And Then They Stopped Talking to Me: Making Sense of Middle School
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And Then They Stopped Talking to Me: Making Sense of Middle School
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Overview
“As the parent of a middle schooler, I felt as if Judith Warner had peered into my life—and the lives of many of my patients. This is a gift to our kids and their future selves.”—Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
The French have a name for the uniquely hellish years between elementary school and high school: l’âge ingrat, or “the ugly age.” Characterized by a perfect storm of developmental changes—physical, psychological, and social—the middle school years are a time of great distress for children and parents alike, marked by hurt, isolation, exclusion, competition, anxiety, and often outright cruelty. Some of this is inevitable; there are intrinsic challenges to early adolescence. But these years are harder than they need to be, and Judith Warner believes that adults are complicit.
With deep insight and compassion, Warner walks us through a new understanding of the role that middle school plays in all our lives. She argues that today’s helicopter parents are overly concerned with status and achievement—in some ways a residual effect of their own middle school experiences—and that this worsens the self-consciousness, self-absorption, and social “sorting” so typical of early adolescence.
Tracing a century of research on middle childhood and bringing together the voices of social scientists, psychologists, educators, and parents, Warner’s book shows how adults can be moral role models for children, making them more empathetic, caring, and resilient. She encourages us to start treating middle schoolers as the complex people they are, holding them to high standards of kindness, and helping them see one another as more than “jocks and mean girls, nerds and sluts.”
Part cultural critique and part call to action, this essential book unpacks one of life’s most formative periods and shows how we can help our children not only survive it but thrive.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781101905890 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Crown Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/09/2021 |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 448,571 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
We’ve all been there.
It might have happened last week.
Picking up your son outside his middle school, you watched as he stood on the sidewalk while his classmates swirled around him, leaving for sleepovers, birthday celebrations, or impromptu parties that came together right under his nose. His frozen smile as he stood there, hanging in until the last minute in the hope that an invitation might come his way, made you crumble inside. As did the knowledge that, other than try to offer up an alternative weekend plan for family fun—which he would undoubtedly dismiss as “just sad”—there was nothing you could do to help.
It might have happened last year.
You bought your daughter a too-expensive white Abercrombie dress for her eighth-grade graduation because, she said, “everybody” was wearing one, and you knew how badly she wanted to fit in. But, on the morning of the ceremony, when she went to join her classmates, you realized that “everybody” was, in fact, only the clique of rich, popular girls who had dropped her two years earlier. They were all lined up, posing as their parents snapped pictures. When they saw your daughter walking toward them, they burst into laughter. And their parents—who, not so long ago, had been your friends—laughed, too.
Or it might have happened a long time ago.
You walked into your seventh-grade homeroom on the first day of school a couple of minutes late and saw that everyone was pushing desks together into friend-group clusters. Your best friend was waiting for you, but now the two of you made just a lonely little desk dyad, and all your other friends seemed, very happily, to have moved on. As the teacher took attendance, you wondered: Had some new friendship map been drawn up over the summer? Would there ever be an opportunity to reconfigure the geometry? You didn’t look at your friend, and she didn’t look at you, but as you both sat there uncomfortably, you knew that she was wondering the very same thing.
Middle school is brutal. Ask just about anyone, and they’ll very likely tell you it was the worst time of their life—if they’ll tell you anything at all. If they don’t, as is so common, simply let out a cry of “Raging hormones!” and cut off the conversation.
The awfulness of the middle school years—ages 11 to 14 for kids these days, 12 to 14 or 15 for adults, if they’re old enough to have attended what in previous generations was seventh-to-ninth-grade junior high—is a given in our country. Suffering through is almost a rite of passage—a modern American initiation ritual marking the transition from a life mostly lived in the warm bubble of home to one that’s spent in the colder, sometimes cruel, and always competitive company of peers. Scratch the surface with most people and you’ll get a well-remembered anecdote, its details fresh and its telling almost automatic, the way stories told over and over again in the mind often are, particularly when they contain a form of trauma. Which, for a great many people, middle school truly is.
