Just in Time For Middle School, a Trio of Teas for Parents and Kids
Middle School isn’t for the faint of heart, for both students and parents. For the kids, hormones debut and chaos often ensues. And for moms and dads, that hormone invasion can lead to heated wranglings with the family members who just yesterday, it seemed, ranked Halloween costumes, summer popsicles and birthday party sleepovers as the highest forms of awesomeness.
Fear not, families. Constant change occurs across our lives. Middle School just happens to serve as an especially vivid manifestation of sudden human biological and social shifts. Navigating the volatile bridge between elementary school innocence and high school quasi-adulthood challenges everybody involved. But most of the time, kids and parents disembark from the journey relatively unscathed.
In addition to the anatomical tumult that coincides with middle school, so does a more pointed emphasis on the stuff of history, language, science and math. Middle school in many ways serves as high school prep, which itself represents so many rungs toward a new world of universities and post-graduation professional pursuits.
In other words, the pressure is on the moment kids open close their first locker and sit down in their middle school home rooms. Crafting hand turkeys for Thanksgiving never taxed kids like the introduction of algebra into their lives.
Middle School Assistants
Sound sleeps help. So do sweets—they may be big-deal 13-year-olds (“Hey, I’m a teenager now and I know everything!”) but their connection to chocolate chip cookies and bubble gum remains as potent as it was at 9.
Another parent and child middle school helpmate? Tea, of course. The botanicals in different teas can spark calm. They can stimulate brain activity. They can help sippers drift into sleep, and give them measured energy to power through a long day.
During this back-to-school month, we offer a range of teas to assist both parents and students as they both voyage through middle school’s sometimes choppy seas.
Back to School Teas for Kids: Sweet Mint Herbal
We already covered how the sweet stuff still holds sway over middle schoolers, and so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we recommend a tea with sweet in its name. But here’s the catch: Our Sweet Mint Herbal tea doesn’t contain sweeteners of any kind! The blend’s tidy ingredient list: peppermint, spearmint, licorice root.
The beauty of mint is it conveys sweetness without doling out sugar, honey, agave syrup, maple syrup or any of the traditional ingredients used to punch up the taste buds with that mouthfeel familiar to candy lovers worldwide. But mint’s advantages extend beyond its ability to stand in for sweeteners: cultures around the world leverage mint for the sake of serenity. The mint plants from the capacious genus Lamiaceae, which contains many culinary herbs including sage, lavender, basil, rosemary and thyme, famously help people calm down. And tranquility, we wager, is precisely what both kids and parents will desire after a grueling day of classroom intensity. Mint also helps with upset stomachs, a condition not exactly unfamiliar to kids finding their way through middle school.
Back to School Teas for Parents: Organic Chrysanthemum Green Tea
Parents, this one is for you for morning and afternoon sipping. Our Organic Chrysanthemum Green Tea combines excellent Japanese sencha with chrysanthemum, rose petals and peppermint, a blend that offers elements of intellectual energy, calming and overall health support.
Sencha, the most commonly consumed tea in Japan, brings grassy and herbal notes to the tea, as well as moderate boosts of caffeine. As discussed above, peppermint welcomes peacefulness and serenity into busy brains. Rose petals jolt the tea with pleasing perfume and more calming qualities. And then there’s chrysanthemum, a widely celebrated herb among practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
People turn to chrysanthemum for its cooling and calming properties. They leverage it to mitigate fevers, and bolster immune systems. They use it to alleviate respiratory symptoms. The flowering herb is powerful, and most welcome in this superb blend.
Back to School Teas for Parents: Organic Tired Bone Blend
Sipping tea for serenity is one thing — and a good thing indeed! But then there’s tea for a different kind of unwinding, one that simultaneously benefits from creative mental engagement and the cosseting of achy, weary joints. Enter, Organic Tired Bone Blend.
This bespoke combination of botanicals leans into ginkgo, that last surviving species in the order Ginkgoales. The order stretches back 290 million years ago, and once upon a time it contained numerous plants. Today, all that is left is Ginkgo biloba, a tree native to China but now widely dispersed across Earth.
People take ginkgo to improve their circulatory systems, a vital body process that, among other things, provides brains the sparks they need to creatively wrestle with intellectual activities. As such, many people consume ginkgo to aid memory and other brain functions. Rosehips, too, help boost circulation. Meanwhile, this blend’s balance of nettle leaf settles into the joints and ratchets down the inflammation that causes those hips, knees, ankles and elbows to throb. The combination, we think, is perfect for middle school parents!
