Forget about it; it's middle school

There was a minute when I thought the book that the O.G. “Mean Girls” sourced from was about my middle school experience. In about 6th or 7th grade, some grad students from Northwestern University came to my school to meet with us after hours in the library so they could take notes while we girls ate snacks and discussed why we were all being so awful to each other.

It was much the same stuff from the movie—three-way phone call bombing, “accidentally” letting each other see nasty things we’d written about each other in our notebooks, taking turns being the one on the outs from your main friend group while you hopefully/shamefacedly tried to approach another group of interim friends in the meantime. Just like in the movie, we started off by discussing one girl in particular, and then, to spice things up, she joined the group.

It was a little bit of a letdown to watch the movie and realize that this type of experience was fairly universal and not limited to our tiny Catholic school in Evanston, IL. We thought we had invented being so awful that we would be studied by academics. But a bright side of “Mean Girls,” was that at least even if it wasn’t about just us, the movie would at least shine a light on this type of strategic, pointless cruelty and eliminate it forever.

…

Now, normally, I think it’s rude when more experienced parents do the “just wait; it gets worse” thing to parents with younger kids. It’s dismissive and demeans the current phase, which has its own challenges. There is no easy phase. Some phases are more straightforward than others. They say, “Bigger kids, bigger problems,” but also, many bigger kids can do things for themselves, articulate their feelings, and even be helpful and fun to talk to.

But then there’s middle school.

I remember when I was on the school board of our PreK-8 school when both my kids were in elementary school. The 6th-grade moms had so many questions, problems, and issues! We could go home early if it wasn’t for them bringing up so many points with the administration. Now I know. That wasn’t them being a bunch of Karens with their random bunch of bad kids: that was the grade. Now it’s me telling tales of out-of-pocket tweens to elementary school parents who probably are thinking “What is with these kids? How did the parents let them get this way?”

Something happens when tweens hit a certain grade (sometimes older or younger than 6th, depending on the school/kids), and they start gravitating toward the kind of behavior and mindsets we hoped we’d never have to deal with after our first go-around and if you’re not ready for it, it’s a little breathtaking.

I realize now I kind of assumed that if we endured a hard time in adolescence ourselves, we could learn from those experiences and save our kids (and us!) from the heartache of them going through it the same way. If we poured enough emphasis on kindness, justice, doing the right thing, self-confidence, and the spirit of giving to our little kids, it would inoculate them and protect them from the hard transitions to come and make them grateful for what they have and stand up to peer pressure. If we told them enough stories about how kids were mean to us when we were young (or how we were mean to other people) they would hear us and avoid those pitfalls.