For a long time, I thought that there was no greater pain possible than the agonies I’d experienced in seventh and eighth grade. The whispers and giggles. The anonymous “slam books,” in which everyone wrote what they really thought about you. Having my oh-so-private journal read out loud before French class. Having my every self-conscious habit—licking the front of my braces, chewing my lower lip, biting my nails, pulling in my stomach each time I passed a mirror—mocked and imitated. Being “dumped” by my first “boyfriend.” Coming in one morning in eighth grade to find that, with no warning and for no apparent reason, none of my friends would talk to me, look at me, or even tolerate being in the same room with me—and no one would tell me why.
I can still remember how it felt: The ground disappearing beneath my feet. Not a single friendly face. Not a word of recognition, much less reassurance. It was like one of those bad dreams where you’re shouting and shouting, and no sound comes out of your mouth. I felt utterly abandoned and completely powerless. I was in a black hole of pain, and it seemed like there was no outside to it.
I was fortunate in that—unusually for that time—our concerned homeroom teacher soon stepped in and brokered a conversation to try to clear the air. He put me at one end of his classroom.
At the other end sat my longtime nemesis, Marci, flanked on either side by Anna and Jill, whom I had, apparently, deeply offended.
Anna, my until-that-week very good friend, was so angry, so utterly disgusted with the mere fact of my existence, that she couldn’t even lift her head off the desk where it rested between her crossed arms to look at me. Jill sat sort of blank-faced, while Marci graciously leaned forward to speak for them. Her hands were clasped daintily before her as she spoke, soft-voiced and with a sweet expression, just one bright red spot on each cheek betraying the high emotion she was otherwise masterfully keeping in check.
It was a command performance—far more subtle and sophisticated than anything I had ever seen from her before in the nine years we’d spent in the same school. On our first Girl Scout camping weekend, for example, her cheeks had flushed completely and floridly scarlet red when I’d walked into our cabin, just before dinner, and she’d led everyone else in stomping out. It had been my very first ground-disappearing-beneath-my-feet moment. It had also been my first time away from home. Marci had been my bus seatmate and had watched me try to hold back my tears as we’d pulled away from the curb and I’d waved goodbye to my mom. She was 9 or 10 months older than me—which was a lot at the time—and was a lot more sophisticated, if “sophisticated” is a word you can apply to a 9-year-old.
I never found out what I did wrong that weekend. But now, in that eighth-grade classroom, my crimes were elaborated: (1) I thought I was better than everyone else. (2) I didn’t say hello in the hallways. (3) I looked through people when they said hello to me, like they weren’t even there.
This was news to me. I thought: (1) I didn’t think I was better than anyone else—I hated myself! (2) I wasn’t aware of not saying hello in the hallways. (3) If I looked straight through people, it wasn’t because I meant to snub them; it was just—how to explain this?—that I didn’t see them. I was smart enough not to make that latter point out loud. I just apologized. I promised to try to do better. And I did, after that, try my hardest to remove my head from my ass long enough to acknowledge the existence of other people—a struggle that continues to this day.
In the end, thanks to our teacher’s intervention, my time in the wilderness lasted for only about a week. But my very acute recollection of how that week felt lasted for decades. For many years afterward, the episode showed up in my dreams. The actors would be different—I didn’t think about my middle school classmates anymore—but the experience, and above all the feeling, was precisely the same. All through my 20s, and even into my 30s and early 40s, I felt compelled to regularly ask my close friends if they were mad at me. The fear that, from one day to the next and for reasons unknown, someone could turn on me, stop talking to me, and start hating me was simply part of who I was.
My daughter never had experiences quite like that in middle school. Neither, thankfully, did she encounter the all-out horrors that some of today’s middle schoolers do: Extended online bullying. Cruel insults. Sexual violence. Death threats. But she did suffer. She was different at a time of life when the secret to social success is fitting in seamlessly. And when she had her own friendship struggles in seventh and eighth grade, in the course of which she ended up going through one very long period of isolation, I learned that watching your child be rejected socially can be a form of misery that’s every bit as bad as being a middle schooler yourself.
I said and did the right things most of the time: encouraged her to talk things out, to make new friends, to seek help from the school counselor, to hang out and have family time on weekends. She dismissed most of those suggestions as “useless.”
