Belle Johnson wears two hats: Chief Marketing Officer at Vanessa Megan Skincare, and mother to two beautiful children, including an eleven-year-old daughter who is very much keeping her on her toes. This article is written for that second role.

It started with a pair of jeans.

We were in the car talking about clothes, just the two of us, one of those rare pockets of time that feel ordinary until suddenly they aren't, when my eleven-year-old daughter looked out the window and said, almost to herself, "It's kind of hard being this age, Mum."

I turned down the song we'd been listening to.

She went on to explain, with a clarity that genuinely surprised me, that she felt caught. Too old to be treated like a little kid, she didn't want that anymore, and fair enough. But not old enough to just do what she wanted, go where she wanted, wear what she wanted, be who she was still figuring out she wanted to be. She was somewhere in the middle, she said. And the middle, apparently, was complicated.

I didn't say much in that moment. I just listened. But I've been thinking about it ever since.

We talk a lot, as a culture, about the teenage years. About the turbulence of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. About identity and rebellion and heartbreak and all the dramatic, cinematic moments that come with high school. We have books about it, therapists who specialise in it, entire film genres dedicated to it. We see it coming and we brace ourselves.

But somewhere between the innocence of childhood and the full storm of the teenage years, there exists a stretch of time that doesn't get nearly enough airtime. The tween years. Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. The in-between. And from where I'm standing right now, raising a daughter who is smack in the middle of it, I want to say clearly: we are not talking about this enough.

Because these years? They are hard.

There's a particular kind of emotional complexity to being a tween that I don't think adults fully appreciate, partly because we've romanticised childhood into something smoother and more golden than it actually was. We forget. We remember riding bikes and summer holidays and not yet caring what people thought. What we tend to forget is the sharp, specific confusion of being eleven, of wanting, desperately, to be taken seriously while still needing, just as desperately, to be held.

At ten, eleven, twelve, children are beginning to reach for independence. They want to make choices, about their clothes, their friendships, their hobbies, how they spend their Saturday afternoons. That reaching is healthy and right and important. It is the first tender scaffolding of the person they are becoming. But it exists in parallel with something else entirely: a very real, very present need to feel close to their parents. To feel guided. To feel safe.

This is not a contradiction. It just looks like one from the outside.

What I've come to understand about my daughter, and what I suspect is true of most children this age, is that she doesn't want me to let go. She wants me to loosen my grip just enough that she can feel the space, while still knowing my hand is there. She is asking me to trust her while still asking for my help. She is seeking my advice while needing to feel like the decision is ultimately hers. It is a delicate, nuanced, exhausting, beautiful dance. And I don't think we give parents, or kids, nearly enough credit for navigating it.

Add to all of this the sheer physicality of what is happening in their bodies, and the picture becomes even more complicated.

The tween years are, biologically, a period of extraordinary transformation. Hormones are shifting in ways that affect mood, skin, body, and brain. For many children this age, these changes arrive before they feel emotionally ready for them, and often before anyone has adequately prepared them.

I remember the morning my daughter called me into the bathroom, her face a mixture of embarrassment and something close to alarm, to show me her first pimple. It was small. To her, it felt enormous. She was confused, a little mortified, and deeply unsure what to do about it. This was her body, and suddenly it was doing things she hadn't asked it to do and didn't yet know how to manage.

Body odour. Oily skin. The dawning awareness of how she smells after sport, of how her skin looks in a certain light. These are not dramatic concerns in the abstract, but in the specific, to a child who is already hypersensitive to how she is perceived, who is already navigating the relentless social complexity of her peer group, they feel enormous. They can quietly erode confidence at exactly the age when confidence is most fragile and most needed.

And yet we don't always talk about them easily. There's still awkwardness, on both sides. Parents aren't always sure how to raise it without making their child feel self-conscious. Children aren't always sure how to ask without feeling embarrassed. And so sometimes the conversation doesn't happen, or it happens too late, or it happens in a way that leaves a child feeling more scrutinised than supported.

What strikes me most, as I move through this season of parenting, is how much the tween years demand of us as parents in terms of restraint. Active, intentional restraint.
Everything in me wants to fix things for my daughter. To smooth the path. To hand her the answer. To tell her, plainly, what to do and watch her do it. That's the parenting I'm familiar with, the parenting of small children, where your job is largely to keep them safe and teach them the rules of the world. But that approach, applied to an eleven-year-old, is a fast track to a slammed door and a child who stops coming to you with the things that matter.

What these years actually require is something subtler. Guiding without directing. Being present without hovering. Offering information and frameworks and values without insisting on the outcome. Letting your child feel like they are making the choice, because in the ways that count, they are, while ensuring that the environment around that choice is one you've carefully, quietly shaped.

It requires that we trust them a little more than feels comfortable, and that we trust ourselves enough to know we've already given them more than we realise. It requires that we stay curious about who they are becoming instead of trying to author that story ourselves.

It is, genuinely, one of the harder things I've ever had to do. And I don't think any of us say that out loud nearly often enough.

This is why, alongside our founder Vanessa, I helped bring Foodie to life.

Vanessa and I came to this from the same place. Both of us are mothers of eleven-year-old daughters, both of us were watching our girls navigate those first tentative steps toward having their own routines, their own rituals, their own small acts of self-care. And both of us noticing the same gap: the products available to them were designed for grown women. Nothing was created for them. Nothing spoke to a tween, at her age, in her language, about her actual needs.

So we built something that did. And we had the very personal motivation that only comes from being in the thick of it yourself.

Everything in the Foodie range was formulated with this age group in mind, which means no harsh actives, no potentially harmful ingredients, nothing that markets itself with the language of anti-ageing or clinical correction. Just clean, age-appropriate formulations that address what tweens actually experience: skin that's starting to change, bodies that are doing new things, a growing awareness of how to care for themselves. Ingredients that are gentle enough to feel good and real enough to actually work.

But Foodie was also designed with parents in mind. Because I know, from my own experience and from the conversations I've had with so many other mothers and fathers in the same season of parenting, that the products our children use matter to us. We want to be able to say yes when they ask. We want to guide them toward choices that are safe and appropriate without making them feel policed. We want to gently steer without taking the wheel.

Because here is what I believe, with everything I have: the way we parent our tweens, the trust we extend, the space we create, the guidance we offer without smothering, has a long reach. The relationship we build in these in-between years becomes the foundation for everything that comes after. If our children learn, now, that they can come to us with the confusing, embarrassing, uncertain stuff, and that we will respond with warmth and information instead of anxiety and judgment, then we keep the door open. We stay in the story of who they are becoming.

And if we can make some of that easier, if we can build products and conversations and rituals that support them to feel confident about beginning to make their own choices, then we are doing something that matters far beyond skincare.

That afternoon in the car, my daughter finished talking and turned to look at me, waiting to see what I'd say. I told her she was right. That it was hard. That being in the middle was genuinely difficult and that I was proud of how thoughtfully she was navigating it.

She nodded, satisfied, and went back to looking out the window.

It wasn't a big moment. But it was exactly the right one. And I'm holding onto it for everything it's worth.

Foodie is a tween skincare and body care brand created with age-appropriate, parent-approved formulations, because supporting our kids to feel confident in their own choices starts earlier than we think.