What to tell your kid before their first day of middle school: real advice from a parent who’s been there
Last Tuesday, I was folding fitted sheets on my bedroom bed when Lila, my 11-year-old, climbed up beside me clutching her crumpled middle school schedule. The office had stamped a glittery gold star next to her homeroom teacher’s name, and she’d been scrolling TikTok locker tours for 20 minutes, her new scuffed Converse swinging off the edge of the bed. “Mom,” she said, picking at a loose thread on the cuff of her jeans, “what do I need to know that they don’t say at orientation?”
I almost gave her the generic lines I’d heard a hundred times: be yourself, work hard, it’s going to be great. But I stopped, because I remember my own first day of middle school, walking around the whole first week with four textbooks crammed in my arms because I couldn’t get my locker open and I was too embarrassed to ask anyone for help. I don’t remember any of the big speeches my parents gave me, but I do remember that no one told me it was okay to not know how to do things the first week. So I gave her the real stuff, the small things that actually matter.
First, if you can’t get that stupid dial to open your locker the first three days, you’re not stupid. I held all my books for a whole week because I thought every other kid in the whole school had mastered their lockers on the first try. What I should have done is ask the 8th grader leaning against the row next to me. Most of them remember how bad it felt to be the new 6th grader, and they’ll help you. We already wrote her combination three times: once on a small slip of paper taped to the inside of her pencil case, once in light pencil on the back of her phone case, and we practiced opening the demo locker at orientation twice. She can erase the pencil mark once she has it memorized. That’s all you need to do for that problem.
Next, it’s okay if your friend group shifts. Lila has been best friends with Mia since kindergarten, and they got in a fight three weeks ago over who got to wear the matching friendship bracelet to the pool. Lila cried for an hour after, saying she’d have no one to sit with at lunch. I told her I still only keep in touch with one person from my 6th grade friend group, and that’s fine. Don’t force yourself to sit at a table just because you’ve known those kids since first grade if it feels awkward. If you can’t find an open spot the first day, go sit at the table by the library. No one’s keeping track of where you sit, and no one cares half as much as you think they do. It’s okay to have different friends for different things: one to sit with in math, one to draw with after school, one to go to the movies with on weekends. You don’t need one single best friend to be okay. I had a friend I only saw in study hall for two years, and we still send each other silly cat memes 20 years later. You don’t have to make forever friends the first month.
Then, don’t feel like you have to join ten clubs. Lila came home from 6th grade orientation with a stack of flyers a mile high: student council, robotics, art club, yearbook, even a baking club. She said a friend’s older sister told her you have to join a bunch of clubs to get into good high schools. I told her I joined five clubs my first year of middle school, went to one meeting for each, quit all of them by October, and still got into the high school I wanted. Pick one thing that actually sounds fun to you, not what your friend is joining or what you think you should do. If you hate it after a month, quit. No one is keeping a list of your 6th grade club memberships that will follow you forever. Lila already picked baking club, because they get to eat whatever they make at the end of each meeting. That’s good enough for me.
Finally, if you get stuck on homework, you don’t have to stay up until 10pm figuring it out alone. Middle school is the first time she’ll have five different teachers, instead of one elementary school teacher who sends home one worksheet a night. We bought a cheap spiral notebook just for writing down assignments, and we leave it by the front door so she won’t forget it. I told her if she forgets to write an assignment down, text one person in her homeroom first. If no one answers before 8pm, just email the teacher. Most would rather you ask than turn in nothing. And if you’ve spent 20 minutes on a math problem and still don’t get it, just write a little note that says “I tried this a bunch and got stuck” and turn it in that way. Teachers expect you to get used to the new workload, and they don’t fail you for asking for help.
After we talked, Lila taped her schedule to the fridge and went downstairs to get a cherry popsicle. I think a lot of us default to big generic speeches when our kids ask what to expect from middle school, but the small, awkward, embarrassing problems are the ones that throw them off the first month. No principal’s orientation speech is going to cover the locker question, or what to do if you don’t have a seat at lunch.
Lila’s first day is still two weeks away. I know she’ll probably have at least one day where she comes home crying, because she forgot her lunch or someone said something rude or she still can’t open that locker. I don’t know if this will be her best year ever or just a year she gets through, and that’s okay. Most of middle school is just figuring out how to be a bigger kid, one small awkward day at a time. Right now, giving her the small, real answers is enough. The rest she’ll figure out on her own.
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