She asked me to intervene and try to work things out with the other moms. I told her that parents didn’t do that in middle school. But the truth was that I had tried. When the trouble had started between her and another girl in her small friend group, I had approached the girl’s mom, Julie, whom I considered a friend, to ask if perhaps the four of us—the two women and our two daughters—could go out to lunch. I thought maybe she and I could team up, put our heads together and come up with a way to say to the girls:
Get it together. You have eighteen months left in each other’s presence. You can make them miserable, or you can make them decent. We vote for decent.
Here’s how to proceed: You will be nice. You will be pleasant. You will be polite and considerate. You will co-exist—which, since you’re part of the same group, means you will have to share friends. I had a model in mind for this. A few years earlier, one of my closest friends, Anne, had convened such a lunch when my daughter and her daughter, Isabel, were having some issues in school. Isabel was saying things that were upsetting my daughter. My daughter kept crying and going to the teacher, who was known to play favorites. Isabel kept getting in trouble for saying things that, Anne knew, were far less malicious than clueless. She suggested over lo mein that there might be better ways to communicate and handle conflicts. We made some suggestions. Everyone agreed.
And that was that.
I kind of gulped out the basic idea one morning when Julie and I ran into each other on the street. In my head, it had seemed logical. Out in the air, it seemed awkward, beseeching. It was not well received. Better to let the school handle things, Julie said, with a notable lack of warmth in her eyes. Better not to get involved. Better to let the girls sort things out. “They’re all just trying to figure out who they are,” she said.
I remember thinking that it was undoubtedly a mark of intellectual superiority to have been able to generate—and find meaning in—that particular sentence. But I couldn’t really disagree. After all, I’d listened at Back to School Night. I knew that parents shouldn’t get involved in sorting out their kids’ business, especially in middle school. School business was school business, and over the years I’d actually seen the school step in with other people’s kids, to good effect.
So I tried to do what I was supposed to do. I did my utmost to take a back seat. To promote independent problem solving. To stay in my lane. I tried not to “interview for pain.” Julie and I encouraged the girls to seek out the school counselor, who then emailed Julie and me to “commend” us for our “wisdom” in encouraging our daughters to work out their problems at school, “with adult help, but essentially independently.”
A couple of years before, when my daughter had been in fifth grade, that same counselor had almost cried while telling me about a “friendship group” meeting she had run with the girls in the class. My daughter hadn’t been involved in whatever crise du jour had precipitated the intervention; she, like many of the others, had been required to attend so that the adults could maintain the fiction that what was going on was “everybody’s” problem. In fact, at that point, she’d been somewhat young for her age and needed more time to master, or even pick up on, the social intricacies of high-level girl drama. So she had sat there, uncomfortably, wearing a cherished pair of green rubber rain boots with frog faces on the tips, while her more advanced classmates, already all but interchangeable with their straightened hair and Uggs, had eaten one another alive. The counselor had had tears in her eyes, talking about my daughter’s footwear, because once upon a time, in a different era, in a different place, and with different shoes, she had been that froggy-booted girl, too.
By eighth grade, my daughter and Julie’s daughter were running circles around this counselor, managing to be extremely busy and/or filled with nothing but the most benevolent thoughts toward each other every time she tried to make an appointment to meet with them. I was spending every moment of my driving time listening to Stephen King’s Carrie and fantasizing about pyrokinesis.
Over and over again in yoga, I set an “intention” at the start of my practice to become a positive, joyful, and comforting presence in my daughter’s life. But no amount of Ujjayi breath could shake my Carrie-like vibe. Particularly once, toward the very end of the year, another mom made an offhand and well-meaning comment that truly made me feel like I, too, was back in eighth grade.
She paused alongside me for a moment just outside of school, watching my daughter chat with her friends. My daughter was “in” and “out” all the time at that point, and we happened to be observing an “in” moment.
“You know, the girls would have been just fine,” the woman said, “if only the moms hadn’t gotten involved.”
Involved?
Yes, involved. In every single aspect of the girls’ social interactions and school lives. “The moms weighed in so heavily,” she said, “and instead of giving the girls the space to work things out, they brought it up to a whole new level that almost made it impossible for them to find a way out.”
She actually told me that last bit a few years later, when I was writing this book. At the end of eighth grade, however, the conversation had ended with the word “involved.” And I felt like a fool. “Useless,” indeed. And pretty damn mad.
