Pushing boundaries as middle schoolers is developmentally appropriate. Unfortunately what we are seeing is the result of unfettered, unregulated access to the internet’s treasure trove of adult topics.
This. As a millennial, I also had access to edgy stuff on the internet, but mostly not until I had my own laptop computer, which happened when I was 18. Before that I had a phone, but our phones weren't smart back then, so it wasn't an issue.
Even having unfettered access at 18 was too early for me, in retrospect. But now these kids are getting access to the open internet in 5th, 6th grade? This is not going to be good. Their brains are not ready for this.
My mom and I were talking about this recently. She wasn’t the type of parent to check in on our internet activity regularly. We were all 3 pretty well-behaved, trustworthy kids so she didn’t see the need.
I closely monitor the content my children consume. Not because I don’t trust them, but because I don’t trust the world.
That is very different from my experience as a millennial, same for most of the kids I went to school with. Maybe it is because we were a very rough school but most of us were looking at things with shock value from 11+, kids also had dumb phones loaded with porn too. It might not have been right but it is no different to what kids are doing these days.
So, I did see stuff before I was 18. But I didn't have the same level of access to it then. I had to go through some trouble to see what I shouldn't see, and being a teenager, I did go through some trouble on plenty of occasions... but I still think there was a big difference between what I could manage with parents who watched me pretty closely and who had parental controls on the family computer and what I was able to get to with my own laptop later on. Like, for example, I wasn't looking at 4chan on the family computer. And the kids now, a lot of them have the same access I had at 18 at a much younger age.
That said, yeah, there were kids who could get stuff more easily than I could. I just have the sense that the problem is more widespread and harder to control now.
I also turned out pretty well overall, but there are things I struggle with that I think might not have been a problem if I'd been born in an era before the internet.
Gen X here. Obscene words, racist and sexist language were in my vocabulary when I was in middle school (1987-1990). Blame cable TV? Explicit language warning labels on CDs or cassettes? I don't know. However, we know when to use that language and when not to. and I think that is the difference. Would you believe I learned most of my curse words from my parents?
I would. Y'all's generation has the reputation for having been left to fend for yourselves a lot, so it's not surprising to me that you would have known these things. I did too, in high school, and I probably had a more watchful parent than you. I think, though, that there's a big difference in the ease of access to things now. You mostly knew all of your bullies, right? They were just as vicious, but they weren't random internet strangers you knew nothing about but who were still mean to you for some reason. And there probably weren't as many. And maybe you found abandoned porn in the forest or got ahold of Dad's Playboys (so did I! lol), but that's not the same in quantity or obsenity as what was just sitting there on /b on 4chan every day, or what kids can find now.
True to your point that quantity and severity are a bigger issue now. Yes we knew our bullies but I do not think we would let a screen intimidate us. I would hope we would have enough sense to walk away from the screen. But I can not imagine having a bully in person in school and then going online and seeing them there too. Different times different dangers.
> not until I had my own laptop computer, which happened when I was 18.
I'm also a millenial (among the older ones), and this was similar to my case. I didn't get a desktop computer in my room until around age 16. While I certainly did start looking at porn and other stuff (whatever was available in the 1990s), I was well past the very impressionable stage of childhood, and I had developed enough self-control to put work before play.
I agree with you! “Pushing boundaries”. What boundaries are the kids pushing though? We had a kid here punch a teacher and get a $5 gift card to Walmart from her “restorative circle.”
It’s an industry problem. The boundary is so low that it’s not even a boundary anymore.
You know, this is interesting. It’s like the erosion of decorum and lower stakes boundaries mean that kids have to really push the envelope in order to push them now.
Chicken vs the egg. “We” (society, parents, the industry) lower the standards and the get lower, so we lower them so they all pass, so they push more, so our county made it 100% promotion and graduation rate irrelevant to grades, so they push more.
I think that’s what OP is getting at. The kids are GOING to push boundaries. If the boundary is already at an inappropriate place, these kids have to go even more inappropriate.
