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The Power of Bonding
It's Not Just for Babies Anymore
By Kelly Burgess
Everyone's heard the benefits – and the debates – about bonding with babies. 
Once you build that bond, most parents strive to keep that parent-child bond strong. During the elementary school years, that's pretty easy; kids are getting more autonomous, more articulate, and their parents are still the center of their worlds.
It becomes more difficult, but no less important, when that happy, candid elementary school child begins to become surly, secretive and solitary – in other words, when they hit the middle school or preteen years. However, if a parent has the right tools, both child and parent will survive these years with that important bond intact, and it will carry over through the teen years and into a happy, close adulthood.
Part of the reason parents never hear about bonding with their preteens is because the positive aspects of this time of life are rarely noted. Instead, parents hear horror stories about how mouthy their child will become, how sullen and disrespectful and how they will only want to be around friends, not parents. While this is partly true, the fact is that this age can be a lot of fun.
Margaret Sagarese is the co-author of The Roller Coaster Years: Raising Your Child Through the Maddening Yet Magical Middle-School Years (Broadway, 1997). She wrote the book, along with co-author Charlene C. Giannetti, after realizing that as their children approached adolescence, there were no positive resources to guide them through this sometimes frustrating phase. What was out there was either too negative or too authoritarian. Sagarese realized instinctively that neither of these approaches would work for her or for most people.