Millions of American parents are now stuck at home with their middle schoolers and becoming intimately reacquainted, in far too close quarters, with the look, smell and feel of life — 24/7 — in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.
On Facebook, appeals have taken on a tone of desperation: Is anyone even trying to enforce rules about screen time anymore? How do you get through to a seventh grader that no, you can’t “just” see a couple of your best friends?
A mom discovers that during a carefully-choreographed, two-family walk, her son peeled off to snap an arm-in-arm picture with his BFF — and posted it on Instagram. Another is mortified to learn that her daughter has been answering anonymous questions about her sex life on Yolo. Parents sit by helplessly as their kids are dropped, virtually, by their friends: kicked out of group chats, excluded from online house parties.
In other words, the coronavirus quarantine is the next chapter in the ongoing saga of early adolescent (and early middle age) misery that has played out, over and over again, ever since middle schoolers — or junior high schoolers, as they have also been called — came into being.
Some of this is inevitable: the result of hard-wired needs to bond with friends, flirt, judge, rank, rebel and separate into in-group and out-group peer hierarchies. But very little of it is absolutely necessary. Meanness, social drama and unhappiness aren’t — or don’t have to be — all there is to life in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades. Middle school is a time when all sorts of new abilities kick in: new powers of observation, critical thinking, reason and reflection. Believe it or not, there’s even a new capacity for empathy, and a strong sense of injustice.
Experts have known and have written about this for well over a century. And all these positives could come to the fore in the pause from normal life imposed on us by Covid-19. If, of course, we have the eyes to see the opportunity, and the will to encourage it. And those are big ifs.
Adults don’t tend to much like kids of middle-school age. They roll their eyes at us and snarl. They watch us with a gaze newly awakened to all our hypocrisies and foibles. Their physical changes make us uncomfortable. They remind us of a phase of life that many of us remember as our most painful. Women’s magazines have carried mothers’ vociferous complaints, particularly about their daughters, since the 1920s. Our popular media has depicted them as budding sex addicts since the early 1960s.
This combination of discomfort and outright dislike — mixed with a not-altogether-hidden dose of prurience — was built right into the foundations of the first junior high schools, which appeared around the country in the 1910s and 1920s, and were built with the express purpose both of protecting sensitive kids age 12 to 15 from older high schoolers and quarantining them away from younger children. (“The opportunity for good,” noted William H. Burnham, a turn-of-the century psychologist and education reformer, “is only equaled by the possibility of evil.”)
Adults’ fixation on all the forms that “evil” might take resulted over the following decades in schools obsessed with control, students who were bored and alienated, and teachers who, a 1959 study by a junior-high principal found, regarded their charges overwhelmingly with “extreme resentment.” It led to decades of bad press for sixth, seventh and eighth graders — rising to truly outlandish levels in the fears of a middle school “oral sex epidemic” in the late 1990s and early 2000s — and to a long-lasting cultural amnesia about the very real good qualities that researchers and the rare educators who love working with these kids have long celebrated. Overall, the story of junior high schoolers and middle schoolers in America offers up a perfect illustration of what social scientists call a “self-fulfilling prophecy effect”: Adults regarded the youngest teens and tweens with distrust and distaste, and the kids gave them their worst.
Our current strange circumstances may offer the opportunity for a reset. Indeed, for many kids, it appears already to be. Some of the very same middle schoolers who just a week or two ago were accusing parents of trying to ruin their lives by keeping them home, are now discovering new — or long-unused — sides of themselves. They’re reading more, and with more pleasure. They’re spending long hours on new interests, odd projects, and even on rediscovering lost elementary school friends on social media (and sometimes — gasp! — even talking by phone.)
I’ve heard stories of happy middle schoolers researching the history of pandemics, mastering elaborate skateboard tricks, taking music lessons online — and practicing, voluntarily. And, in one story that particularly spoke to my own inner 11-year-old, drawing the board, cutting the cards, and writing up the rules for a new game called Covid-opoloy.
Some parents are seeing their kids thrive on distance learning — at least in some subjects. They are asking themselves if there might be good lessons to learn from this period outside of the classroom about how different kids take in different sorts of information. Kids vary enormously from one another developmentally in the early adolescent years. Perhaps, after more than a century of talk, the dream of individualized instruction will finally start to be realized.
For that to happen, though — and for middle schoolers to explore and become their best selves generally — there’s got to be some pressure-letting. The stresses of life under quarantine have the potential to become a nationwide mental health pandemic, and middle schoolers and their parents will be especially at risk. Schools need to cut them a break. Assign less homework. Let kids take classes pass-fail, as many colleges are doing. Make teachers and guidance counselors available for Zoom, Facetime, or even just old-fashioned phone calls for support. And help parents out by suggesting new rules — with student input and buy-in — around social media, including community-wide schedules limiting screen access to certain times in the day.
Parents can’t create who their middle schoolers are or control what they do. And they shouldn’t try. Early adolescence is, after all, the moment when young people start to become who they’ll be for the rest of their lives — again, if adults let them. What parents choose to see — what we as a society encourage and validate — is, however, within our control. In the past, we took the easy way out, rolling our eyes and relying on stereotypes to avoid real engagement with these complicated and often challenging kids. Now we need to make smarter choices.
Judith Warner is the author of “And Then They Stopped Talking to Me: Making Sense of Middle School.”
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