Middle School Makeover

Improving the Way You and Your Child Experience the Middle School Years

Michelle Icard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138456518
• eBook ISBN: 9781351861328
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy

Middle School Makeover is a guide for parents and educators to help the tweens in their lives navigate the socially fraught hallways, gyms, and cafeterias of middle school. The book helps parents, teachers, and other adults in middle school settings to understand the social dilemmas and other issues that kids today face. Author Michelle Icard covers a large range of topics, beginning with helping us understand what is happening in the brains of tweens and how these neurological development affects decision-making and questions around identity. She also addresses social media, dating, and peer exclusion. Using both recent research and her personal, extensive experience working with middle-school-aged kids and their parents, Icard offers readers concrete and practical advice for guiding children through this chaotic developmental stage while also building their confidence.

PART 1

The Foundation for Parenting Middle schoolers

HOW THIS BOOK WORKS

In the next five chapters, I’ll give you a simple foundation of theories you’ll need to understand and distill the advice I dispense in the second half of the book, where I’ll get very practical and specific about scenarios that are probably happening at your home and what you can do and say to manage them. You may be tempted, in your search for answers, to flip right to the second half of the book and find the solution to your problems, but I encourage you to read through the first section to help you commit to the new solutions I’ll introduce. Otherwise, they may not make sense. Then, keep this book handy, tucked into your car door or perched on your nightstand, so that when a situation arises, you can flip and find the help you need.

“WHAT YOU TALKIN’ ’BOUT, WILLIS?”

One more important instruction for how to use this book is to remember with empathy what it was like when you were young. My writing is heavily peppered with references to ’70s and ’80s pop culture, which informed my coming of age and probably yours, too. Mostly, this is because I think they’re funny and I can’t help myself. But they also serve a higher purpose, reminding us that we can’t overlook the important influence of pop culture on our kids’ social development. What better way to see this than through a nostalgic lens that brings into focus the effects of pop culture on our own development. You feel me? No? Kiss my grits.

Now let’s begin, as any decent makeover should, with a good foundation.

1

What’s a Middle School Makeover?

Visit any elementary school near the end of the academic year, and you’ll hear parents lamenting the transition to middle school.

1. “I’m so nervous for her!”
2. “We just don’t know what to expect.”
3. “I hated middle school.”
4. “Poor thing, he’s got such an awkward couple of years ahead.”
5. “I’m dreading the bad attitude!”
6. “I’m dreading the bad influences!”
7. “I’m dreading it all.”
8. And so on.

Middle school gets a bad rap. Even the name implies that it’s a no-man’s-land, stuck in the middle between cute elementary school and important high school. Historically, this has been the case. You probably remember going to junior high, not middle school. In the mid-1960s middle schools slowly began replacing junior high schools as part of an effort to distinguish between a model of kids attending “little high school” and a new concept where the unique developmental needs of kids ages eleven to fourteen could be addressed right along with their academic needs.¹ Whether or not developmental needs are truly addressed in today’s middle schools is questionable. Instead, many parents see middle school as a tumultuous, hormone-driven, attitude-filled, peer pressure and rebellion–ruled subsociety where every kid must serve time before gaining entrance to the happy world of high school.

In part, that’s because it’s the socially acceptable thing to think. We aren’t supposed to like the fact that our daughters are becoming interested in boys, that our sons are cutting up in class to make girls laugh, that makeup and deodorant and feminine hygiene products and cell phones and expensive sneakers are littering already too-messy rooms. We feel we’re supposed to complain about our kids making their own decisions, and making a mess while they do it, because that’s what parents of kids this age talk about. We gripe to each other to form a common bond over how awful it all is, and we joke about needing wine therapy and about how much we dread the dating and driving and drinking soon to follow. We pretend misery loves company when what it really craves is a new perspective.

It’s time for a middle school makeover.

I know that times have changed since we were in school, and our kids face more challenging situations than we ever imagined. But, we’ve created a self-fulfilling prophecy in which, for many kids and parents, middle school really does stink, in part because we fully expect that it should. Did you know that in many other cultures there is no such saying as the terrible twos?² In countries like ours, where we have a high regard for all individuals, we expect toddlers to integrate into our family systems just like every other member of the family. To an exploratory two-year-old, that means he must share, adjust to adult schedules, and comply with adult norms. Cue crying and pounding of fists. In other countries, parents expect older family members to forgo their own needs so that a toddler’s unique needs and desires may be tended to. The result is, you guessed it, happy and compliant two-year-olds, and that leads to happy parents.

Why am I even mentioning two-year-olds when this is a book about middle school? Because two-year-olds and twelve-year-olds have a lot more in common than you might think. Like a toddler, your middle schooler is learning how to operate a new body, identity, emotions, desires, and intellectual thoughts. Talking about this like it’s a big, ugly process and worrying about how messy it might become, or ordering him to learn how to control himself to fit into your family’s structure, is counterproductive. (Cue crying and pounding of fists.)

The middle school makeover is about improving the way we think about the middle school years. What if, instead of dreading middle school, we got excited about it? There is a lot of magic that happens during the middle school years and it has the potential to be one of the best times of your parenting life … if you can see middle school through a new lens.

