Join us for a special event with New York Times best-selling author, Judith Warner, to discuss her new book And Then They Stopped Talking To Me: Making Sense of Middle School. The evening will focus on how our ideas about middle school and, especially, middle schoolers came into being; how they affected us as children, lived on inside us as adults, and affect us as parents today.
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 are a time of great distress for children and parents 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.
Of the book, the New York Times writes: "“Warner knows of what she speaks,” Shannon Hale writes in her review. “Not only is the book well researched, but she also gets personal with her tales of middle school woe — both as a former student and as a parent. It is the caregivers of current middle schoolers who might gain the most solace and insight from this book, those who find that shepherding children through what was once called junior high brings back their own trauma in unexpectedly painful ways.””