Those Crazy Middle School Years
by An advice piece detailing the stress your middle-schooler is facing and what you, as a parent, can do to help them.
As someone who graduated eighth grade only eight years ago, I feel I have a unique perspective about the whole middle school experience. I’m not yet a parent, but it wasn’t that long ago that I was a kid. As a young adult, the memories of those turbulent middle years are close to my mind. And I think that, as time passes, the older we get, we forget what it was like to be that age. However, I’m in the unique position to tell you parents out there exactly how it is for your middle-schooler.
First of all, the most important thing to remember is that they are going through huge changes in their lives. Hormones are setting in, leading their voices to crack and their emotions to go haywire. You sit there, looking at your child and wonder: how is it that they’ve gone from a cute, cuddly baby to a horrible teenage monster? Well, I’m here to tell you. It’s the hormones.
But there’s also unique stress going on in their lives, stress that parents may not be aware of.
Today’s middle school student is held to different expectations than their parents were when they were that age — expectations from both the school administration and their peers.
I entered middle school when I entered the fifth grade. I went from being in a school with a bunch of little kids and brightly colored wall decoration to being in a school with hormone-crazed adolescents and lockers. That’s a big adjustment for a ten-year-old. And I guarantee you, if your child has recently entered middle school, they’ll be feeling the same culture shock. To them, they feel as though they’ve suddenly entered the world of adulthood.
Their school will expect more out of them when they reach middle school. They’ll no longer be treated like children. This can be both liberating and exhausting, because while they’re proud to be treated like the teenagers they are, they’ll also be expected to finish mounds of homework. I had more homework in one week of middle school than I had in a whole month of freshman year at college. Their schedules will become more stressful. They’ll be tired and cranky and the punishments for not finishing their work will become more severe, expecting their grades.
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