Horizons PARENTING
on the front steps” was the bad-optics
excuse one mother used to exclude
her son’s unpopular friend from an
eighth-grade pre-dance get-together.)
Parents slide right into their middle
schoolers’ social obsessions.
Parents, by and large, don’t do mid-
dle schoolerish things because they’re
terrible people. They do them because
they’re scared. Or helpless. At their
worst, they can even feel—if their mid-
dle schoolers seem sad, lose friends,
spark tearful family fights or simply
disappear for long, angry stretches into
their rooms—like they’re failing at the
most important job in their lives. A 2015
study showed that the start of puberty is
actually a trigger for marked declines in
parents’ feelings of “self-efficacy”—that
is, the degree to which they feel up to
the task of parenting their children in a
positive way. That’s long been true. And
for this generation of parents in particu-
lar, middle schoolers’ “sorting” struggles
are particularly painful. They push our
own buttons regarding class and wealth
and status—long-simmering issues that
tend to come to a head in early middle
age. Given all these triggers, it’s not sur-
prising that parents end up engaging
on the level of kids, trying desperately
to take control. The problem is, as des-
perately controlling parents always do,
they make a bad situation worse.It’s the Values
however well-meaning they are,
American parents tend to worry
about the wrong things. They fear
“sexting” and bullying—both extreme
behaviors that occur far less fre-
quently among middle schoolers than
we all tend to think. But what they
don’t tend to consider—and what
I’ve come very strongly to think—is
that the greatest danger facing our
middle schoolers now is actually not
their phones or their peers. It’s us—
or more specifically, it’s the common
values that hold sway in our world
and that we reinforce through our
parenting: selfishness, competition
and personal success at any cost.
Research shows that those values,
which have everything to do with
external markers of status and self-
worth, are psychologically damaging
for all people, at all ages and in all
communities. They create a lot of indi-
vidual unhappiness—and they’re bad
for our society. But, precisely because
early adolescence is a critical period in
which our brains are super-sensitive,
particularly to anything that tells us
who we are and how we rank, they hit
middle schoolers extra hard.
This means that a lot of the things
we do to advance our kids’ interests
and bolster their feelings can backfire
badly. When we teach our kids to put
themselves first and focus narrowly on
results, we not only encourage them to
ignore or trample on the needs of oth-
ers, we also rob them of the key build-
ing blocks of psychological well-being:
good relationships and a sense of
belonging. When we lose our bound-
aries and enter into their battles, we
preempt their chances for developing
competence and feeling skilled—the
core elements of lifelong resilience.
Instead of spiraling into the affec-
tive realm of middle schoolers, we
adults must raise our own level of emo-
tional functioning. We have to learn to
listen without immediately rushing in
to fix things and to tolerate distress—
our own and theirs—without falling
to pieces. We have to figure out howto acknowledge, without excessively
dwelling on, the bad things that hap-
pen. And bring a light touch and a
sense of humor to middle school’s dark
places, always bearing in mind that few
social situations are black-and-white.
This is incredibly hard to do. I
myself rarely, if ever, did it successfully.
But I always keep in mind now an
example I heard in my interviews of
a mother who sat up with her daugh-
ter’s middle school friends when they
had sleepovers. She played the role of
a nonjudgmental sounding board, try-
ing to lead them, to “help us figure out
what was going on with our friends,”
her now-adult daughter and a middle
school teacher, recalled. “She would
explain how self-esteem and the need
to be liked were really the things driv-
ing most of these weird/bad choices
our friends were making...She urged
us to have compassion for the girls we
were so ready to write off as ‘skanks.’”
Compassion is the salve of the mid-
dle school parent’s soul. Teaching it,
modeling it and getting your middle
schoolers to expand their thinking
and feeling beyond the bounds of their
own minds are by far the best gifts you
can give them. If we can pull all this off,
even imperfectly, it will send a message
to our kids that they are competent
and capable and that their friendship
losses or dramas are problems to be
solved rather than existential catastro-
phes. And that is extremely empower-
ing—for them and for us.
I firmly believe that by rethinking
the middle school years, we have the
opportunity to become better and
happier adults.
It’s certainly worth a try. Because
we don’t want to stay in seventh
grade forever.Ơ Excerpt adapted from and then
they stopped talking to me by
Judith Warner, published by Crown.“Send a message that
friendship losses or
dramas are problems
to be solved rather than
existential catastrophes.”38 NEWSWEEK.COM MAY 22, 2020