And Then They Stopped Talking to Me: Making Sense of Middle School - Hardcover

Warner, Judith

 
9781101905883: And Then They Stopped Talking to Me: Making Sense of Middle School
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1101905883 ISBN 13: 9781101905883
Verlag: Crown, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Through the stories of kids and parents in the middle school trenches, a New York Times bestselling author reveals why these years are so painful, how parents unwittingly make them worse, and what we all need to do to grow up.

“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.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Judith Warner is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety and Hillary Clinton: The Inside Story, as well as the award-winning We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication. A senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Warner has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times, where she wrote the popular Domestic Disturbances column, as well as numerous other publications.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101905883
ISBN 13 
9781101905883
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
MUSIC STORE professional GmbH
022188841282
Lars.Mueller@musicstore.de

Istanbulstr. 22-26
Köln
51103
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781101905890: And Then They Stopped Talking to Me: Making Sense of Middle School

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1101905891 ISBN 13:  9781101905890
Verlag: Crown, 2021
Softcover