But I really shouldn’t have been surprised.
The parental-involvement revelation wasn’t the first “I can’t believe this” moment I’d had as the mother of a middle schooler. Over the years, there had been so many things that I’d experienced, witnessed, or been told about that had simply seemed crazy. There was the time I got a lecture on “social codes” from the mother of a popular girl when my daughter bought a party dress, at the height of bar and bat mitzvah season, that had already been “claimed” by her daughter. (The girl herself called me a few minutes later. “Please forget it,” she said. I can still, to this day, hear her tearful voice pleading while her mother made protesting noises in the background. “I didn’t want her to say anything.”) There was the time another mom brought in a professional hip-hop dance coach to teach the girls in the class some choreography for the school talent show, inciting a cabal of stone-faced moms to gather to watch the dance practices and then march to the principal’s office to complain that their daughters were being trained to behave like “sluts.” (The girls were thrilled. The show went on. My un-dance-educated daughter gestured a bit too wildly during the number and sent all her bangles flying off the stage.) And there was the dad who bragged that he’d signed a big check to reserve a “cool” kids’ table for him, his wife, and their friends at a school auction.
The weirdness wasn’t just contained to parents; other adults had their issues, too. There were a couple of academic-subject teachers who had repeatedly been overheard making nasty comments about girls’ “big boobs” or detestable skinniness. There was a gym teacher who often lost it with the eighth graders, making them sit silently on the floor, their backs to the wall, for entire class periods, while he berated them for letting their “drama” leak into the time they were supposed to be devoting to PE. (“All the teachers were constantly telling us how ‘bad’ we were as a class,” my daughter recently told me. “Maybe we were,” she reflected, “but being told that all the time didn’t help.”)
I had no right, really, to dole out judgments about boundaries. I had spent my middle school parenthood years cataloging hurts and snubs that my daughter wasn’t even aware of: how others looked at her; whether or not they held doors for her; whether they sat with her, spoke to her, settled in next to her or scuttled away. My husband had, too. With his far more finely attuned social radar, he was constantly scanning the horizon for evidence of exclusion—and then prodding me to do something about it.
It was hell. We were all in hell. It was no accident that I was driving around listening to the story of an insane 1970s teenager with the power to channel her rage and hurt into murder. We were all going through middle school together, thinking and feeling and behaving like selfish, self-protective, and, above all, un-self-aware 12-and 13-year-olds. It was no wonder that so many of the kids—boys and girls alike—were struggling so greatly, despite all the careful social orchestrations and emotional ministrations of their attentive parents. The inmates were running the asylum. Life really was, as the women around me so often put it, “seventh grade all over again.”
In the midst of all this, I was supposed to be working on a book proposal about modern women in midlife. A kind of Perfect Madness redux. But something else kept making noise in my head. Floundering deep in middle-school-mom misery, I yearned for good explanations for what my daughter was living through, why parents and kids were behaving as they were, and what I could do to make things better. I had no information—nothing useful to read, no relevant advice, and no insights from the parents around me, who by seventh or eighth grade were too locked into face-saving competition and proxy wars to permit any potentially damaging self-disclosures.
What I really wanted were explanations from experts who could answer the specific questions forming in my mind: Why, precisely, were the middle school years so awful? Had they always been this way? Were they this way everywhere? How much was about middle school per se, and how much was about middle school in a high-achieving—and highly competitive—American enclave? What was going on in the heads of the kids I saw parading by at school—the boys with their hair in their eyes, the girls in shoulder-to-shoulder symbiosis? What was going on in the heads of their parents?
Not so many years earlier, when my daughter was in the elementary grades, I would simply have asked around. Or not even—the conversations would have started spontaneously. But in the middle school years, there were fewer opportunities for those kinds of easy exchanges. The kids were more independent, and even on the occasions when parents did come together, the atmosphere was different. There was more distance and, seemingly, more distrust.
Each school year would start with a sense of dread, as the parents girded themselves for what everyone knew would be the very worst time in their children’s lives. Well before the first day, the sighing and anticipatory eye-rolling would begin, along with an uptick in gossip. By the time the semester began, there would be whispers of “drama”—not just among the kids, but among the adults as well.
