{"id":2278,"date":"2020-05-05T07:41:58","date_gmt":"2020-05-05T12:41:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/?p=2278"},"modified":"2020-05-05T08:34:28","modified_gmt":"2020-05-05T13:34:28","slug":"an-interview-with-judith-warner-about-her-new-book-on-middle-schoolers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2020\/05\/05\/an-interview-with-judith-warner-about-her-new-book-on-middle-schoolers\/","title":{"rendered":"An Interview with Judith Warner about her new book on Middle Schoolers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Judith Warner is the author of is the author of nine non-fiction books, including the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0bestsellers,\u00a0Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety<\/em>, and\u00a0Hillary Clinton: The Inside Story,<\/em> plus the multiple award-winning\u00a0We\u2019ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication<\/em>. In her new book released today, And Then They Stopped Talking to Me: Making Sense of Middle School<\/a>, she reports on her interviews with middle school children and their parent’s about parenting middle schoolers in today’s society.\u00a0 I recently had the opportunity to interview her about her book:<\/p>\n

AK:<\/strong> As a parent I hear a lot in the media about “helicopter parents” and how they are ruining their children .But I also get the impression that being a helicopter parent (or “intensive parenting”) might be the best way to make sure my kids will succeed in a competitive society. After doing your research, what do you think of intensive parenting?\u00a0 Why do we do it, and is it really ruining our kids?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

JW: <\/strong>The longer I have been a parent, and the more experts I have interviewed over the past 15 or so years, the more I\u2019ve become firmly convinced that our ability to \u201cruin\u201d our children is as limited as our ability to create, much less perfect them. That is to say: we can tinker around the edges, but they are who they are, with so much of who they are hard-wired at birth. I find enormous comfort in this, as I think all parents do once they reach this point \u2013 usually when their kids are in college, but sometimes before \u2013 of understanding the limitations of their power. That said: there\u2019s certainly a lot we can do to make their time at home more or less pleasant or miserable, and there are things we can try, at least, to do to equip them to live their lives with as much strength and resilience as possible.<\/p>\n

Middle school really is the time when that issue of equipping them with those tools becomes particularly urgent. After all, it\u2019s a difficult time for most kids \u2013 the time that many adults remember as the most painful of their lives. It\u2019s also, and has long been, a very difficult time for parents, and the style in which we parent today \u2013 some call it \u201chelicopter,\u201d others \u201cintensive\u201d parenting; I tend to think of it just as enmeshment \u2013 makes it far tougher still. For us. <\/em>Many parents of my generation \u2013 the older end of Gen X, though this is certainly true for at least the younger portion of Baby Boomers, too \u2013 grew up with more or less \u201cMad Men\u201d-style parenting. And many of us came out of it feeling kind of under-parented, like we weren\u2019t really seen, and our feelings weren\u2019t validated. So much parent behavior that falls into the helicopter category comes from this, I believe. There\u2019s also, of course, enormous anxiety about our kids\u2019 future (and our own future), stemming from a great deal of status insecurity in the middle and upper middle class. (Lower-income parents deal with all kinds of anxiety and insecurity, too, but they tend not to be accused of helicopter parenting and tend not to have the time to engage in it with the level of frenzy we see among the affluent.)<\/p>\n

All of which gets me to the part of your question about success: Experts believe that helicopter parenting is bad for kids \u2013 it undermines their sense of self-efficacy, prevents their developing resiliency and \u201cgrit,\u201d etc. I\u2019m sure this is true. But there\u2019s a cynical side of me that has come to believe that these parents do, indeed, prepare their kids well for success in the world of the privileged, in that they very often convey the values necessary for navigating a highly unequal and status-driven world where the rules are different for the wealthy and well-connected. Helicopter parents pull out all the stops to make sure their own kids\u2019 interests come first; this usually gets dressed up in the much nicer-sounding phrase, \u201cthey advocate for their kids.\u201d Those with sufficient money and time on their hands to spend enormous amounts of time in their kids\u2019 schools, volunteering in the classroom, fundraising, etc., recent studies have shown, do get preferential treatment for their kids. Those who \u2013 later on \u2013 micromanage their kids\u2019 school work, even, at the extremes, writing their papers, genuinely do get them better grades. None of this is right; none of it is good for kids in a human, character-building, problem-solving sense. But if your goal is success at all costs in a world that runs on knowing how to game every system, then, in a certain sense, you do make your kids more successful.<\/p>\n

AK:<\/strong> I went to middle school in the 1990s; my daughters will both start middle school in the 2020s. How will their experience be different than mine?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

JW: <\/strong>The biggest change will, of course, be the ubiquity of social media: whatever sorts of social drama you remember will now be able to play out 24\/7, and unless adults in your community (hopefully led by teachers and schools) set rules around access to screens, there will potentially be no escape from it. Another change, depending on the type of school your daughters are in and the type of community you live in, will be, if current trends continue, that the level of pressure middle schoolers are under will be nothing like what you remember. They\u2019ll already be talking about college and what they have to do to get in. They may be studying math at a level you didn\u2019t encounter until high school. They \u2013 or their classmates \u2013 may already be attracting the attention of college recruiters if they\u2019re exceptional athletes. They\u2019ll be wondering what their special talent is \u2013 so on top of the usual and age-old worries about whether they\u2019re good-looking enough and popular enough, etc. they\u2019ll also worry about whether they\u2019re successful enough.<\/p>\n

