Hectic Holiday or Holiday Hum Drum...

So the holidays bring on plenty of stress without having a teenager in the house.  But, the years of middle school mayhem are inevitable....
So,here is some basic survival information about teenagers, middle schools, and the holidays.
1.  Gift Giving --if young teenagers are involved in a relationship, the questions of appropriate gifts come to the surface.  Is it too early for jewelry, what clothing items are appropriate (no lingerie), what if you buy a gift for person that you care for, but the feelings are unappreciated.  Some tips about appropriate gift buying in middle school include:  Stay within your price range, look for subtle hints about what your boy/girlfriend likes, and start slow (no diamonds engagement rings in 7th grade, and yes it has happened)(http://www.wikihow.com/Pick-the-Perfect-Gift-for-Your-Boyfriend-or-Girlfriend-in-Middle-School)

               


2.  School Break--While teachers are counting down the number of days between and Thanksgiving and Christmas vacation (13 days from today for those of you who are wondering! but I am not counting or anything like that).  Any....way, the issue at hand here is that schools provide a lot of consistency for students.  It is the place that students spend time with their friends, eat two of their three meals during the day, and make connections with their teachers and staff members.  During the winter break, depending on what day those holidays fall, some schools can be out for an entire two weeks.  (Teachers unfortunately have to stay at home as well :)  you can't teach when the students are there, oh darn!  For some students, this means a break in consistency and structure.  The greater majority of students do well with structure and consistency, and they is the true reason why so many are really ready to return to school when the January winds begin to blow.  There are some great tips of things to do with your students all over the internet.  It is a google search that will be outdone before the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve.  But, if that is too much work, here are few quick tips:  have a regular mealtime during break just like at school (it helps to keep the routine), build in time during each day for learning or hands on activities (video games do not count here!), try to maintain a regular bedtime (even if it is later than a usual school night).                            

3.  Keep up with the Jones'--or the Smith's, or the Tyler's or the Johnson's, or whomever your student's best friend's last name during this holiday season.  After opening presents during your particular holiday season, the second best thing is finding out what everyone else got.  Social Media makes this process faster and easier for teens to click away during the ceremonial gift giving process.  However, it also makes it worse for those students that don't receive gifts that are up to par with the rest of the social group to which they belong.  So, how do we tackle this dreadful and age old problem of  "I got better gifts than you"?  Simply by giving!! Make the focus of your holiday about giving instead of receiving.  Let's be the people that change
"I got better gifts than you" to "I gave gifts, did you?"
Finally remember, most of all, to make memories with your students.  Before long, you will be wishing them back into these years of middle school mayhem.  You will long for the fights in the kitchen, the laughter in the living room, and the scamper of feet on these cold winter mornings as they quickly fade back to the school schedule in January!!!
  

Wishing you and yours the best of holiday seasons of whichever you choose to celebrate.  Celebrate it with love, with family, and with laughter!!!! 

Lean on Me....

Sometimes in our lives
We all have pain, we all have sorrow
But if we are wise
We know that there's always tomorrow

Lean on me when you're not strong
And I'll be your friend, I'll help you carry on
For it won't be long
'Til I'm gonna need somebody to lean on

These are lyrics from one of my favorite songs--"Lean on Me".  And they are perfect for the topic that has been on my mind most of this week.  

It has become blatantly obvious how easy it is for me to take for granted the simple things that I have at my disposal everyday.  Access to healthcare, medication, healthy children, and family support seemed to at the top of the list throughout the week.  

I hadn't really taken into consideration how fortunate it was for me to be able to understand each person that I encounter every day.  When I walk into a hospital seeking medical attention for my children, I have no problem communicating my needs or problems to the nurses and doctors.  In an eye opening experience this week, I realized it is a luxury that I take for granted.  Not being able to tell someone how my child is hurting or not understanding what a doctor is telling me would be so frustrating when my child needs help.  As parents we just want the best for our children, and when our children are in crisis, anything that prevents us from getting help for our children just escalates the crisis even more.  

To complicate the matters, how do you know where to schedule your medical appointments.  Could you go to France and find a dentist?  Could you go to Mexico and find a doctor?  These are all daily tasks  fluent English speaking people just go into naturally in this country because they are just basic daily activities.  

