The middle school years can be so tricky. For a mom or dad, there are shifting boundaries

in bedtime. There's the importance of friends. There's the phone. There's so much that you have to deal with and there's not a clearly defined set of rights and wrongs.

I'm John Fuller joined by Dr. Danny Werta who heads up our focus on the family parenting team and I don't know about you Danny but we had some challenges and I think it was a lot of my wife and me getting on the same page.

Dean and I had somewhat different approaches

to the middle school years.

And so we had a lot to process there.

Oh, that's great, John.

That's one I didn't think about, that there are differences between parents and that's still true. Heather and I had those moments and I, as I was thinking about this episode, I was thinking about when my daughter came back with so much more drama with her friends and just the emotional ups and downs that I sorry the unexpected emotional ups and down.

So, hyperness and then all of a sudden,

sad and oh my goodness, I'm never gonna have friends,

all my friend, no one likes me.

And all of a sudden she's got all these kinds of friends all over the place.

And then I also noticed during those years my son, having certain difficulties in understanding

girls and what they're about he goes man they're so confusing

dad because I'm still thinking yeah I was gone my son welcome to the club you know

sign up right and we did talk more about chores and then opinions they had. It opened up the

door for more questions for me to explore where they're coming from, their opinions, and who they are.

But as you were saying at the beginning,

this is a time where you're going to see a lot more independence

starting to pop up, and also fear, socially,

fears of growing up. There's so many things that are kind of mixed emotions there and

what a great opportunity for us to laugh now but it can be frustrating for parents it can be

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