At those times, I’d email out Anne Lamott’s quote about “hell and the pit.”
The moms in particular loved it. It was “perfect,” they said.
And yet no one—including me—ever talked directly about what we were feeling, or asked if there was any way to try to change the general atmosphere. A lot of the parent relationships by this point had started to fray. There were so many competing agendas, so much polluted water under the bridge. Nobody was even bothering to be fake anymore. Even at school-sponsored grade events, the former talk of “our kids,” “our classroom,” and “our community” had noticeably subsided. It was as though the balance between adult ideals and kid realities had shifted. The window of opportunity for teaching our children the rules of kind and thoughtful co-existence appeared to have slammed shut.
The sense of inevitability was so deep—that sixth, seventh, and eighth graders were destined to be mean; that middle school sucks, sucked, and will always suck—that it was inconceivable that adults might do anything about it. Except, of course, dig the trenches and start arming their kids to do battle, using many of the same weapons they’d used to defend themselves during their own middle school or junior high years decades earlier.
Table of Contents
Author's Note ix
Introduction: Trigger Warning: Middle School May Make You Crazy (Again) xi
Chapter 1 Middle School in Our Minds 3
Chapter 2 When Familiarity Bred Contempt 26
Chapter 3 The Hormone Monster Emerges 40
Chapter 4 Party Hounds and Vixens 57
Chapter 5 Into the Abyss 81
Chapter 6 Mommy & Me 2.0 101
Chapter 7 Looking for Control in All the Wrong Places 127
Chapter 8 What We Value 155
Chapter 9 Forgetting and Remembering 186
Acknowledgments 199
Notes 201
Index 275
Reader's Guide 289
A Conversation with Judith Warner 297
Reading Group Guide
And Then They Stopped Talking to Me by Judith Warner
A Reading Group Guide
1. “Middle school is brutal.”; just about anyone will likely tell you “it was the worst time of their life.” How much does this tally with your own middle school or junior high experience or with that of any current or recent middle-schoolers in your life? Do you look back at yourself and see a “mean girl” (or boy), a “bully” or victim— or some combination of all the above? Or do you remember a basically happy period?
2. “People’s middle school stories . . . very often have a disproportionate impact on the narratives of self that they carry through adulthood.” Do you feel like you started to become who you now are during your middle school period? Why—and in what ways?
3. Judith Warner mentions fictional depictions of difficult or sensitive young adolescents past and present: Frankie in The Member of the Wedding, for example, or Kayla in the movie Eighth Grade. What other famous cultural portraits can you think of? Which ones, if any, have had an impact on you? Do those you encountered at a younger age have the same resonance for you today? And, in retrospect, are they more about kids, or about the adults who created them?
4. In 1904, the pioneering psychologist G. Stanley Hall popularized the notion of adolescence as a special and unique phase of life, describing it in part as a “kind of repressed insanity.” Do you agree? From your experience and reading of this book, what factors do you think are the most important in making this such a “crazy” period in life? How much of what we believe about middle schoolers is real and how much is myth?
5. At the beginning of the twentieth century, idealistic education reformers argued that twelve- to fourteen-year- olds were at an age of “exciting potential,” and that the grades that would soon come to be known as junior high school were the ideal time for these kids to use their “strengthened powers of judgment” to develop knowledge and personal virtue. Do these ideas ring true for you? If so, why hasn’t middle school ever lived up to its potential?
6. Perhaps most disappointing of all for idealistic educators was that junior high schoolers didn’t end up showing a penchant for “independent and original thinking,” and instead they “policed one another’s behavior.” According to Warner, what lies behind this conformist urge?
7. The book discusses research showing that the adolescent brain enters a “second critical period” of growth— heightened perception (caused by sex hormones) as well as a lopsided development with the growth of the amygdala (responsible for emotion) outpacing the frontal lobes (responsible for control and decision-making). Does this picture of a hypersensitive battle between emotion and reason tally with your own experience?
8. Would it have been helpful to have known about the science of the adolescent brain during your own middle school years? Would other insights this book contains have made a difference for you? Which ones? And why? And what are the takeaways you think are the most important now for parents, teachers, and schools?
