Is Middle School Or High School Harder For Teens? What I Learned As A Mom And Teacher
Last week, I sat at my kitchen table grading 7th grade argumentative essays at 7pm, half-drunk cold coffee next to my laptop, when my 11th grader Lila dropped her backpack next to my stack of papers and slumped into a chair. “I don’t get why everyone acts like middle school is the worst,” she said, pulling out her half-eaten granola bar. “High school’s way harder. No one tells you that.”
I’d heard this a hundred times from parents, but most of the time it’s the reverse: parents come to my middle school parent nights white-knuckled, saying they’re just surviving middle school and counting down to high school, when kids are supposedly more mature, less dramatic. I’ve taught middle school for eight years, so I know the drama. I’ve held a girl while she cried in the hallway after her best friend left her off a group chat. I’ve mediated arguments over stolen hoodies and wrong lunch tables. I’ve graded essays written on the bus on the way to school because a kid forgot to do it the night before.
But as I watched Lila pull up her AP Bio syllabus on her phone, muttering about how her teacher never reminds anyone of tests, I realized she was right. The hard parts are just different. Middle school’s hard is loud, messy, and out in the open. High school’s hard is quieter, and it sneaks up on both kids and parents.
A month ago, I had a new 7th grader named Mia who showed up to homeroom without her lunch, and no money in her account. She stood by my desk, red-eyed, too embarrassed to tell anyone, and I pulled an extra granola bar out of my drawer, walked her to the cafeteria to add money to her account, and texted her mom right away to let her know what happened. That same week, Lila came home from school furious that she’d missed a field trip for her art class. She’d signed up two months earlier, wrote it down in her planner, and no one reminded her. No one called me to check why she wasn’t on the bus. No one emailed to ask where she was. I had no idea the field trip was even happening until she walked in the door upset.
That’s the difference no one talks about. Middle school is built with scaffolding. Most schools know middle schoolers are still learning how to manage their time and advocate for themselves, so teachers check planners every morning, the office calls parents if a kid is even 10 minutes late, every teacher I know posts reminders on Google Classroom every single day, and counselors check in with every kid at least once a quarter. Even the most independent middle schooler has a dozen safety nets to catch them when they forget something or mess up.
High school yanks all those safety nets away almost overnight, and it’s not because high school teachers don’t care. It’s because the whole point of high school is to prepare kids for college, where no one is going to remind them to study or email a professor. So suddenly, a kid is juggling five classes, each with a different late work policy, a different way to turn in assignments, a different expectation for how to ask for help. Most haven’t practiced doing any of that on their own before.
After Lila’s comment, I talked to a mom at my kid’s soccer practice who was panicking about her daughter starting 7th grade next year. When I asked what she was most worried about, she said the drama, the hormones, all the social stuff. When I asked if she’d thought about what high school would look like, she said she’d cross that bridge when she got there. That’s the common mistake I see: we spend all of middle school just getting through the messy parts, and we don’t take small, low-stakes steps to build that responsibility before high school hits.
I’ve started telling parents the small, concrete things I do with Lila that have made a difference, that you can start doing in 7th or 8th grade, no big lifestyle change required. First: instead of checking your kid’s planner or Google Classroom every night to remind them of assignments, ask them to pull it out and tell you three things they have due that week. If they can’t name them, you can point them to where to look, but don’t look for them. Second: if your kid forgets an assignment or needs an extension, don’t email the teacher for them. Sit with them, help them draft the email, then make them send it themselves. Third: if they get a bad grade, don’t immediately reach out to the teacher to ask for extra credit or a retake. Ask them what their syllabus says about retakes, and what they think they should do next.
When Lila failed her first algebra test last semester, she came home with the crumpled test paper and expected me to email the teacher to get her a retake. I told her the syllabus was on the class website, and she could look up the retake policy herself. She grumbled for 20 minutes, but she looked it up, saw she could retake it if she came to two after-school help sessions, and emailed the teacher herself to set that up. She got a C on the retake, which wasn’t great, but she still talks about it, how she won’t wait until the night before to study again. That’s the lesson she couldn’t have learned if I’d fixed it for her.
None of this is to say middle school isn’t hard. I’ve had 7th graders go through things that would break any adult, and the social cruelty that hits early adolescence is real and painful. It’s not a competition to see which is harder. Some kids sail through middle school and struggle with high school’s independence, some kids struggle with middle school’s social chaos and thrive when they get more control over their schedule in high school.
Last night, Lila left a sticky note on the fridge reminding me to pack her an extra snack for after school tomorrow, when she’s taking her delayed AP Bio test. She emailed the teacher herself, put the reminder in her own calendar, and didn’t ask me to do any of it for her. My stack of 7th grade essays is still sitting on my kitchen table, one of them written by a kid who forgot to turn it in three times, and I reminded him every single time. I still don’t have a clear answer for which stage is harder. It changes, kid to kid, year to year. But I know now that the best thing we can do, whatever stage we’re in, is let them practice falling in small ways, when the stakes are low, so they know how to get back up when the stakes get higher. That’s not something that gets talked about much, but it’s the thing that makes the jump between middle school and high school a lot less scary for everyone.
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