AND THEN THEY STOPPED TALKING TO ME
Making Sense of Middle School
By Judith Warner
“It’s just like junior high all over again.” I spoke those words not long ago when I was trapped in a toxic professional setting.
Apparently I’m not the only adult who remembers too well the pangs of those years. Judith Warner interviews scores of fellow middle school survivors in her accomplished and highly readable new book, “And Then They Stopped Talking to Me.” These barely recovered adults share the horror stories you might expect: memories of bullying, cliques and lost friendships. Perhaps more alarming is the bad behavior on the part of parents who push their children to be top of the heap using adult-size “mean girl” tactics.
Warner knows of what she speaks. Not only is the book well researched, but she also gets personal with her tales of middle school woe — both as a former student and as a parent. It is the caregivers of current middle schoolers who might gain the most solace and insight from this book, those who find that shepherding children through what was once called junior high brings back their own trauma in unexpectedly painful ways.
Warner describes that “middle school feeling” that most adults never seem to escape. It’s “a place in the mind,” an emotion, a sense of being somehow wrong — a freak, inferior, unfinished.
Middle school parents and caregivers may be surprised to learn that in the preindustrial United States, kids hitting puberty was hailed as a good thing for their families — the moment when they could carry an adult workload and become a productive member of the household. Adolescence was not the fearful event it is now, when our innocent, adoring, clear-skinned children become “disobliging, somewhat deranged and kind of disgusting.” Who thought that locking hormone-ravaged pubescent minors in the same building with legions of their peers for seven hours a day was a great idea? Warner supplies the answer in a fascinating section on the history of junior high, including how race, class, sexual orientation and gender can affect the experience. Separate schools for 11- to 14-year-olds have existed only for the past 100 years, and by 1960 even the most prominent ones seemed to regret it.
Part of the problem is biology: The tween years force kids through so much change so fast. Warner explains that it’s been only 20 years since neuroscientists discovered that, after the period from age 0 to 3, puberty is the most critical time for brain development. The changes can be confusing and excruciating — all that adult brainpower untempered by adult perspective and experience. Warner taps evolutionary biologists to suggest why kids this age might perceive something as common as rejection by a friend as “a threat to their very survival.” It’s vital for middle school caregivers like me to remember that the relationship drama that adults tend to belittle can feel to these kids like a matter of life or death.
In her nonjudgmental, accessible style, Warner shows how for so many of us, our “narrative identity” is greatly affected by what we suffered in middle school, and since our perceptions during those years are undoubtedly distorted, so too might be our sense of self. How many of us are walking around with unhealed emotional wounds inflicted in junior high? And can we really trust our memories and the stories we’ve told ourselves about those memories?
One key, Warner proposes, is to have compassion — for our current middle schoolers, and perhaps as well for middle-aged adults who have their own middle school selves still slumped inside them, even now feeling somewhat wrong, inferior and unfinished. Having compassion for ourselves, and for those years that were “the worst of the worst” of our lives, may do our kids more good than all the anti-bullying assemblies in the world.
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May 05, 2020 at 04:13PM
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Traumatized by Memories of Middle School? You Are Not Alone - The New York Times
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