I agree that the internet via social media is ruining our youth. But I was born in 79 and without the internet. And in middle school, We were VILE! To each other, Our teachers, sometimes even our parents. We were worse than the Southpark kids any day. As a parent of 8, I feel like they grow out of it. If you are lucky, Some skip it entirely.
Also, to add to it, these kids live to provoke a strong reaction from adults. They’ve unfortunately learned that the use of these terms will provide this reaction abundantly.
I definitely think it is because it is taboo. I remember in elementary and middle school going to the playground and my friends and I saying all the bad words we learned just to see who knew the worst one.
But I think what is different from this generation and old ones is their access to anything. Social media has given them an insight into things that no other generation has ever had. They are being inundated with things well beyond what they can actually process.
I teach at a private Catholic school, without a doubt these children are so incredibly sheltered and even still they are doing the same thing just not as severe/graphic as in the public schools.
I think it’s access too.
Middle schoolers have always wanted to be a bit transgressive. I remember plenty of dead baby jokes when I was in middle school.
What middle schoolers haven’t always been able to do is easily find Internet forums fill of whatever hateful drivel some maladjusted adult can dream up and post publically.
Behavior in Catholic schools is about 90% better than what I saw in public. Their retirement isn’t as good, but it feels like teaching was in the 90’s and early 2000’s when I could just enjoy teaching and being with students
From my experience, the behavior has been better. That isn't to say all the Catholic schools in the area are great. The type of trouble they get into is generally more age appropriate. But the Jr high students still try to be vile to each other, they have been racist, exclusionary, sexist, and generally bad to each other. But nothing as graphic or as violent as I have seen in public school or what has been described on here.
I think middle school especially 7th grade is a time in development where empathy and sympathy have not matched the same desire for attention and the inability to truly understand that bad things in the world like the above. So they try and be "edgy" and cool by saying or doing these things, as well as still acting like a child and not wanting to include people but have a whole new level of understanding about how to exclude.
Kinda?
But also, they ARE being exposed to really nasty stuff way earlier than normal. Most of middle schoolers I know are not only watching porn, they are watching it *all the time*, including at school, and the content of the porn is.... *bad*. Like, this is not the porn you grew up with. They are also watching a huge amount of adult animation and content without any filter.
Shock value is what middle school is about. They are trying to figure out where the line is and also be an adult but they have no idea how to do either.
But nobody is enforcing the line.
I remember going to college a while back and being a little irked out by guys who thought porn videos were an accurate portrayal of what women like. Even worse, hearing girls say you have to pretend to like XYZ and just do it because it's expected of you.
So I'm looking at the shock porn stuff that's rampant now and just..... ew.
We didn't say any of this stuff though when I was that age. I'm from Austria, was 12 in 2002. Even with 14 we didn't. Actually, never, come to think of it. Guys called each other "gay" or stuff like that but genuinely none of what is described in OP's post (or any of the comments).
I think so too. If any of us had talked to a teacher or even worse the director like that, it would have been over for us. And yes, also from our parents' side. They would have freaking killed us.
One day when we were about 13 (2003 maybe), it came out that a group of guys in my class had been stealing (mostly chewing gum) at a local supermarket for a couple weeks. They were under 14, so nothing happend in that regard but you cannot imagine the dressing down they got from the director and our class teacher (in front of the entire class) for like 15 minutes straight. Some of them were crying by the end of it. One guy wrapped itself in one of the curtains and wept. And that was just for... stealing gum at 13, outside of school.
So show me data that’s not confirmation bias because with out data that’s all the last couple of comments are.
“My experience was different so that must mean it’s the standard experience”
Pretty much this. Middle school is basically just insecure kids being as edgy as possible. The majority are jsut saying it for shock value/pushing boundaries. Yes, maybe a few actually think that way.
See that used to be the case but the problem is in the Trump and post Trump era they stopped actually growing out of it and continue to act like this as adults.
