What My 8th Grade Graduate’s ‘I Guess I Competed’ Line Taught Me About Middle School Pressure
The chocolate ice cream was dripping down my son’s wrist onto the rubber grip of his new scooter, the one he’d asked for as a graduation gift. He’d already peeled the tassel off his navy graduation cap and was twisting it around his finger, the gold lettering for “Class of 2024” already scuffed from being stuffed in his backpack all week. We sat on a park bench a few blocks from the middle school, post-ceremony, and I asked the question every parent asks after a big milestone: “What do you think, looking back on the last three years?”
He licked ice cream off his thumb, shrugged, and said: “I just graduated from 8th grade. I guess that I competed.”
I froze mid-bite of my vanilla cone. I’d expected something silly about bad lunch pizza or annoying teachers, or even a sappy line about missing his friends. I hadn’t expected that. I asked him what he meant.
He counted off on his sticky fingers: Competed for a spot on varsity volleyball in 7th grade. Competed for higher test scores than the kid who sat next to him in math. Competed to get picked first for group projects. Competed to be the one who got the most likes on the group chat memes. By the time he got to “competed for a spot in the national junior honor society,” I was already counting the moments I’d encouraged this without even noticing.
I remembered 6th grade, when he came home sobbing over a B+ on his cell biology project. The teacher had written “Creative, well-researched” on the front, but his friend got an A, and that was all that mattered. I’d hugged him and said “Next time work a little harder and you’ll get that A,” instead of asking him what he’d learned making the model of the cell. I remembered the fall of 7th grade, when he skipped our weekly movie night to practice serving in the backyard, because he was sure he’d get cut from varsity if he didn’t. I told him I was proud of his dedication, instead of asking if he was having fun. I’d hung every award, every honor roll certificate, every qualifying ribbon on the fridge for three years, right at eye level when you walked in the door. I thought I was celebrating his hard work. Turns out I was just putting the competition on display.
It took that offhand comment at the park for me to see how ubiquitous the competition is in middle school, even for quiet kids who don’t act like they care that much. The system is built for it: curved test scores, limited spots on varsity, a set number of honor society slots, even social capital that gets sorted like a tournament bracket every few weeks. As parents and teachers, we get so used to it that we don’t even question it. We just help our kids train for the race.
After that day, I started making small changes, nothing big or dramatic that would make him feel like I was criticizing him. First, I swapped the questions I asked when he got home from school. Instead of leading with “What grade did you get on that math test?” I started leading with “What was the weirdest thing that happened today?” It’s a small shift, but it stopped every conversation from opening with a performance check. When he talked about a win—making the starting lineup, getting an A on a big paper—I stopped saying “That’s awesome, you beat everyone else” and started saying “Did that feel good for you?” That got him talking about how much he liked the work, not just that he’d won.
A week after graduation, I took all the award certificates down from the fridge. I kept the ones he actually wanted to keep in a memory book in his closet, and replaced the fridge space with the silly comic he drew about our dog, the ticket stub from our 7th grade camping trip, and the terrible poem he wrote for English class about pizza that made me snort-laugh when he brought it home. He didn’t even notice the change for three days, which told me all I needed to know about how much those certificates mattered to him day to day.
It hasn’t fixed everything. Last week, we were talking about high school registration, and he was already stressing about getting into the AP science classes he thinks he needs to “get ahead.” He still compares his test scores to his friends sometimes, old habits die hard. But lately he’s started adding things to that stress that he never would have before. Last month, he said he wanted to try out for the school play, even though he’s never acted before, and when I said that was cool, he said “I probably won’t get a big part, but it sounds fun anyway.” That’s the first time I’ve heard him lead with fun instead of what he’ll get out of it.
I don’t have a neat ending here. We’re heading into high school, which is even more competitive than 8th grade, and I’m sure we’ll have moments where we both fall back into old patterns. I still catch myself asking about grades before I ask about his day, sometimes. But that one line from my kid, the offhand “I guess I competed,” made me stop and think about what we’re actually preparing them for. Competition is unavoidable, but it doesn’t have to be the whole story of middle school. The small shifts we make every day, the questions we ask, the things we choose to celebrate, can shift that story a little bit, one conversation at a time. We don’t have to completely take the competition out of school to give kids space to remember that there’s more to those three years than who wins what.
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