Don’t Blame the Kids

MIDDLE SCHOOL IS WIDELY CONSIDERED TO be one of the most difficult periods of adolescent development and socialization. Understandably, parents want to ease their children’s passage through these difficult years. In her new book, And Then They Stopped Talking to Me: Making Sense of Middle School, bestselling author Judith Warner discusses how adults’ experiences in middle school color their own behavior and how they respond to their children’s challenges. In this excerpt from her book, Warner discusses why parents’ interventions may actually be exacerbating rather than helping a period of fraught social interactions.

Start With the Parents

MIDDLE SCHOOL SHOULD COME WITH A trigger warning for parents. We all know it can be a psychologically treacherous time for kids. It’s the point when old friendships abruptly end, new alliances form, and everyone is subjected to a brutal process of “sorting,” as I once heard the psychologist and author Michael Thompson say, which arranges kids into unforgiving hierarchies based on looks, wealth, athleticism and that ever mysterious ingredient that in my day was called “cool.” A sixth-grade teacher