What to expect when you're raising a seven-year-old.
Just when you thought you got age six under your belt—your child is turning seven! What can a caregiver expect from a child this age? Is there anything important to keep in mind as a child is making their way from age seven to age eight? In this episode, Dr. Nanika Coor offers a window into the mind and behavior of a newly minted seven-year-old.
Project Parenthood is hosted by Dr. Nanika Coor. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Hey parents! You're listening to the Project Parenthood podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Nanika Coor, clinical psychologist and respectful parenting therapist. Each week, I’ll introduce you to the same respectful parenting practices that I use to help parents repair and deepen connections with their children. You’ll get tips for cultivating more parental self-compassion, more cooperation from your kids, and more joy, peace, and resilience in your relationship with them.
In today’s episode, I’m talking about what to expect as you’re raising a seven-year-old! Stick around till the end to hear about how to capitalize on a seven-year-old’s growing sense of relational awareness to help them manage feelings of perfectionism.
While your child clearly has their own personality and is growing up in their particular environment and context, according to child development experts Louise Bates Ames and Frances Ilg, authors of Your Seven-Year-Old: Life in a Minor Key, each age is a period of generally typical social, emotional, cognitive, physical, and behavioral development. Every age has its own characteristic way of showing up in the world, and once you have an idea of what you might expect, it’s easier not to freak out when your child isn’t behaving as ideally as you hoped they would.
This period of development is like a settling and calming moment in many respects. You might notice that your seven-year-old is more agreeable and easygoing than they’ve been previously. They’re better able to control their bodies, their emotions, and their behavior in mixed company or during family outings than they were when they were younger. Being more reflective and observant at this age, you may see that they show a new appreciation of and concern about their relationships with their friends, teachers, and favorite extended family members. This quieter period might also look like a withdrawal into their own activities and away from their parents. With a new sense of self-reflection and awareness of relationships might come some anxiety about being liked by peers, teachers, and family members, as well as perfectionism, sulking, and melancholy.
Your seven-year-old is developing new physical, mental, and social skills rapidly at this point, and showing more and more independence in everyday routines. Given opportunities to help with age-appropriate household tasks like setting the table, they’re able to develop a good sense of responsibility. While still working on table manners, a seven-year-old is getting much better at handling utensils and using napkins, even if they do so inconsistently. A growing interest in others, the world, and everyone’s place in it means they’re also more capable of staying longer at the table and may even participate in the mealtime conversation!
They’re able to describe their experiences, feelings, and thoughts with more complex language and ideas. Less loud, active, aggressive, and explosive than they were at age six, your seven-year-old is less physically all over the place and they can focus for a longer period of time. And speaking of time—your child is getting a better handle on the passage of time. They’re understanding units of time more clearly: minutes in an hour or number of days until vacation make more sense to them now.
Your child is becoming more aware of who they are and who they are not, and what their strengths and weaknesses are—particularly in comparison to other people. This is a time of trying to get better at things, achieve things, and be good at things. A seven-year-old loves improving themselves and building and discovering new things. They thrive with lots of opportunities for independent decision-making, and they love to be challenged. They’re likely to show courage and be willing to do slightly scary things. Seven-year-olds are really ready to figure out what’s distinctive or special about them—what makes them stand out?
Being self-reflective, they enjoy time alone and having private space for their own personal possessions—which they are starting to care about and care for. In fact, seven-year-olds may have a propensity for wanting to possess or collect interesting things, so you might want to have a periodical emptying of coat pockets and backpacks to unload all of the things they may have accumulated! During their independent time, they may be more likely than in months past to read on their own, and may be particularly fond of riddles, comic strips, and books with magic, superpowers, and fantasy.
Your seven-year-old is beginning to integrate all of the information they’ve been taking in for the first years of their life. The world is beginning to make more sense—new realizations along with the new questions that come with them are happening all the time. Your child is actively trying to soak up knowledge, learn, and understand new things. It may seem that they’re asking you an endless stream of what can be sometimes trivial but often pretty existential questions about how life, the world, and people work.
They can be so lost in their own mind that they tune out everything else. Your child may tend to stall, procrastinate, be more forgetful, absentminded, or distractible than usual—easily sidetracked by objects in their room or by their own thoughts. So make sure you really have their attention or you might find yourself having to say everything repeatedly!
At this age, it’s hard to get started on a task without personal attention or approval shown by a favored adult, so it helps to give advance warning and specific instructions—and be prepared to do a little “herding” and reminder-giving to keep them on track. They have difficulty doing more than one thing at once and can sometimes suddenly express that they’re extremely tired. And while your seven-year-old may be able to dress and bathe independently, they still like to and need to have a parent around for these activities for help, checks for efficiency, reminders, and company. Plus—your seven-year-old might become so absorbed in a pleasurable activity (like asking questions!) that they may have difficulty stopping once they begin. Although sevens are increasingly mature, they’re still little kids in need of parental help much of the time.
Not only will a seven-year-old keep at something for longer than is necessary or indicated due to their drive to finish things but also out of a desire to finish them correctly. So they’re often closely monitoring themselves and become keenly aware of any mistake they might make. Getting things right, succeeding, and gaining adult approval are particularly pleasurable for a child of this age. So much so that they can be self-critical or may take on more than they can handle and may need some help giving themselves a break. This is a developmental period that has a lot to do with a child living up to their own standards. Sevens are sensitive, easily frustrated, easily disappointed, and hard on themselves. They may dislike being corrected and immediately supply an excuse like “I was just going to say/do that.”
