It is too late: the life of all his blood / Is touch’d corruptibly and his pure brain, / Which some suppose the soul’s frail dwelling-house, / Doth by the idle comments that it makes / Foretell the ending of mortality.

There were sneers, and scoffs, and inuendoes of some; prophecies of failure in a hundred ways; forecastings of non-completion, forecastings of swift dissolution and crashing ruin […]

By which account, a Diamond steeped in Goat's bloud, rather increaseth in hardness, then acquireth any softness by the infusion; for the best we have are comminuible without it; and are so far from breaking hammers, that they submit unto pistillation, and resist not an ordinary pestle.

Your eight to twelve year old is in the gray area between early childhood and the teen years. He is a child in the middle—a “tweenager.”