kids in no uncertain terms that they really enjoy hanging out with them.  They’ll say that in other ways such as talking with their friend on the baseball bench or letting the other kid pick the game at recess.  But with one big act, they can reciprocate all the good feelings of inclusion they’ve gotten to feel this year from other people.

In the future, they’ll figure out other ways to say that.  And they’ll learn that it’s better to say that to a committed, small group of people vs. trying to say that to a lot of people who don’t really care all at the same time.  And hopefully, by that point, I will have done my work well and I’ll be sending good friend material into this world.  The world needs more good friend people.

How much do you care about reciprocation?