If you do it for shock value the end result should be a significant amount of diamond detention. If you want to play around and test Administration fine don't complain when your butt is sitting in detention for weeks at a time
I think kids have always said racist and sexist and vile things. I remember some kids saying the n word, making fun of Chinese eyes, calling each other the r word, making fun of sped students (the short bus, etc.), homophobia was rampant, etc.
Some of it's ignorance, some of it's trying to be shocking and edgy. Tiny middle schoolers dropping f bombs trying to sound cool just makes me giggle inside; they're trying so hard to act older than they are. The racist and sexist stuff is just the grosser version of the same mentality, imo.
I'm not saying we should ignore it. It needs to be addressed as much as we can. But I don't think it's anything new or a sign that this generation is any worse than any other. In a lot of ways, kids seem much more inclusive and welcoming than when I was their age.
I generally agree. I’m a young millennial and we said similar things to the examples you listed as kids. It was terrible, though a lot of it was the general culture of the time with adults saying the same things plus kids trying to seem mature.
The main difference I’ve seen nowadays is that, in my experience, we didn’t say any of that stuff to or around our teachers or staff and we didn’t have the same online porn access at a young age. Most of us in my group didn’t have that sort of internet porn access until we were teenagers.
I think that this language and behavior is coming from younger kids in middle school and being said to and around teachers is pretty crazy, but they also know there’s hardly any consequences for anything that say or do so why would they monitor what they say or code-switch based on their audience? When I was a kid we used different language with different groups of people to avoid trouble.
> I generally agree. I’m a young millennial and we said similar things to the examples you listed as kids. It was terrible, though a lot of it was the general culture of the time with adults saying the same things plus kids trying to seem mature.
> The main difference I’ve seen nowadays is that, in my experience, we didn’t say any of that stuff to or around our teachers or staff and we didn’t have the same online porn access at a young age.
Are you sure you're a young millennial? Young millenials would have been very familiar with sites like Newgrounds starting around age 11 and more ready access to shocking material on straight early youtube and other sites. Maybe there was a difference in how open they were with some of the behavior towards teachers, but nearly 20 years ago, and we were still seeing open racisim, homophobia, death threats to teachers in letters, etc...
> Most of us didn’t have that sort of internet access until we were teenagers
100% not true ( flash games, runescape, java applets, all super popular, would not exist in the cultural zeigest at all if most didn't have access to the internet ) , Note that millenials start from 1981 and go to 1996, I think you might be mistaken and could be an *older* millennial, someone pre 1990 would be an older millenial, and you could have been old enough to skip some of this, though even that's dubious, many of the people making content for these sites were actual teenagers at the time, so would have been late 1980s or early 1990s millenials.
It may also be that you were a younger millenial, but lived in a rural area, in which case your experience isn't really representative of the majority of the population, most of the population [had internet as early as 2000 in the US](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/) and by 2000, [70% of 18->29 year olds used the internet](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/), I think it's fair to say that this extended further down the age groups as well, so we're likely looking at 75% of teenagers having access to the internet by 2000.
My mistake, I wasn’t intending to speak for everyone nor was I trying to say we didn’t have the internet. I was just speaking about what I recall about me and my friends at that age. I did grow up in a city and we mostly got the internet around age 10 and I am a younger millennial. We were on the internet before Google was popular, so we definitely got exposure to early internet, early YouTube, flash games, etc. and we mostly had to type in entire urls to get to sites as the search engines weren’t that good, so in my experience porn wasn’t really that easy to find nor was I interested at that age. I absolutely had some terrible internet experiences, but I also had great times before everything on the internet was monetized or owned by the same three companies.
What I meant about the porn aspect was that yes, we talked about sex, but while I’m sure some of my peers experienced porn at younger ages, in my personal experience, I started seeing actual internet porn around 13. It definitely was not to the same caliber as other commenters mentioned kids talking about it nowadays with middle school kids casually saying “do you like BBC” and “are you a squirter” to/around teachers or how I’ve heard kids talk about “choking/strangling” so casually. (In my day that was erotic asphyxiation and we only heard about weirdos doing it to themselves). Also really anything BDSM wasn’t something I easily came across or that anyone I knew talked about.
