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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
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English | |
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AND THEN THEY STOPPED TALKING TO ME
Making Sense of Middle School
The bestselling author of Perfect Madness trains her eye on the middle-school years: why they're so painful, how parents unwittingly make them worse, and what we can do about it.
The French have a name for the uniquely hellish years between elementary school and high school: "l'âge ingrat" or "The Ugly Age." Characterized by a perfect storm of developmental changes--physical, psychological, and social--the middle-school years, roughly the ages 11-14, are a time of great distress for parents and children alike, marked by hurt, isolation, exclusion, competition, anxiety, and often outright cruelty. Some of this is inevitable; there are intrinsic challenges to early adolescence. But these years are harder than they need to be, and Judith Warner believes that adults are complicit.
With piercing insight and compassion, Warner walks us through a new understanding of the role that the adolescent school years play in all our lives. She argues that today's parents are overly concerned with status and achievement--in some ways a residual effect of their own early teen experiences--and that this is worsening the self-consciousness, self-absorption and social "sorting" so typical of early adolescence.
Tracing a century of research on middle childhood and bringing together the voices of social scientists, psychologists, educators, and parents, Warner shows how adults can be moral role models for children, making them more empathetic, caring, and resilient. She encourages us to start treating middle schoolers as the complex people they are, holding them to high standards of kindness, and helping them see one another as more than "jocks and mean girls, nerds and sluts." Part cultural critique and part call to action, this essential book unpacks one of life's most formative periods and shows how we can help our children not only survive it, but thrive.
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 highly acclaimed 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.
With piercing insight and compassion, Warner walks us through a new understanding of the role that the adolescent school years play in all our lives. She argues that today's parents are overly concerned with status and achievement--in some ways a residual effect of their own early teen experiences--and that this is worsening the self-consciousness, self-absorption and social "sorting" so typical of early adolescence.
Tracing a century of research on middle childhood and bringing together the voices of social scientists, psychologists, educators, and parents, Warner shows how adults can be moral role models for children, making them more empathetic, caring, and resilient. She encourages us to start treating middle schoolers as the complex people they are, holding them to high standards of kindness, and helping them see one another as more than "jocks and mean girls, nerds and sluts." Part cultural critique and part call to action, this essential book unpacks one of life's most formative periods and shows how we can help our children not only survive it, but thrive.
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 highly acclaimed 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.
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Book
Published 2020-05-05 by Crown |