Surviving Middle School: a Parent’s Guide

AFTERBIRTH: Parenting by Jennifer McCoy

Surviving Middle School

I think I would have flunked Middle School if I were going through it now. These 6th Grade Teachers are INTENSE! The emails they send, the hours of homework they assign, the sheer number of details the tweeners are expected to remember is both awesome and daunting. I genuinely cannot read their school schedules because they are too complicated and don’t have a legend to tell you what anything means. I think I must have been preparing my child for pre-school, not college, all these years. Could I really suck as a parent that much? Don’t answer that! Here I thought I was nurturing independent people by planned sleeping-in so the kids had to rummage for their own breakfast. These could be future valuable forest foraging skills! I’m creating little Survivor castaway contestants!

surviving middle school
credit: someecards
Why is making them sleep in their clothes they are going to wear the next morning deemed “lazy”? I call it efficient, and a way to sleep for five extra minutes. Clean clothes are just going to get morning cereal smeared on them. Am I right, or am I right? What others call lazy parenting, I call independence-building. Aren’t kids pretty much self-sufficient after age five? Five years is a really long time to dedicate to watching after other people, even people you are related to. Prison sentences are often not even that long, unless it’s a drug-related offense, and then you’re in the Big House for a decade. Geez, and I’m expected to remember when their birthdays are, what shoe size they wear (stop changing already!) and what their favorite animal is. It’s all too much work. Not to mention the drama, the tears and defiance. And often, complete sweetness.
surviving middle school
credit: someecards

 
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