Surviving the Middle School Years: Commonsense Solutions for Complex Teen Problems and Behaviors
A Survival Guide for Families and Educators
A clearheaded review of the problems middle schoolers face, the childhood development guidebook Surviving the Middle School Years is filled with practical advice.
Noel Schmidt’s informative guide Surviving the Middle School Years is about navigating the multiple challenges and opportunities that middle schoolers face.
Key stages of mental development occur in the middle school years, the book notes. Knowing this, it promotes improved awareness of contemporary problems that arise during this influential period. Addressing key academic, social, and behavioral influences that drive a child’s brain and their neural pathways, it uses hypothetical case studies to illustrate its points. It also incorporates the perspectives of pupils, parents, and school personnel.
Covering a period from sixth to ninth grade, the eighteen chapters play on their anecdotes to emphasize how particular situations impact students—and to pronounce lessons that might be learned from them. Various forms of bullying, the impact of subpar versus inspiring teachers, devious and lying behaviors in children, and special education needs and learning disabilities are among the topics covered. Each scenario ends with a list of concise steps for tackling the problem to improve a child’s long-term cognitive health.
Each chapter is organized to maximum effect—introducing the affected student’s perspective, parents’ viewpoints, and the potential involvement of school personnel, showing the topics from all sides. A psychological bullying scenario, for instance, covers both the victim’s and the bully’s opinions. A child suffering in school due to his parents’ divorce describes his father as working “in an office somewhere, doing something with accounting and numbers”; elsewhere, a middle schooler abuses her mother’s prescription drugs and alcohol. And discernment between choices is modeled, too, as in the final chapter, which highlights two notional public schools for a newly relocated family’s seventh-grade daughter, using a series of questions to direct unbiased consideration of each.
The prose is straightforward and coherent, with each case study representing its everyday scenarios in a realistic manner. The proposed solutions are made applicable via specific steps that can be individualized, inspiring hope that all problems, no matter how complex, can be solved. Strong and open communication is upheld as a core value throughout. Indeed, the book does an able job of balancing diverse points of view, working toward tailored solutions for remedying negative repercussions on children’s social skills.
A succinct yet comprehensive guide to educating children in their formative years, Surviving the Middle School Years recommends ways to approach common problems with an eye toward healthy resolutions.
Reviewed by
Katy Keffer
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