As I said, in my experience we absolutely said terrible racist, homophobic, etc. things to each other and to our peers (and I’m an actual lesbian and experienced a lot of homophobia at the time) and we said terrible things *about* our teachers, just not *to* our teachers actual faces. If we did we faced real repercussions and consequences.
That was more my point. Just that I personally didn’t see internet porn before 13 and didn’t repeat the abhorrent things we said *to* or *in front of* our teachers and it’s surprising what kids will say to teachers nowadays compared to when I was that age.
>I think kids have always said racist and sexist and vile things. I remember some kids saying the n word, making fun of Chinese eyes, calling each other the r word, making fun of sped students (the short bus, etc.), homophobia was rampant, etc.
Yeah the problems are
1. When the black kids punch the kids saying n word they usually take all the fault and punishment
2. These kids grow up with this then we act shocked when we see tiki torches
Imagine having unlimited hardcore porn on your phone. Anything new that you hear somebody say or referenced online can be googled instantly. Now imagine all of your friends have the same access. It’s totally normalized now.
Social media brain rot. Access to social media & smart phones at such a young age has really, seriously, messed up these upcoming generations. And that's a gross simplification of these issues.
I'm sure SM has had a negative impact but I also remember being a middle schooler and being targeted by other students my age. They were feral little sociopaths in 2006 too.
Same. 2001 was vile.
And I watched my nephew go through it all in 2014ish, and he was a nasty feral racist misogynistic little turd. Ignoring him or calling him out ("dude, wtf, that's so gross, you want to bang X's 49 year old mom. Why, are you having that bad of luck with girls", or "you realize your family has Jewish ties right, and that the nazis would have burnt your family.alive for their religion. You ok?") Really was what worked the best.
He recently turned 21 and we had him over for steak and he laughed at how much of an idiot he used to be.
In the 2005-2006 school year I was in the 8th grade and had moved away from Louisiana after Katrina. Kids made fun of the fact that my home was devastated by a hurricane.
Kids have always lacked empathy. I agree that unfettered access to social media is making it worse though.
Yep, can tell the dinosaurs are who haven't dealt with a middle schooler in 30 years are. They were saying the same kinds of stuff 20 years ago, edgier stuff sometimes because homophobia was way more tolerated, especially in media and comedy, and actual murder and violence, and disgusting fetish shit was way easier to find.
When I get the option for a password recovery question "what was your childhood nickname", I'm reminded it basically was the F-slur. I'm not even gay lol, that was everyone's favorite word in the early 2000s.
Honestly, middle schoolers are feral animals that should be denied human rights. Teaching them how to not be tiny terrorists becomes more vital than any level of content.
This. It’s more human to deal with it when they’re young, than to make excuses for it until they outgrow the excuses.
Kids who spout off nasty shit in my classroom get labeled misogynists or misandrists who are speed-running growing old alone and bitter. Publicly shaming this crap is the only way to get the youngsters to realize it’s not funny in the real world.
Not a teacher. This shit was said when we were kids, porch monkey is extreme but hearing racist crap from others was very normal. Taboo sums up the reasons well.
Saying it front of teachers and admins though - that’s new. We knew we would get punished and we were. The fun was trying to get away with it and the danger was having the things you said repeated to your parents and school punishment.
I’m not that old of a fart, high schooler in 2000’s. I guess these are the kids my peers spawned you all are dealing with
From what I hear as a common complaint on this sub, is that punishment can't really happen unless admin also goes for it.
Can't punish kids when you're basically not allowed to.
Tw: references to rape
Agreed. I’ve had to have several “what the actual fuck” conversations with 6th grade boys telling girls they were going to rape them. Honestly what-the-fuck???
