Navigating the Turbulent Middle School Years: Common-Sense Solutions for Problems and Behaviors

Author

Introduction

What your child’s brain does in the middle school years will affect them for the rest of their life. The importance of the developing brain in your middle school child—academically, socially, and behaviorally—cannot be overstated. At no other time, other than from birth to the age of two, does your child’s brain undergo so many profound changes.

In my over 30 years experience as a middle school educator, as principal, dean, school psychologist, coach and teacher, I have personally witnessed the power of successful navigation through the turbulent middle school years and the negative consequences when it is not successful.

From a brain’s point of view, what happens during your child’s middle school years is extremely important because the brain creates, strengthens, and even destroys neural pathways. Neural pathways are the key, whatever your child will face from then on. The ability (or lack of ability) of the neural pathway—neurons, axons, and dendrites—to communicate throughout the brain will determine your child’s overall ability to think, make sound decisions, and communicate with other human beings. The neural pathways your child uses in the middle school years will be strengthened, and the neural pathways your child doesn’t use will weaken and waste away.

But the good news is that there is much we can to do mold your child’s brain and teach it to strengthen certain useful neural pathways, while allowing other non-useful neural pathways to wither away and die. In a sense, the advice given in this book will help strengthen the important neural pathways in your child’s brain. For example, which neural pathways do you want strengthened in your child? Do you want them to have weak neural pathways which cause their brain to have difficulty comprehending language, mathematical constructs, and have substantial struggles in understanding and applying their social skills in the right context?

A sad truth is that once your child leaves the middle school years and enters high school, they will have progressively more difficulty changing their neural pathways and subsequent thinking abilities and behavioral tendencies. As the neural pathways in the brain become more solidified, so also do your child’s skills, behaviors, personality, attitudes, and aptitudes become entrenched, and more difficult to change.

I don’t want to alarm you, but in a certain sense, the middle school years are your last chance to profoundly change your child. Educators and professionals who work with children agree, virtually unanimously, that changing behaviors in a high school kid is significantly more difficult than changing behaviors in a middle school child.

To help you assist your child in strengthening the beneficial neural pathways in their brain, I have chosen to write this book using stories and scenarios. We learn through stories and scenarios, and this book is all about stories and scenarios. The purpose of the scenarios in this book is to help you understand some typical situations that confront middle school kids and how you can address each situation. Each scenario has a story told from the multiple points of view of those most affected by the story’s situation—by the kid, by the parents, by the teachers, and sometimes by a principal or other adult. Each scenario will have one problem. The problem will remain consistent in each scenario within the chapter, but the key will be how the problem is viewed by each unique point of view. Why are multiple perspectives so important? When something happens, no two people view the same event the same way. This happens in schools all the time. Your child’s version of what happened, the teacher’s version of what happened, and your version of what happened will oftentimes be dramatically different from one another.

The primary purpose of this book is to help you resolve these competing viewpoints (which may mirror situations in your own life) and merge them together into one coherent story. The secret to solving any problem often lies in being able to view the problem from somebody else’s point of view and to understand why they did what they did. Many times it is very helpful to determine why your child is doing certain things before launching into an aggressive intervention, or, even worse, not knowing what to do and, consequently, doing nothing.

Each scenario will include a problem that is common with middle school kids. The format for each scenario will include:

The story from the middle school kid’s point of view

The story from the parents’ point of view

The story from the teacher’s or administrator’s point of view

A summary of the problem

My recommended solution(s) to the problem

Keep in mind while reading these scenarios, and my concluding advice, that my goal is to present the most common problems that bedevil kids and their parents, not to present a list of all the potential problems. When I dispense my advice at the end of the scenario, the same rule applies—it’s not possible in a book format to provide every angle to consider in addressing the problem. Rather, I am giving you some of the most obvious solutions that apply to the involved scenarios. My goal is to be brief, concise, and straight to the point. It is up to you to apply the information to your own unique situation.

Why did I select these particular scenarios? I wanted to address problems many families and their kids struggle with every day. For example, some of the scenarios include common problems, such as bullying, fighting, flunking classes, dealing with the smart kid who doesn’t do homework, and determining whether your child has an outstanding teacher. Some of the problems are not common to all children, but the results can be devastating to your child and family, and you should know what to do if they happen and how to prevent them from occurring. These uncommon problems include swiping prescription drugs and alcohol, smoking marijuana, determining whether your child has a terrible teacher, investigating whether your child has attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and seeing whether your child is eligible for special education or gifted services.

You may find much in the scenarios that applies to your kid and your family. I am also certain you will find the situations and scenarios to be very real. The scenarios are presented in no particular order. Thus, you can read them in any order you wish. However, you may be surprised to find useful information in scenarios which initially may look like they don’t apply to your particular family or teaching circumstance.