All of this is a long round about way to say that I think we need to help people be more aware of what resources are available in our communities.  United Way has a great way to start.  2-1-1!  If you dial 2-1-1, you will be connected to an agent to help get you connected to services in your community.  These services range from Basic Human Needs, Physical and Mental Health Resources, Work Initiatives, Support for Seniors, Children, Youth, Families, and People with Disabilities, and  Volunteering opportunities!  This would have been a great resource for the family in need of translation services.  Helping that family getting hooked into their community and finding local resources for medical care for their children will increase school attendance, improve the students self esteem, and increase grade performance.  

We all need someone to lean on in a time of crisis, new communities, and unfamiliar territories.  Who can you lean on to help you through those rough times?  But, more importantly, who can lean on you???

Good Grief...

There are plenty of things that parents expect to happen during the three years of middle school.  Puberty, parties, and painful trips to the mall to name a few!  While middle school has become a rite of passage for the generation that we are serving now, there are some experiences that we would prefer they did without.  And Grief would be at the top of that list.  Losing parents, classmates or even teachers just isn't what comes to mind when you think of sending your student off to school each day. Unfortunately, there are way too many students having to experience these intense emotions during one of the most difficult physical transitions of their lives.  While the body is already sending them on an emotional and hormonal roller coaster, a significant loss serves to complicate the process even more.
Grief is a natural process that everyone goes through, but, as with many other emotions, adults complicate the process with other emotions like pride, anger and ego.  Helping a child to process their grief while the adult is also grieving can be a difficult as well.
While most of the blogs that I have been focusing on have been discussing the trials and tribulations of the interactions of middle school students, the number of middle school students grieving the loss of a loved one has crept up and become a prominent part of my weekly schedule.
Many of these students are trying to make sense of their new life and sudden loss all while trying to understand this new body they are living in and find out who they really are.
Luckily for these parents and families, there are some great resources out there.  My go to book for grieving children is "When Children Grieve" by John W. James and Russell Friedman.  I came upon this book at the recommendation of my favorite pastor.  She recommended that I read it to process some of my own unresolved grief issues.  After I finished reading the copy that she loaned me, I knew I would have to have my own copy for future reference.  And refer to it I have, on a very regular basis I will add.

One of the best pieces of advise this book offers is to let the child grieve in their own way.  While adults can model appropriate ways to grieve, allow each child to grieve in the way they see fit.  Younger students will grieve in a simple and uncomplicated manor.  Adults let emotions, guilt, anger and pride get in the way of processing the true emotions of our grief.  An important thing to keep in mind for your child is to model the grieving process and not hide it from them. Grief is a natural part of our human existence.  Acknowledging that you are struggling and sad gives your child permission to acknowledge their own feelings.  There are many ways for adolescents to process through their feelings of grief and loss, and they don't have to look like a group counseling session in your living room.  Sometimes it means looking through old pictures, remembering old times, or reminiscing about your favorite memory of the person who is now gone.  All these activities help the healing process and validate the students feeling of loss.  While the adolescents are looking to discover who they are about to become, working through their grief and loss can help them to remember who they were!

8 things all girls should have...

This entire blog post is about a fantastic list that I found on my Twitter account.  http://funnzoo.com/site/post/502

The thing I like most about this list is that it is not a list of materialist things that you purchase at high end salons or fashion boutiques.  These items are begotten, they are earned , they are achieved.  Young women (and men for that matter) are looking for affiliation and inclusion in their social groups through their sense of style and personality.  What this list expresses to young adults is the most important thing that you can put on everyday is what ever makes you feel your best.  

Take the example of the perfume.  When I was in high school, I always wore Liz Claibourne perfume that came in a yellow triangle bottle.  ( I understand that you young peeps have no idea about this product, but it was the rage, I promise).  Anyway, if there was another girl who wore that specific fragrance, she may encounter a comment such as "Oh, that is Sara's favorite".  Which rarely was taken very kindly by the person on the receiving end.  But, that fragrance was as known to me as my red hair--inseparable.  And , I never left home without it.  More importantly than the actual fragrance or the type of bottle it came in, was how that made me feel.  I loved the compliments that I received when I wore that fragrance, and I loved how I felt when I wore it.  I felt beautiful.  Now, at the beginning of the post, I said you couldn't purchase the items on this list, they had to been earned.  You technically can purchase perfume, bracelets, and sunglasses to give you that look or scent that makes you, you.  But the real point here is about becoming the person that you want to be.  With the attributes on this list, making friends and the social awkwardness of middle school mayhem will fall away.  

