As summer break comes to an end, there can be the anticipatory excitement of the new school year right alongside unsettling feelings. For many kids, it might be a new teacher, new kids, or the expectation of harder work. There are no easy solutions for alleviating this kind of anxiety other than having lots of conversations of reassurance with your kid that they know what to do, how to navigate their school, and how to interact with others. It is also a good idea to remind them to have faith in the adults, like their teacher, who knows how to have kids learn, work together, and get along.
This fall, I have a middle schooler—sort of. Although she is technically in sixth grade—“middle school”—she is attending a TK through eighth grade school and is not switching schools. She gets to have a different middle school experience from the one I had by remaining with the same kids and having a single teacher for instruction. In preparation for this change, my wife and I have been talking up the responsibilities of being in middle school, the increase in homework, and the need for more independence. As the reminders continue of what will come, my daughter will often ask about what middle school was like for my wife and me. We talk about the changing of teachers, the challenges of new curriculum, and the shuffling of friends as elementary schools combined into middle school. In actuality, I want to warn her about the awkward and public ways that puberty hits you, the horrible feelings of social comparison and exclusion with peers, and the clunky ways in which you figure out your personal sense of who you are, your identity. But I don’t want her to start her experience with doom and gloom. I am keenly aware of how much I need to provide her with the skills to navigate this transition.
For girls, self-esteem and confidence often go down in middle school. Because girls are naturally more attuned to social relationships, they are also more susceptible to social comparison with their peers and can turn those feelings of not fitting in inward, reducing self-esteem. A similar process can happen with confidence where the comfort and self-assuredness of childhood can give way to caution and self-doubt, awaiting the response of the peer group. In addition, for girls, research indicates that the relationship with dads, in particular, influences self-esteem. So, my job has been to build our relationship sufficiently and strongly enough to avoid or minimize the middle school self-esteem dip.
Boys’ self-esteem is not so vulnerable to social relationships at this time in life, but they are not immune. Boys’ self-esteem tends to dip more in early high school as physical differences become apparent. Athleticism becomes more central, and boys can feel less personal value if they cannot compete with their peers. For boys, the relationship with parents is more generally supportive for self-esteem and not as dad–daughter linked as it is for girls.
So, to prepare for the transition to middle school, we are having conversations about what being in middle school is about and about how the expectations increase for work as well as for self-management of tasks. It is harder to have conversations on managing the peer relationships that become so tangled in this phase of life. Our daughter, in her preteen way, is trying to understand why people behave the way they do and how to cope with them. We have conversations on how to respond to people who are being deliberately hurtful or mean to her. We have conversations on how to respond when people try to “ship” her for talking to a friend who is a boy (“shipping” is when others suggest that they are in a romantic relationship when romantic feelings have not yet been acknowledged or romantic intentions are not present). We have had conversations theorizing about why some kids say things aloud that are vulgar. Sometimes she will ask why one kid or another says something mean or excludes her, and I have to get her to identify why the child would choose to target her if she has done nothing deliberately wrong. I do this on purpose so that she practices not internalizing the comments of others and instead sees these slights as flaws in the instigator. With practice, she can avoid the chipping away at self-esteem that comes from these kinds of comments.
As the new school year arrives, it will be time to put the skills learned in all the conversations to the test. The best antidote for the first-day jitters is to remind kids of their own competence and successes in school and in the past. Entering into the school year with a positive attitude and anticipating success can lead to favorable outcomes. We are looking forward to a new school year and hope you are too!
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