It’s developmentally appropriate for them to be pushing boundaries and to be excited by the taboo and strange (we used to love Happy Tree Friends and Salad fingers), but the sheer exposure to *everything* is making them disgustingly obscene and difficult to like. I struggled this year with the boys especially. I can understand that they’re parroting what they’ve read and heard, but I can’t let go of the fact that they’re traumatizing other kids by consistent racism, homophobia, sexism, and downright nastiness without repercussions.
When they think no adult is around, their conversations are atrocious. I don’t really care if they’re saying the F word, but it’s so far beyond that. The moaning, shoving their fingers up each others butts, saying they want to motorboat someone, sending porn to teachers through another kid’s Google classroom where it’s got 3 dicks in a woman’s ass…and it’s always “it was just a joke” and the other kid involved doesn’t want to “snitch” so they get away with it even though they’ve been violated or hurt.
The need to be told to actually fuck off, but all we can say is “that’s not appropriate” and admin sends them back to their next class because what is the protocol when a 12 year old says he’s gonna rape someone?
Sometimes I think they're just trying to one-up each other for shock value. Sometimes I think it's terrible internet stuff that has seeped into their brains. Some kids are repeating things older siblings or parents say.
But often with the younger middle schoolers I find they don't actually understand what they're saying. Like I had some students make some pretty crazy remarks about Chinese people and they did the fake Chinese talking "ching chang bing bang" and said something with a terrible accent like "love you long time!" I really can't stand that kind of thing and stop the whole class and did a big lecture. I think it's sunk into at least a few of them that this was not okay.
I really put my foot down and make a big deal out of stuff so when I do I think it kind of drives home that it's important. The only other one I did that with was when they were saying some really inappropriate things about gay people. Stopped the whole class and talked about it. I'm sure there were some boys who went on talking inappropriately out of my earshot but at least it was out of my earshot and they got the message that it wasn't okay.
I think we as adults are going into the “those damn kids era” I’m not that old but I’m old enough to were I had some internet access growing up and I learned all sorts of awful shit that I would then turn around and repeat. This is a tale as old as time and you’re just at the spear point of it all
Looking at the comments here and there are a lot of tone deaf responses. Yes middle schoolers are some of the worse, and this age group has been saying some of these things for a long time, but the biggest problem is that they are saying these things out loud. In front of people. They have no filter. There is no respecting the setting they are in. We can blame social media for sure, but their parents don't set any precedents at home for what is appropriate and what isn't.
Exactly. They’ve been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that saying the quiet part out loud is free of consequence or maybe even something to be celebrated.
as someone who was a middle schooler once, this sounds like normal middle school boys, competing with each other to see who is the baddest.
they're hashing out the pecking order. this is standard, abhorrent preteen/teenage behavior.
you will see the same thing for years to come.
So far, just this morning, I’ve been told I look like “The music producer from Alvin and the chipmunks” followed by “He’s kind of fine though.” I don’t even know how I’m supposed to respond to that.
I feel this frustration in my bones. Half my class (none of which were Muslim) were saying Allah akbar today. They tried to pull "but it means God is great, Ms. Reads!" Yes, it does, but that's not why you are saying it. 7 days left....
We had a kid catch a sexual harassment charge after being warned at least 3 documented times to stop interacting with the victim. Kid kept calling the student a “sl*t” and a “wh*re.”
Every couple of years some kid will push it too far and catch a charge, and then for about 2 years the boys will remember it and actually be scared of the consequences, and then the memory fades and they get bold again. Honestly the only thing that’s going to stop it is these young men getting scared straight by the legal system. Fear over contributing to a “school-to-prison pipeline” has made it more difficult for the female students to actually seek remedy.
F that, sue the bully’s parents and the school. If the females are going to be forced to be in a school with male students (not a bad thing, but it’s their inability to withdraw that makes it so brutal) then the male students should be forced to learn how to properly respect their peers.