That is what this list is trying to do for young people.  Help them find the things to make them feel beautiful, make them feel strong, make them feel empowered, and make them feel powerful.  

Challenging Changes...

We are well into the school year and the rumor mills are turning faster than windmill in Western KS.  (a joke most students won't get :) )  I knew that this would be part of the job when I moved to the middle school population, but what I didn't count on was how constant and complicated the problems would get.  Tangled webs is an understatement compared to what some of the middle school students are able to create here.  If these students spent half of the energy on their classwork as they do on these rumors and deceitful comments, we would have a school full of scholars. 
The teasing and the rude comments are hard enough when you are in middle school, and they lead to attendance problems all across the country.  However, the deceitful comments and straight out lies about the other students are the problems that are causing the greatest difficulty for many of the students.  There are students having to choose sides and pick between friends when the story doesn't have any truth to it in the first place.  Does anyone else remember playing the telephone game when they were in elementary school or at sleep overs?  You remember the game, where you sit in a circle and someone says something crazy, but they can only say it one time.  The next person has to repeat the sentence as they heard it, and so it goes.  Those are the politics of middle school.
Re-reading over the last several blogs, it is a wonder that any of us survived middle school at all.  But times are different now.  Social media is making middle school a different game altogether.  The best analogy I can come up with is that when we were kids we shopped with cash, and now our kids are shopping with debit cards.
Not that what we did was wrong, or what our kids are doing is wrong either.  It is just different.  A saying from my old school was "What we know today, doesn't make yesterday wrong, it makes tomorrow better".



With that information in hand, parents we have to start arming ourselves with the same information that our kids have.  We need to educate ourselves on the social media forms that you are kids are using.  We need to know how to use their forms of technology so that we can monitor and supervise them with an educated mind.
Parents, we can not control every aspect of our student's lives (trust me I have tried, and they are very resistant to that process).  However, we can continue to have informed conversations with our students.  I am not talking about the hard conversations about sex, drugs, and violence.  I am talking about everyday conversations about how their friends are doing, where they are going, and how they are spending their time on their devices.  Have your student teach you the latest and greatest new social media craze.  What a great way to empower a child, learn a new skill, and develop your relationship.  Who said middle school had to be all bad?

...And there is more

It is so strange how some things happen, but one of my co-workers (Thanks Michele!) sent me article that I felt had to be shared.  I am working really  hard to make sure that I blog each week, but this one really couldn't wait.

In Middle School, I frequently get confronted by students stating that they have been bullied. Bullying is the new buzz word.  But this article does a great job of talking about the differences in rude behavior, mean behavior, and bullying behavior.  I couldn't have said it better myself.  Take the time to read and review with your student.  

Rude vs. Mean vs. Bullying

Girls vs. Boys, there is a difference!

We have surely all heard of the school yard bully that took lunch money from the scrawny little kid in a alley on the way to school.  When we discuss bullying that is the image that comes to mind for many of us.  But unfortunately, bullying has taken on many different forms and fashions here in the fourteenth year of the twenty-first century.
The thing that is becoming glaringly apparent is that boys and girls both participate in bullying, but they do so in a very different way.  Boys tend to play out the physical aspects of bullying: fighting,  taking lunch money, and teaming up against one kid. Girls are another story entirely.  They can be downright evil with their behavior.  Now, before everyone starts getting mad at me, I am not saying that girls are evil. (In fact, some of my favorite people are the girls). It is some of their behaviors that are evil.  Relational aggression is the term being used to define girl bullying.  This term is more accurate than bullying because girls use their RELATIONSHIPS to gain power over others.  Some examples of this include exclusion, spreading rumors, and reveling secrets.  Girls can be cruel and demeaning with their behavior.  This relational aggression is what keeps my door revolving during the school day.  "...This person said this about me, and now my best friend doesn't like me anymore."  "Why does my friend believe those rumors when they know that they aren't true?"  And so goes the angst of the middle school mayhem.
So, why have I gone of this little tyrant telling you about the difference between girl and boys and their bullying styles?  Great question!!  My sole intention is to let everyone know that bullying no longer fits in a neat little box like it used to when Ralphy was walking home from school in "The Christmas Story" facing his school yard bully.



Bullying takes on the face of the girls in the movie mean girls.



Anyone can be bully, and anyone can be a target.  Our next steps are teaching our students resiliency and how to handle the bullying behavior.  While we can not prevent our students from becoming a target, we can prevent them from becoming a victim!