In the end, each scenario will have information that will be useful to you. Sometimes, at first glance, you may think a particular scenario doesn’t apply to you and your middle school child. Within each scenario, however, you will find kernels of truth and nuggets of useful advice you can apply to all sorts of situations. For example, what should you do when you find out your child is being bullied? And what should you do if you discover your child is the bully? What about when you uncover your child taking pills from your prescription bottle or siphoning liquor from the bottle of vodka beneath the kitchen sink? How can you tell if your child has a great teacher? What if your child stops doing their homework? After reading this book, you will be much better informed on how to approach your middle school child and what to do when bad—and good—things happen.

I do need to say, however, that the scenarios are composites and generalizations about situations I have encountered over the years and are not intended to cover every possible situation. The scenarios and names are completely fictitious. Any similarity to an actual case I have handled is purely coincidental and unintentional. I do not dispense medical or psychiatric counseling or psychological advice; that should be given by a practicing professional. Make sure you see a professional for specific information for your child. That said, there is a wealth of information and knowledge you can gain by reading the scenarios and, more importantly, my advice on what parents should do. You will find scenarios that may be eerily close to situations currently impacting your middle school child and your family. Hopefully, much good will come from learning you are not alone with your problem and discovering there is something that can be done to make the situation better.

Chapter One

Problems with the Shared Custody Agreement

This is the story of parents, recently divorced, who can’t agree on how to raise their middle school son, who continually pits one parent against the other. Whether intended or not, school is caught in the cross-hairs.

John’s Point of View

John doesn’t like the fact that his parents recently divorced. He likes it even less that he lives with his mother and only gets to see his father every other weekend. When it is his turn to live with his father, John waits outside school until five p.m., every other Friday, for his father to pick him up. (This is the only place both his parents could agree on.) His father has told John he has to finish work before he can get to the school. His father works in an office somewhere, doing something with accounting and numbers, but beyond that, John doesn’t know exactly what his father does for a living.

John hates getting picked up at the school. By the time his father gets there, all of the kids are gone from the building, and even the activity bus has departed. He hates the way all of the kids keep asking him why he is there, every other Friday, just sitting around the building. Every once in a while, John will try to go back into the building to get away from all the kids, who he is certain are staring at him, but the hall supervisor keeps kicking him out of the building and tells him to go home or to wait outside. He dislikes the hall supervisor and thinks what she is doing is stupid. Once he even told the hall supervisor that she was stupid and received a detention for it. His mother reamed him out for getting the detention, but his father only told him to stay out of the building so he doesn’t have to deal with the hall supervisor.

John wants to live with his father, but his mother won’t let him. He has argued the case with both his parents, but his mother says it’s in his best interest to live with her. Then his father says, The courts always rule on the mother’s side when it comes to the custody of the kids.

John knows that his parents hate each other. Whenever he sees them together, it seems like they are always arguing about something. He is glad he doesn’t have any other brothers or sisters so they don’t have to see what losers his parents are.

John goes out of his way to make sure his parents know all of the bad things the other parent is doing. He knows he makes things worse by telling his father all of the bad things his mother does and telling his mother all of the bad things his father does. They both ask him about what the other is doing, so he figures he isn’t under any obligation to tell the truth. If they can’t talk to one another like normal adults, he doesn’t see why he should be the go-between. He mentions to his mother how Dad spends money on fast food because he knows she is a health nut and thinks hamburgers should only be eaten once a month. He mentions to his father how Mom spends money on jewelry because he knows Dad will become angry and frustrated about how his ex is wastefully spending all of the alimony money he sends every month. John is careful, however, to make sure to bring up more stories of how Mom is doing the wrong thing. He wants to live with his dad, and he thinks if he can show what a horrible person his mother is, somehow he will be able to live with his father again. He isn’t sure how the system works, but he is convinced a judge will listen to him and rule that he should live with his father.

He doesn’t know how he will see the judge again, but he is fairly certain his plan will work. His logic seems flawless to him.

His mom is stricter than his dad. That is why he wants to live with his dad. When he lives with his dad, they have pizza on Friday night and go to McDonald’s on Saturday. He also gets to play Xbox whenever he wants to and has even talked his dad into placing the Xbox in his bedroom. Many times he will play video games well after midnight on Friday and Saturday nights and sleep late into the next morning. Sometimes Dad gets angry when he isn’t awake by eleven a.m., but he mostly yells and doesn’t actually do anything about it.

Dad also doesn’t make him waste his time with homework. When John is with his mother, she forces him to work on homework and has even called the teachers to find out what he needs to work on over the weekend. John hates his mother for calling the teachers and wants her to leave him alone like his father does.

Dad also doesn’t make him waste his time on chores around the house. When John is with his mother, she makes him take out the trash, clean the dishes, and even vacuum the house! She keeps a list of his chores on the refrigerator and checks them off when he is finished with each one, so he rarely gets out of his chores. He doesn’t understand why his mother can’t back off and leave him alone like his father does. He continually complains to his father about all of the chores his mother makes him do, and occasionally he invents chores just to impress upon his father how awful his mother is to him. His father says kids should have time to rest and play on the weekends, so he rarely has to do any chores when he is with his dad. He never tells his mother he doesn’t have chores when he visits his father. When his mother asks, he mumbles something about cleaning the apartment and changes the subject so she doesn’t ask too many questions.