Our middle schoolers are WILD! We had middle schoolers running a gift card scam (stealing gift cards and selling them for ‘less than’ what the card said except they weren’t activated). We’ve had kids not only send other kids’ nudes around but airdrop them to the whole cafeteria! A kid was SA-ing a friend and was blackmailing them to be quiet about it and to comply with them. Plus, we have several who are legitimately already apart of gangs, except what they don’t understand is that they’re being used by the older gang members to run drugs and weapons because they’re easily manipulated. We’ve lost too many middle schoolers and high schoolers to gang violence in the past 10 years. I thought my friends were bad in middle school but I never could have imagined that literal children could be like this.
😳I had to look that one (BBC) up.
Believe me, this behavior is already present in PreK students. It’s disturbing. Imagine four year old boys pretending to hump their female peers and shouting out that they want someone to suck their balls. This year I was told countless times by PreK students, kindergarteners and first graders that they were going to blow my fucking brains out. These same kids love coming into my resource room at all times of the day to calm themselves and to learn. They tell me they love me. They give hugs. They are unable to regulate themselves, have suffered trauma, and what can I do for them besides keep coming back year after year? I just finished my 7th year with this population that grows more violent each year.
It is absolutely a case of “I’m old enough to kind of know what this means, and definitely old enough to know it gets a reaction out of people.”
I vividly remember giggling my way through a teacher’s presentation on Martin Luther King Jr. in the 7th grade. Nothing about it was funny, but my friend and I caught the giggles at lunch and were halfway paying attention. That’s not what my teacher saw, though.
Instead, she saw two children giggling at MLK Jr. and his “I Have a Dream” speech. She must have been very concerned at how flippant we were about something so serious. Similarly, I’m from the era where the R-slur and F-slur were thrown around regularly, so much so that we had to have school-wide assemblies about why it’s not okay to say things like that.
I’ve had to do a lot of unlearning and learning to make sure I’m not as stupid and ignorant as I was in 7th grade, but a lot of it also comes with time. Time and conscious effort. You can at least rest assured that one of those things is certain.
Middle school behavior basically reflects the online world they all inhabit. The worst things from social media and 4chan wind up at school every time.
Lmao okay but it was this bad when I was a middle school student in 2006? We need to sit down with kids and really talk about what their words mean and how it can affect their peers and themselves. Social media as a whole is brain rotting parents and kids, and it’s unfortunately on the teachers to talk to kids (what a concept) about rights and wrongs. To say kids are worse is too broad of a statement. Kids will always be kids.
We’re in a difficult moment, many fall back on this argument you’ve made. No doubt that historically, the older generations look upon the new ones with shock and appall as to what behavior they see from them.
What I think is an important difference is access to internet. Yes, 2006 definitely had notable instances maybe similar to what we see more largely today, but back then there was still an attempt to keep kids away from adult concepts on the internet. The now unfettered access to adult content ranging from adult cartoons to porn exposes them to way too much.
Another key development is the lack of secrecy, looking at other comments and seeing a kid ask a para if they like BBC… the boldness in the presentation of these things, followed by a complete lack of accountability or willingness to hear the conversation, is now leaving us in a new situation.
I spent all of last 2 years trying to mediate conversations like these, if you found a way to make them try a new perspective through a conversation I’d love to hear how.
> What I think is an important difference is access to internet. Yes, 2006 definitely had notable instances maybe similar to what we see more largely today, but back then there was still an attempt to keep kids away from adult concepts on the internet. The now unfettered access to adult content ranging from adult cartoons to porn exposes them to way too much.
Were you asleep for the past 20 years? There was *less successful* attempts to keep kids from this, because parents were much less technically adept, especially compared to their own children, and nobody knew what they were *actually* letting their kids see on the internet. Today it's way easier to block children's access to content, even if it isn't perfect, and parents today have better basic technical knowledge, as a population, than their own children, and tools are harder to circumvent.
The kids are the same as they've always been in middle school. They were edgy, violent, and mean in 2004 just as they are in 2024. The problem isn't vague "secrecy" junk, the problem is the same problem everywhere:
* Reduced Teacher agency
* No repercussions for bad behavior or poor grades.
* Worse student to teacher ratios.