All that said, I also think you\u2019ll see, as I did, that middle schoolers themselves have not really changed. I was surprised to discover this when my own daughters were in middle school in the early 2010s. We\u2019d been hearing for decades how sped-up and racy and dangerous everything had become; that middle schoolers were yesterday\u2019s high schoolers in terms of their sexual knowledge and risk-taking behavior. In fact, reading the news, there was \u2013 and continues to be \u2013 every reason to believe that they were all but sociopathic. But I didn\u2019t find anything like that at all. I was a middle schooler (though people were in \u201cjunior high\u201d then) in the late 1970s, in New York City. It was a time when there was far more sexualization \u2013 and unquestioned sexualization \u2013 of girls of middle school age. (I vaguely remembered this but re-discovering with adult eyes the way that girls like Brooke Shields were described in the media back then was absolutely shocking.) My world was full of crime and a general kind of urban rot; other adults I interviewed described sex and drugs everywhere, and a lot of parents were out to lunch. My daughters\u2019 world was far safer and more child-like. The kids around them behaved pretty much exactly the way I remembered my peers behaving decades before. If anything, the culture had changed in ways that meant they were, at least on the surface, somewhat nicer: there was an awareness of bullying, and that it was unacceptable. Expressions of racism or homophobia were unacceptable. Studies have backed up my anecdotal observations. They show that in recent years middle schoolers are far less likely to drink, take drugs, have sex or go on dates than they were a generation ago \u2013 partly <\/em>because they\u2019re spending so much time on social media.<\/p>\n

My research for the book, which traces how adults have looked at, thought about, and written about kids in the years around puberty for over a century in the U.S., has redoubled my feeling, based on personal experience, that we have to be super-skeptical of any reports on how dangerous or otherwise bad things are among middle schoolers. Adults have been catastrophizing about them since the early 1960s. And the narrative through which they do so is pretty much always the same: these kids aren\u2019t kids anymore. Because of earlier puberty, they\u2019re getting into sex earlier, etc. That, at least, was the predominant narrative from the early 60s through the late 2000s. I think it\u2019s calmed down since. But the panic about sexting and the general evils of social media has replaced it. Once again, social media plays a huge role in middle schoolers\u2019 lives, but that role is not terribly different than the use to which we put analog forms of communication (land lines and notes passed in class) in the past. I think it\u2019s important not to exaggerate the dangers and vilify it, because doing so can actually let adults off the hook from thinking concretely and productively about how to educate kids in handling it. We used to talk a lot about media literacy \u2013 we need social media literacy now, i.e. to give kids an understanding that what they view on line is curated, that they need to think critically about what they\u2019re viewing, and whether their own behavior on or around social media serves them well.<\/p>\n

AK: <\/strong>\u00a0What did you find most surprising when doing research for this book?<\/em><\/p>\n

JW: <\/strong>As I mentioned a moment ago, discovering how much middle schoolers of my daughters\u2019 generation were essentially just like the sixth, seventh and eighth graders I remembered from the past really was eye-opening. Another thing that really surprised me was discovering that many of the most basic and essential truths about early adolescence were known to researchers back at the turn of the 20th<\/sup> century. Late 19th<\/sup> century brain research had shown that kids undergo significant cognitive changes right around puberty, and that those changes were likely due to changes in the brain \u2013 not in its size, but in its structure and functioning and, in particular, the nature of its connectivity due to myelination. Educators in the early junior high school reform movement \u2013 who advocated separating out 7th<\/sup> and 8th<\/sup> graders from their old K-8 schools and putting them in new institutions with 9th<\/sup> graders where they could enjoy an education specially tailored for their unique needs \u2013 knew that kids the same age in the years around puberty varied enormously in their levels of physical, emotional and intellectual maturity, and that this unusually high degree of variability was absolutely normal. They knew that kids at the younger end often appeared not to be good students and were at risk of being seen, or thinking of themselves as \u201cnot smart,\u201d but that intelligence had nothing to do with it. For that reason, they advocated very strongly for individualized instruction in what are now the middle school years, using the very same terms of argument you\u2019ll hear today. They didn\u2019t get it \u2013 and neither did the proponents of the middle school movement in the 1960s. We still don\u2019t have it today.<\/p>\n

I also was surprised at just how emotional my interviews turned out to be. My central interest, when I embarked upon writing this book, was in finding out how people\u2019s middle school experiences lived on in them throughout their lives: what they had experienced, how they had experienced it, and how they had turned their memories into their stories of self afterwards. I wanted to know how middle school and its vicissitudes lived on in adults and impacted them throughout their lives, especially as parents. I was knocked off my feet by the volume of response to my initial queries. If I\u2019d interviewed everyone who expressed interest, I\u2019d still be at it today, five years later. The interviews were one-on-one, and they usually lasted about two hours. Many people cried. I saw that, if you say to someone, \u201cTell me about your middle school experience,\u201d you\u2019d soon get their entire lives in a nutshell. This remains the part of the book that fascinates me the most.<\/p>\n

Judith Warner<\/a>\u00a0is currently a\u00a0Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Journalism Fellow with the Women Donors Network’s Reflective Democracy Campaign.\u00a0She is a contributing writer for\u00a0The\u00a0New York Times Magazine,\u00a0was a contributing columnist for the\u00a0Times\u00a0and a special correspondent for\u00a0Newsweek\u00a0in Paris, and has freelanced for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Arielle Kuperberg, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at UNC Greensboro, and the editor of the CCF Blog @The Society Pages. Follow her on twitter @ATKuperberg<\/a>\u00a0or email her at atkuperb@uncg.edu.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Judith Warner is the author of is the author of nine non-fiction books, including the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0bestsellers,\u00a0Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, and\u00a0Hillary Clinton: The Inside Story, plus the multiple award-winning\u00a0We\u2019ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication. In her new book released today, And Then They Stopped Talking to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2095,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38855],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-three-questions"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2095"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2278"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2282,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278\/revisions\/2282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}