Every day of middle school is like a Jenga game — a precarious tower of wooden blocks whose foundation is cannibalized to make it grow higher and higher, says Haley Kilpatrick, co-author of “The Drama Years.”
“Your daughter goes to school, and never knows how many little blocks a teacher or another girl will move, and which block it will take to make her collapse,” Kilpatrick says.
At the ripe old age of 25, Kilpatrick has become something of a guru to both adolescent girls and their parents.
She will be in Denver next week to talk about her popular Girl Talk program that matches high school girls as mentors for middle school girls facing the notoriously catty years between elementary school and high school.
Here’s how it works: A high school girl, supervised by an adult adviser, has access to more than 100 worksheets on issues facing middle school girls. She meets weekly with middle school girls to talk about a specific problem, listen to their concerns, and assigns a challenge to be completed before the next meeting. It’s free and voluntary, and gives the high school girl a chance to expand her college service resume.
“It’s hard to remember, as a parent, that your daughter is going from a happy-go-lucky grade-schooler to middle school, with one foot in the world of a child and the other in the world of an adult,” Kilpatrick says.
“It’s not that today’s bullying isn’t something that parents didn’t experience. It’s that when the girls leave school, the drama is 24/7. You can’t rule out what realityTV shows, and Facebook, and texting have done to girls’ perceptions. Girls today are facing problems that didn’t even exist when I was in middle school.”
For example, Kilpatrick cites the plight of one young girl whose concentration on a test was shaken after a deluge of vibrations from the cellphone in her pocket.
“After feeling her phone vibrate eight or nine times, she asked to be excused to go to the restroom, looked at her cellphone and found that the girl sitting behind her had taken a picture of her (slightly exposed buttocks),” Kilpatrick said.
The other girl had already uploaded the image to her Facebook account, prompting the student’s friends to pepper her with text messages. Time doesn’t always erase the sting of such betrayals.
“I hear stories like that all the time,” Kilpatrick said.
“I talked to an 87-year-old woman in a nursing home. She can still tell you specific examples of what happened to her in middle school and how it affected her life.”
Meet “Girl Talk” founder and “The Drama Years” co-author Haley Kilpatrick at a free parent-daughter workshop, 7 p.m. April 30 at the Girls Athletic League School, 200 S. University Blvd.
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com