John knows his parents are getting nastier with one another. Both of his parents complain to him about the other. John usually listens and adds something to the complaints, when it is in his best interests to do so. John can’t see how they ever liked one another.

The Teachers’ Point of View

The teachers are noticing that John is not doing as well in school compared to how he was performing in the beginning of the year. They have especially noticed on some weekends his homework is not finished. During team meetings, the teachers talk with one another about John and realize they have something in common: John has problems with homework about every other Monday. This is affecting his grades, and he has dropped from a B to a D in most of his classes. John also sometimes performs very poorly on tests, particularly if they are given on Mondays.

John’s poor grades are confusing to some of his teachers because his mother continually calls the teachers, asking about missing work and upcoming tests and assignments. They don’t understand how John can be performing so poorly, compared to the beginning of the year, because his mother is staying on top of his schoolwork. Some of his teachers believe John’s mother is poor on follow-through and doesn’t have the staying power to get on her son. They think John’s mother needs to kick him in the pants and make John be more accountable. They have seen this happen many times in their teaching careers. A parent appears to be interested, but doesn’t have the will to follow through and make their child do their homework. It’s a sad but common story—but what can you do?

Some teachers aren’t so sure that John’s mother is the problem because they know his parents are divorced. They speculate that John is stressed from the divorce. One of them, Miss Bebbensee, asks John how his parents are doing. He tells her he lives with his mother but sees his dad every other weekend. Miss Bebbensee tells John’s counselor about the conversation she had with John, and the counselor promises to talk with him about the situation.

The teachers also talk amongst themselves about how John’s behavior has gotten worse over the past several months and how rude he has been to the after-school supervisor. One time he even told her she was stupid. The teachers were appalled at John’s callous remark because they know the afterschool supervisor is a nice elderly lady who loves her job and is known as a kid magnet because most kids love to be around her. Some of the teachers are very upset with John for his rude comment and tell him so. John becomes very upset when they confront him about his poor behavior, and he mouths back to them, telling them to mind their own business. John gets another detention.

The Parents’ Point of View

Tim and Sheila were married for fifteen years. Tim is an accountant for a Fortune 500 company, and Sheila is an office manager for a paper supply company. Over time, their marriage got worse and worse until finally, last year, they filed for divorce. As part of the divorce proceedings, Sheila retained full custody of their only child, John, with Tim having visitation rights every other weekend. They had trouble agreeing on a common place to exchange John, but they finally agreed to have Tim pick up John at school at five p.m. every other Friday. They picked the school because they know it has an after-school supervisor on duty, and they figured John would get into the least amount of trouble if he were on school property. They don’t call the school to tell them about the arrangement because they figure the school has better things to do, and because it is a family matter, it is, frankly, none of their business.

Sheila is very upset with Tim and can’t believe she stayed married to such a loser for such a long time. For many years she pressed Tim to take more of an assertive role in parenting, but now she has given up and doesn’t believe Tim will ever buck up and parent like a man. She doesn’t like Tim’s permissive style of parenting and hates it when John goes to visit him every other weekend. But she can’t do anything about it because that is what the judge ruled. She is very angry John is doing poorly at school and knows John isn’t doing any homework when he visits his father. To compensate, Sheila calls the teachers often, trying to stay on top of the situation. But John forgets to turn in major assignments on Mondays, after he has spent the weekend playing video games in his father’s apartment, and the loss of the points is killing his grades. She has given up trying to change Tim, but she hopes to save John. Because she is embarrassed, she has never called the teachers and told them any of this.

Sheila tries to make John accountable by giving him regular chores to do around the house. She has even gone so far as to make a list and place it on the refrigerator, where she checks off each one of his chores for the week as he finishes them. John often rebels and complains about having to do chores. Frequently, they end up shouting at one another. These episodes usually end with John storming off and yelling back at her, Dad doesn’t make me do so many of these stupid chores! Sometimes he throws in a You don’t love me like Dad! When John says these things, it breaks her heart. She wishes things could be different, but she doesn’t know what to do.

Tim works hard as an accountant. He puts in long hours and arrives back to his apartment after ten-hour days. He lives in an apartment because his wife kept the house in the divorce settlement. He is so tired after work that he usually gets fast food on his way home and eats in the tiny living room, watching television before going to bed.

He sees his son every other week, and when it is his turn to keep John for the weekend, he picks him up from the school at five p.m. on Friday. However, he must leave work early on Friday to pick John up, so he is usually crabby when he sees John—all he can think about is all the work he left behind on his desk. He knows he will have to work longer on Monday to make up the time. He and his son usually eat pizza on Friday nights. Because he is so tired, he goes to bed early. He knows John will play video games until well after midnight,