And then they stopped talking to me : making sense of middle school

"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 parents and children alike, marked by hurt, isolation, exclusion, competition, anxiety, and often outright cruelty. Some of this is inevitable; there are intrinsic ch...