9. “The American obsession with adolescents and sex has long had adults chasing after demons that don’t exist.” How much do you think adult fears about the sex lives of young adolescents—from concerns over the health effects of the “solitary vice” of masturbation in the nineteenth century to present-day worries over the “verbal horrors” of sexting—reflect the preoccupations of adults rather than the actual problems of kids? Do adults ever underestimate the dangers facing this age group? Did they in the past?
10. In chapter 5, the book describes in detail how the “sexual revolution” produced a more sexualized world for 1970s adolescents, along with new and confusing “rules of engagement” that young teens tried to follow in an “adult world that was falling apart.” What were the effects on adolescents at that time and as the fallout continued in the 1980s? Now that those kids have grown up, do you think that memories of that time affect the way they parent their middle schoolers today?
11. The author notes that the early adolescent years have long been understood as a time of “non-stop self- monitoring,” during which we develop what the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley once called the “looking- glass self.” The psychologist David Elkind described it as “living life as a performance before an ‘imaginary audience’ of alternately jeering and cheering critics.” Does that tally with your own experience? Does this get better with age? Or do some people stay stuck in middle school all their lives?
12. Warner notes that, at least as far back as the 1930s, “popularity” was a junior high schooler obsession, and
it looked very much like it still does today. “At the top of the heap were kids who were good-looking and had money. . . . At the bottom were those who were socially awkward or physically unattractive.” How much do you think the problems of middle school are the result of adolescents sorting themselves into a hierarchy? Are there any ways that schools could ameliorate this problem? Do you think the American practice of having schools exclusively for children aged twelve to fourteen make this problem worse?
13. Popularity “can be a risk factor for unhappiness.” From your reading and experience, would you say this is true? If so, how? Does it have to be?
14. “Today, though, it seems that it’s the kids who are often dragged along for the ride as they struggle to manage the crazy ups and downs of their middle school parents.” Warner depicts cases of parents who have become too involved in their children’s social lives—often taking sides or colluding with their children in disputes with others. From your reading and experience, what are the causes of this “boundary-slippage”? How can parents learn to recognize and limit it? Do you think schools can do anything to help?
15. Many parents say that other parents now are “competing through their kids,” making middle school parenthood feel like “seventh grade all over again.” Have you witnessed or experienced this? If so, what drives it? Do you think it’s worse in some schools than others—and is more prevalent among certain types of parents? What effects do think all this has on middle school kids?
16. “Better to let the school handle things.” Do you agree that parents should step back from the disputes their children are having with others in middle school, that “school business [is] school business”? In your opinion, are teachers and schools actually capable of handling that “business”?
17. What do you understand by the idea of parents “interviewing for pain” when discussing school with their children? Have you caught yourself doing this? Do you see others engaging in it? In what ways can parents “elevate, rather than lower, problematic conversations”? What benefits would this bring?
18. Warner describes a “winner-take-all society” that encourages ruthless “parenting to win,” arguing that toxic competitive attitudes are being passed on from adults to children—particularly among the upper-middle class. Do you agree? Has there been an accompanying diminishment of the “old-fashioned notion of [being] considerate to others”? What do you think might have caused these changes? Are there practical measures that could be taken to mitigate it among parents, within schools, and among kids?
19. Children’s mental health issues are left untreated for an average of “eight years before getting a proper diagnosis and starting treatment.” Are there ways that potentially damaging long-term problems could be better identified and even prevented in middle-school?
20. “Does a school really celebrate all sorts of students, even those the faculty doesn’t necessarily love?” How can schools live up to their own mottos and mission statements? How can teachers and administrators stand up to parents who might not get with the program?
21. When talking with a class of students, Warner tells a story about how she nursed a long-term resentment against a girl she felt had bullied her in middle school, but had completely forgotten—until she was in her 30s—that she herself had cruelly “dumped” two of her own eighth grade friends, concluding that, particularly where middle school is concerned, “things are not always as they seem.” Have you ever had a reality-shifting realization like this? Do you think sharing our own stories of adolescence—ones that show that our personal interpretations of events are often inaccurate—could help middle-schoolers “expand their thinking and feeling beyond the bounds of their own minds”? Why might this be valuable for them—and for us as adults?
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