And Then They Stopped Talking to Me

We ve all been there.

It might have happened last week.

Picking up your son outside his middle school, you watched as he stood on the sidewalk while his classmates swirled around him, leaving for sleepovers, birthday celebrations, or impromptu parties that came together right under his nose. His frozen smile as he stood there, hanging in until the last minute in the hope that an invitation might come his way, made you crumble inside. As did the knowledge that, other than try to offer up an alternative weekend plan for family fun which he would undoubtedly dismiss as just sad there was nothing you could do to help.

It might have happened last year.

You bought your daughter a too-expensive white Abercrombie dress for her eighth-grade graduation because, she said, everybody was wearing one, and you knew how badly she wanted to fit in. But, on the morning of the ceremony, when she went to join her classmates, you realized that everybody was, in fact, only the clique of rich, popular girls who had dropped her two years earlier. They were all lined up, posing as their parents snapped pictures. When they saw your daughter walking toward them, they burst into laughter. And their parents who, not so long ago, had been your friends laughed, too.

Or it might have happened a long time ago.

You walked into your seventh-grade homeroom on the first day of school a couple of minutes late and saw that everyone was pushing desks together into friend-group clusters. Your best friend was waiting for you, but now the two of you made just a lonely little desk dyad, and all your other friends seemed, very happily, to have moved on. As the teacher took attendance, you wondered: Had some new friendship map been drawn up over the summer? Would there ever be an opportunity to reconfigure the geometry? You didn t look at your friend, and she didn t look at you, but as you both sat there uncomfortably, you knew that she was wondering the very same thing.

Middle school is

Judith Warner is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety and Hillary Clinton: The Inside Story, as well as the award-winning We ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication. A senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Warner has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times, where she wrote the popular Domestic Disturbances column, as well as numerous other publications.

Fascinating . . . well researched . . . Judith Warner interviews scores of fellow middle school survivors in her accomplished and highly readable new book. . . . She also gets personal with her tales of middle school woe both as a former student and as a parent. Shannon Hale, The New York Times Book Review
 
With clarity, compassion, and insight, And Then They Stopped Talking to Me brilliantly captures the landscape of kids experiences today and the psychological, familial, and cultural forces shaping them. Along the way, Warner debunks age-old myths and offers practical guidance that every parent can use. This is a gift to our kids and their future selves. Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Judith Warner offers both fascinating social history and practical advice on a life-stage that sends many adults into a PTSD spiral. She shows how, by compassionately revisiting their own pasts, parents can truly support early adolescents in developing the building blocks for long-term happiness. Peggy Orenstein, author of Boys & Sex and Girls & Sex

I don t know a single adult who did not feel alone, insecure, or deeply self-conscious in middle school. Warner puts the pieces of the puzzle together to show us just how not-alone we were. Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out and Enough As She Is

I have often advised parents not to allow themselves to be sucked back into middle school when they see their children s distress or hear their war stories. But I had no guidebook to offer them. Now I do. Michael G. Thompson, co-author of Raising Cain

Warner has written a compulsively readable book . . . I only wish I d had it on my bedside table when my own kids were adolescents. But I d actually recommend it for parents at any stage, as it holds a mirror up to us as much as to our kids.