A Thousand Cuts

How not to be a knife-wielder during your kid's middle school years

When my kids were little, I instituted a “no headphones in the car” policy. We used road trip time to talk or listen to books through the car stereo, and even the five minute drive to school resulted in small shares and bits of information I didn’t otherwise get at home. The no headphones policy and side-by-side conversations became a habit that remains in effect today, and during a recent love drive, my adult kid and I had a pretty intense conversation about the ways we all put ourselves together and the stories we tell ourselves in our heads about who we are. The kid has been working through some hard things, and we began to dig at the sources of some of the decisions they’d made in middle school.

One of those decisions was about being noticed for the things they were interested in – everything from programming robots to playing Magic, The Gathering. They didn’t like the attention, and they didn’t want to get an ego about showing their intelligence, so they began shutting down. I asked if there was one specific incident they could remember – something someone said or did that caused them to dim their own light so it didn’t shine so brightly. My kid said that it wasn’t just one thing that stood out because middle school was basically just like a thousand cuts – none of them deep enough to draw blood by itself, but all of them together were more than enough to damage. Subtract the friend group that didn’t go to the same school, add puberty, and you’ve basically got the walking wounded.

My memory of their middle school years was of solo parenting for part of the year while Ed worked out of the country, of writing books, going to robotics tournaments, and not worrying too much about a kid who didn’t seem to need more than robotics mom support. Grades were good, moods were good, and if they seemed a little less talkative than before that was just being a teen, right?

Turns out, I was actually one of the knife-wielders on those thousand cuts. I apparently didn’t dig deeper on some of the things that interested them – glazing over when they talked, or not following up with questions – so they began to feel like their interests didn’t matter enough to talk about. The time I spent ferrying the robotics teams to and from tournaments, learning the rules and watching the matches wasn’t the same thing as really listening when they tried to explain a problem they were trying to solve with programming. I felt connected to my middle-schooler because I was so supportive of this one thing they did that I instinctively got (people, team dynamics, leadership, events – totally in my wheelhouse), but I didn’t go digging for the things I didn’t understand.

I remember being so amazed at the patience of my firstborn toddler when they were learning language. A word or phrase would be said that I wouldn’t get, and I’d guess, and I’d guess, and guess again until I finally deciphered what they were trying to communicate. They never got frustrated with me, maybe because I didn’t give up until I understood, and I was committed to teaching the words for everything they might need. But then they became fluent in the language of things, and because the words made sense, I stopped listening for the ideas they didn’t have words to say.

Language is so fascinating. We’ve somehow collectively agreed what “green” means while nature laughs at our flimsy attempt to wrangle green into just one thing. When a child learns language we assume they now have all the tools they need to communicate, meanwhile therapists and counselors can tell you definitively that most adults don’t even know what those tools look like, much less have them in their tool chests. I have all the excuses of months-on-end of solo parenting and writing books while caring for two kids and a dog during my kid’s middle school years, but the fact of the matter is that I stopped listening so closely to the words because I thought I knew what they meant.

What if we, as parents, shifted our thinking about language acquisition? The “terrible twos” are the time when frustrations boil over because toddler intentions aren’t being understood, and the teen years have a terrible reputation for defiance and surliness and silent retreat. What if we consider that language skills take a lifetime to learn? Speaking words that communicate needs is just one step on a lifelong journey that includes the communication of thoughts, feelings, interests, and desires. Communication is like a roundabout intersection that includes listening, clarifying, and understanding. It may not look like traffic is screwed up because everything’s still moving, but unless all the signs are really clear, you could go around the circle for hours without ever finding your way.

I parented the way I knew how to parent, so I can forgive myself for not knowing to do things differently. But if I knew then what I understand now, I would have asked and asked and asked until I understood everything my kids didn’t know they didn’t have the words to say. I would have taken the headphones of work and responsibility and adulting out of my own ears, and treated every phase of their childhood as a period of language acquisition – from the language of things, through the language of feelings, to the language of ideas, hopes, and dreams. If I had the chance to do things differently, the thousand cuts of middle school would have had one less knife-wielder who was instead armed with a tin of green medicine salve and a fascination with everything my kids didn’t yet have the words to say.