Is anybody else having attitude problems with your middle schooler?

[Fran51]

Totally understand. :grouphug: It's definitely hard at times, but it helps to know how normal, natural, and necessary the separation/independence process actually is.

[bethben]

I just read this by Dorothy Sayers (a founder of the modern classical education movement). I thought it was appropriate to this conversation.

 

"It will, doubtless, be objected that to encourage young persons at the Pert age (Dialectic Stage) to browbeat, correct, and argue with their elders will render them perfectly intolerable. My answer is that children of that age are intolerable anyhow; and that their natural argumentativeness may just as well be canalized to good purpose as allowed to run away into the sands.â€

 

See? It was even true in the 1940's when she wrote this essay.

 

Beth