One of the first steps in doing that is getting rid of your own middle school baggage. We often send our kids into middle school carrying more than that already-too-heavy book bag. In addition to forty pounds of books, binders, and pens, they might be burdened by expectations or worries built on our own memories of bullies, popularity, social pressure, exclusion, growing up too fast … you name it.

I surveyed one hundred parents of kids in third, fourth, and fifth grades about their expectations for parenting middle schoolers.

25 percent said they had a definitively bad experience in middle school

30 percent had a definitively good experience in middle school

45 percent had some good experiences and some bad experiences

Of the 25 percent who had a definitively bad experience, half could not identify one thing to look forward to about their kid going to middle school. Sample comments from these parents were:

“Nothing. Most other parents identify this time as one you have to ‘survive.’ I rarely hear positive things about it.”

“Excited about middle school? Nope, nothing, I am not looking

forward to the next three years AT ALL …”

“Nothing, I’m scared for him.”

“To be completely honest, not much! They are crummy years!”

“Nothing. Wish we could skip it altogether.”

“Mostly, I dread middle school.”

I understand. It’s been thirty years since I walked the halls of seventh grade (ouch), yet I still have a vivid recollection of the people and events that characterized these short but important two years of my life. Maybe, like me, you can recall the stuff that happened in middle school—embarrassing moments, friendship betrayals, first kisses—with high-definition clarity. It was the first time in your life, after all, that you dabbled in total independence from your parents, concentrating your mixed feelings of excitement, doubt, guilt, and pride as you tried to figure out who you were in this world.

I encourage you, as you read this book, to do two things.

Think back on your middle school experience and distill it from your child’s. One way to do this is to watch your middle school moments like a movie with some detachment and, if you’ve cast yourself in a victim role, take yourself out of it. Give your younger self some grace toward the mistakes you made. Harder still, give those kids who mistreated you not one more second thought. That was a reflection of their bad decision making, not yours.

Reframe the way you think about middle school in general. When you talk about middle school, use words like “opportunity” and “exciting.” Before long, you’ll have created a self-fulfilling prophesy of the nicest kind.

MY STORY

To help you get to know me a little better, and as an example of exorcising middle school baggage, I’d like to share with you my middle school story.

In fifth grade, I attended Brooks Elementary School in Medford, Massachusetts. This was the third of four elementary schools I would attend. How to describe Brooks Elementary … did you ever see Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds? Not that bad. Those kids were hard-core criminals! Let’s say about one-tenth that bad. Did you ever see Meatballs? About twice that bad. Brooks had a staff that could not have cared less and an out-of-control student body comprised overwhelmingly of dim-witted pranksters and soon-to-be juvenile delinquents.

Needless to say, the academics at Brooks were far from rigorous. I remember my fifth-grade teacher explaining her grading system to us: “If you turn it in on time, it’s an ‘A.’ A day late, it’s a ‘B.’ After that, a ‘C.’” And so on. My parents grew alarmed. This would not do. One weekend they told me they were taking me to a private school for admissions testing. If I could get in, they would figure out a way to pay.

Easier said than done. The cost was about $13,000 per year back in 1983, the equivalent of about $30,000 today, although current tuition is $39,000 per year without boarding. The point is, it was very expensive.

I did get in, and that must have been a mixed blessing to my parents. We were not wealthy and paying tuition meant taking out loans, but my parents, thankfully, were committed to giving me the best possible education.

My new school, Buckingham, Browne & Nichols, (BB&N for short) was exactly what it sounds like: a beautiful, well-endowed, and exclusive New England prep school with a student body comprised of the wealthy children of Boston’s elite (plus a few kids like me thrown in for diversity). As the start of school drew closer, I became increasingly nervous about becoming a private school kid. Would I fit in? Would I make friends? Would I have the right clothes?

Of course I wouldn’t have the right clothes! I had “public school clothes.” I asked my parents if I could get some fancy clothes to start my fancy school, but their money was all tied up in tuition. I would have to go as I was.

Nuh-uh. “Going as I was” was entirely unacceptable. Did Willis and Arnold “go as they were” to Digby Prep when Mr. Drummond tried to enroll them? No! They put on sweater vests and wool slacks and marched to the beat of their own drum by fitting in. Did Jo Polniaczek “go as she was” to Eastland School with Mrs. Garrett? No! Jo may have pulled her necktie askew, but she still wore the uniform and looked pretty much like every other girl there. If TV taught me anything about poor kids straddling the economic divide, it was that a large dose of sassy attitude and the right “uniform” were essential to fitting in.

(It occurs to me now that my primary education on how poor kids behaved around rich people came entirely from ’80s television sitcoms. Clearly, this was a major part of my problem.)

Because my new school did not require us to wear uniforms like my sitcom role models, I needed to get creative about my wardrobe. I did what any self-respecting tween would do (any who couldn’t actually sew like Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink): I called my grandmother. She offered to buy me one new outfit to start my new school. I needed only to be sure it was killer.

The year was 1983. You may recall a new TV show had recently aired called Silver Spoons, in which Ricky Schroder played a rich teen living in a mansion with a working train to transport him from room to room, among other cool things.

Ricky was the quintessential rich kid and I knew I needed to dress like him to make a good impression at my new school.

My attempt to look like a successful and wealthy private school k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: How and Why This Book Works
• Part One The Foundation for Parenting Middle Schoolers
• Part Two Helping Your Kid Through Real Middle School Problems
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes
• References
• Index
• About the Author