Entry anxiety is common. To allay it, going to a school orientation helps as well as parents who normalize fears and assure that within the first week the new school routine will establish a sense of familiarity.

MIDDLE SCHOOL IS AN ADJUSTMENT FOR PARENTS. For parents of entering middle school students, there is also adjusting to do. "This isn't Kansas anymore," was how one parent described leaving the intimate and welcoming world of a small elementary school for the larger and more daunting secondary setting of middle school. In middle school, the advent of multiple teachers means that none of them know a student as well as one dedicated teacher did in back in elementary school. For the parent, this means there is no one go-to teacher with who the parent may have cultivated a supportive and collaborative relationship.

Parents of elementary students often felt invited in by a teacher responsive to concerns about a child's growth. With fewer students, the elementary teacher could afford to give more individual attention to each child's nurturing and development. In middle school, however, parents can feel kept more at a distance by teachers who seem less responsive and harder to reach because they are now responsible for many more students who they know less well. This does not mean that middle school teachers are not approachable, only that they have more calls on their time.

THE MIDDLE SCHOOL MISSION IS DIFFERENT. Now teachers seem to focus more on a student's acceptable conduct and adequate performance. As one middle school teacher put it, "We treat kids as less delicate and more responsible here. We don't coddle them. We expect them to act more grown up."

It's not that middle school teachers care less; they care differently. Part of the mission of middle school is helping students learn the self-management and social system skills that will be necessary to successfully cope with high school. Self-managment sills include developing the discipline to keep track of homework and the work ethic to process it on time. These are essential educational responsibilities students must learn to assume.

What are the social system skills? Although not formally stated, they are still very clear: "Comply with rules, Conform to routines, Cooperate with authority." If a young person doesn't learn adequate self-management responsibility and social system skills (the 3C's) in middle school, he or she will have a harder time making it through high school - an even larger, more impersonal facility, with less tolerance for off task and socially disruptive behavior.

This is why parents need to throw the full weight of their supervision behind the development of study skills and help their child learn from infractions at school to fit in and go along, with no need to double punish at home for consequences the school has already applied.

EARLY ADOLESCENCE BRINGS A CHANGE FOR THE WORSE. Around ages 9 - 13 a child usually starts separating from childhood into early adolescence. By middle school, most students are being transformed and destabilized by this first adolescent stage. They start pulling away, pushing against, and getting around adult authority in order to create more freedom to grow and to live on more independent terms. Now complaints, arguments, delays, disobedience, and testing limits become part of the young person's repertoire at home and at school as both parents and teachers find themselves contending with more active and passive resistance.

And now comes the great incompatibility that riddles middle school education: the collision between the onset of adolescent resistance in students this age with the more stringent demands of middle school for self-management and social adjustment. "The middle school crunch" is created at a time when there is increasing pressure on the student to live within a more complicated and demanding educational system, but early adolescent determination to act more independently makes this adjustment harder to do. Compared with elementary school, disciplinary referrals usually go up in middle school.

THERE IS A DISCIPLINARY DISCREPANCY. Factor in puberty (which begins for most students during middle school, and about which children should be told) when the task of defining and asserting young manhood and young womanhood begins, and a common discrepancy arises. Now disciplinary referrals for boys are significantly greater than for girls as male students may express their sense of emerging manhood by being more resistant to being told what to do by adult authorities, particularly when in front of their peers. To reduce the need to establish self-respect by asserting social opposition, encourage your child to develop multiple sources of self-esteem - others ways to challenge and affirm oneself by developing interests and capacities.

SOCIAL CRUELTY GETS WORSE. Come early adolescence both boys and girls become more socially aggressive with each other as they jostle for a place to socially belong among their independent community of peers. This need becomes more important as they experience less childhood closeness to parents and family at home. Now social cruelty at school comes into serious play -- treating each other meanly as a means to secure social membership and standing. Most commonly attacked are students who appear "different," for example who depart from sexual ideals of the age -- boys who appear unmanly (small and weak) and girls who appear unwomanly (fat and not pretty.)

Even if they don't give or receive it a lot, they see the five forms of social cruelty occurring all around them - teasing, exclusion, bullying, rumoring, and ganging up. And they know that what is happening to others could happen to them. Middle school is less socially safe than elementary school in this way.

I remember a teacher once, partly in jest, telling me that what every middle school needed were mechanisms to minimize the social damages. He proposed having a referee station to regulate fights between boys, and a rumor control center where girls could go to find out the current gossip being circulated against them. His humorous conclusion: "With so much else going on that feels more important than classroom learning, maybe we should just declare a moratorium on middle school education."