Some research suggests that parents that consistently display controlling or negative verbal and nonverbal reactions to their children when the child makes a mistake may contribute to the development of later anxiety disorders in the child because an internal threat response develops in response to parental reactions. In the future, when the child perceives that they’ve made a mistake, whether or not parents are present, an internal threat response (fight/flight) may still occur. Reacting with calm neutrality in the face of your child’s mistakes and errors helps reduce the potential for your child developing anxiety around making mistakes, and helps them be easier on themselves as well.
Along with your seven-year-old’s new awareness of themselves in relation to peers, teachers, and family members can come more awareness of feelings of guilt and shame, and suspicions that others are being mean or unfair to them or are mistreating them. Your seven-year-old may have a particular fondness for their teacher or other trusted adult and very much want positive attention and approval from them. Other people’s opinions are becoming more salient to them, and they’re suddenly more concerned about things being fair or making sure they’re getting an equal share of something. They may start to become concerned with their place in the family or in their social group.
With playmates, your seven-year-old might be more likely to leave a conflict in a huff than stay and argue about it. At this age they’re starting to be aware of their friends’ attitudes and reactions and reflecting upon whether or not they’ll categorize others as good or bad.
There might be a bit more interest in playing structured games led by a coach during this period. And although group play has become more cooperative now that they can give and take directions from one another about how games should be played, they can still devolve into chaos since seven-year-olds tend toward what Ames and Ilg refer to as “reckless physical expenditures.” This over-excitability can make for sudden interpersonal altercations and entanglements, so having an adult nearby who can step in and help when necessary is a good idea.
Some seven-year-olds’ burgeoning interpersonal awareness may include fascination with the horrible ways humans can impact each other and you may see a preoccupation with violence, gore, killing, and death—what’s involved in those things, how those things happen, why they happen, or if they’re going to happen to them or someone they love or even at the hands of someone they love.
Again, it’s important that your child doesn’t get the impression that you’re frightened, shocked, or angry about their fears and worries—that’s simply another thing for them to worry over (and/or hide from you)! Remind yourself that this behavior is most likely a passing phase that will straighten itself out in time if you let it run its course without making much of a big deal about it.
Reassure them that sometimes kids have thoughts like that, and it’s fine to speak openly about them with you. But also—reassure them that the violence, death, killing, poisoning and the like that might be going through their mind are extremely rare occurrences that are often exaggerated and casually glorified in the media they consume and that you’ll keep them safe.
If you can only remember one thing about parenting often-complaining and relationally worried seven-year-olds it’s this: don’t take it personally. Show acceptance for their perceptions of their worries and complaints the way they seem to your child instead of trying to get them to see things differently.
Pay less attention to the worries and complaints themselves and more attention to the kiddo doing the complaining. Recognize that your child isn’t presenting you with a problem that you need to fix, but that they’re asking you for help making sense of the emotions swirling around inside of them. Offer more empathy, more reassurance, and more plain-old listening to them vent. Once they’ve been completely heard, you might actually have better luck with offering them alternative and potentially more positive ways of looking at a situation.
A seven-year-old’s thinking is moving from a more concrete and “magical” state to one that’s slightly more abstract. Things like morals, fairness, and truth are becoming more important to kids of this age and they may be particularly good at pointing out others’ shortcomings in these areas—even while having lots of excuses and explanations when they fall short of similar ethical codes and standards. But this means you may actually have a better chance of gaining cooperation from your seven-year-old by explaining how a situation seems to you or to other people, as they’re beginning to be able to see others’ points of view and are better able to accept differences of opinion.
State your expectations clearly, and in advance—and expect to have to give at least one reminder! A seven’s resistance to requests and limits is often about wanting to know the “why” behind it, so also be willing to explain your reasoning.
As we’ve seen, seven is a stage where your child’s personal achievements and how well they’re doing at things becomes increasingly important to them, and they can set high standards for themselves and lean towards perfectionism in a way that may leave them always feeling like they’ve fallen short.
Your child’s new social awareness and focus on the opinions of others means that a close relationship with your child also becomes an opportunity to help your child appreciate their efforts and how hard they worked at something rather than focus solely on the outcome of those efforts.
Try talking aloud about the ways that you’ve had to practice particular skills to get better at them over time. And when you make a mistake—show them what it looks like to have self-compassion. Instead of saying self-critical things about yourself in front of your child, model being gentle with yourself. “Oh darn! Well—I guess I’m going to break a glass sometimes when I’m rushing around trying to meet everyone’s needs including my own—life can be so busy! Let me get this cleaned up.” “You know what—I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have spoken to you that way. I guess I’m pretty snappy when I’m sleep deprived and hungry—no one can do their best when they’re running on empty! Let’s take a break and have a snack, shall we?”
Test it out and report back!
If you haven’t already, age seven is a great time to establish a harmonious and responsive relationship with your kiddo. Bolster your relationship with your child and get to know them on a deeper level by taking advantage of your seven-year-old’s interest in relationships and eagerness to learn: ask them open-ended, thought-provoking questions like what they think is fair, right, or wrong in different personal or worldly situations.
Being seven is just another pitstop on the long journey to your child becoming who they will ultimately be. That involves not only learning who they are and what they feel, but also learning who the people important to them are and how to most efficiently interact with them. Though you may see a good deal of moodiness, perfectionism, social worries, and complaints in your typically developing seven-year-old, there’s really nothing that needs changing—only feelings that need to be accepted by a patient, confident, and empathetic caregiver.
Ames, L. B., & Haber, C. C. (2012). Your seven-year-old: Life in a minor key. Dell.