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My daughter started middle school this week. I won’t bore you with all the “where did the time go?” and “it feels like only yesterday that she was torturing us with colic for the first 6 months of her life.” While it’s all true, I’ve made peace with it. Hitting 40 has a way of doing that for you.
Watching her get up an hour and half earlier, take more time with her hair than ever before and haul off a backpack that made her look like she was attempting Mt. Everest brought back memories of trying to survive middle school myself. Some good, most horrifying.
Starting middle school is a defining time in your life. Well, it was for me at least. I knew that leaving 5th grade for “the show” meant that I had to change up my entire world. It’s when I made the life changing decisions to feather my hair, not always wear a shirt with a Seattle sports team on it, and I knew I had to get a girlfriend. A major line had to be crossed from kid to guy. And I’ll be damned if I wasn’t crossing it.
My daughter begged us to let her ride the bus. She just had to — and would “die” if we didn’t let her. Just like I knew that I had to start feathering my hair, she knew that she couldn’t have her dad drop her off at school and risk someone hearing 80′s music (gasp) or having him yell out one of her 77 nicknames with toilet paper on his shoe. I was hesitant since nothing good happens on the bus. Nothing. The bus was witness to some crazy moments back in the early 80′s.
It was on the bus during my first day of 6th grade when I decided I needed a girlfriend — it almost less of deciding that I needed one, and more that I thought you just had one. Almost like they issued you one on the first day. Or just paired you up. I started surveying the bus finding a couple candidates that still wouldn’t look my way 5 years later.
I sat further back than I wanted to because legend has it: some 6th graders never returned from the back of the bus with the stoners, bullies and burnouts. And while I wasn’t technically in the back of the bus one day during on my way home, I was close enough to hear what was going on. They were taking mushrooms, and not the kind that saute up nicely with a little butter. I stuck my head in a book and held my breath the rest the way home. These were the kids that we’re horrified that our kids to start to hang out with. They scared the hell out of me back then, and still do today — for a completely different reason.
This all brings me back to the title of the post, “Will Your Kids Survive Middle School.” To a certain extent, how we’ve raised them the past 11 or 12 years will be telling.
If you’ve done your job as a dad and taught them the skills and lessons of how to survive in the real world, then you’re good — that’s 90% of the work. And remember, next to providing and protecting, teaching them how to survive in a cruel world is about the most important thing we can do. If you over-protected them, it could get rough. The last 10% however; has to be done tactically. It has to be short, to the point and it has to stick.
I only really gave my daughter two big pieces of advice about middle school, but in reality I could have written a book about it. I could have told her about how others will start gunning for her, about how the showers after P.E. bring little surprises and horrifying sights, that tuna fish is a terrible choice in a paper bag, and how kids go completely insane when they hit 12 or 13.
Instead, the two pieces of advice I chose were: stick up for yourself and your friends, and realize that boys will start looking at you in a whole new light, so proceed with caution. I didn’t beat this into the ground and we had the discussion while shoe shopping so I think she was actually listening.
This is the first real test for us as parents. Middle school/junior high is their first step out into that real world by themselves — and one with real world problems. Now we’ll really see how we’re doing as parents.
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