* No admin support.
* Maybe worse parenting, but I'm not even sure there are more shitty parents now a days, or if it's just that more shitty parents are *empowered* to be shitty because the school system is so feckless in dealing with their bullshit.
Thing were better on many of these fronts 20 years ago, but it has gradually eroded away, and it wasn't even all that great back then.
I can't tell you how many times I hear kids from 12 to 15 say "you stupid monkey"
Just that alone is concerning can't imagine what else is said that I don't hear
Was in middle school in 2012 at the dawn of the “always online” era and remember this sort of thing being common among the student body in general, mostly the boys but a few girls too. I think it’s a development of the usual boundary pushing/edginess at that age, except tainted/influenced by the way discourse is discourse’d online these days. That of course doesn’t make it right, but I think it helps to understand that most of these kids will look back on this period of their lives and be mortified by the things they said, as was the case in my age cohort, and this reflection and growth is what separates the wheat from the chaff in my opinion. The ones that can look back on that behavior and be proud of it are usually the ones that find themselves no longer welcome in most corners of society.
I think it has to do with what they are watching, the lack of parental figures and discipline at home, as well a lack of being around people due to covid. This is my first year as a para and the number of times I get on the students I'm with about simply not cussing is astounding. They will flat out tell another kid to fuck off or call them some racist name in front of me or the teacher.
Young people today utter things we would never even allow ourselves to think in the 70s when I was a teen. Not sure of why but it is horrible to see. We made so many great changes in the world around race ... We seem to be loosing all of them
I don't think it's just taboo, and we need to look deeper than middle school angst. They are repeating what they hear and they are being targeted by influencers who need an impressionable audience. There's an entire economy around convincing young men that their problems are because of women, gay people, and sometimes people of color depending on who they're listening too, that somehow civil rights and equality has meant white men conceded something, and that the patriarchy is a myth. This starts with the mindset similar to Harrison Butker's comments, that women should focus on building families and supporting their husbands. But if you go down that rabbit hole, it quickly turns into influencers selling vitamins or cream, to selling courses on how to make money, and even further into pickup artists and redpilling. These young men are being told that when people comment on the patriarchy, they're coming for all men (including *you*, 13 year old middle schooler!). They're being told red pilling theory, that women never date down and they only date up, that wealth and status is the most important thing to get women, because women are something to be had. This isn't just middle school angst, there's *money* behind these beliefs. They're being told that you deserve a Tradwife, that will always support you, and that "females" got too independent, that social justice is coming for the western nuclear family, and the only way to fix this is to sign up for a $50 a month course on how to pickup women, how to go viral and make money, and when they grow up maybe they'll attend a $5,000 course where men try to be Spartans and scream at each other in the mud.
https://youtu.be/GHkhTIEe254?si=_sMmfFszkYziB9Th
This video link is from Some More News, and they cover all of this and more. There's a particularly depressing clip halfway through where one of these influencers meets some of his middle school aged fans at a baseball game, and they immediately start saying vile things about gay people and women, and the influencer almost has a moment of clarity where he looks completely shocked at the damage he's done.
This is what our young men are being subject too. I don't know how to fix it, but we at least need to make ourselves aware of the extent of it.
Edgelords ruin a lot of the experience honestly. I couldn’t teach middle school because I would have the hardest time not roasting those walking joker memes
I am seriously disgusted with the middle schoolers. I swear it rises to the level of sexual harassment towards other kids and teachers. I don't want to hear about GYAT ever again!!! Or 69 or WTF ever 21 is about...
I'm an ESL teacher, our school isn't even that big and we have to deal with those kinds of things, constantly. Me and my boss frequently discuss about the classes "leaving the good age range and becoming savages" that happen around 9/10-12/13. That gap is totally the worst. After that, they are still teenagers, but less savage. I guess they wanna test the world and their boundaries, so I usually am very understanding of those situations.
A big part of them repeat those slurs unconsciously, just because people around them (or on the internet) say so.
I've had to deal with a range of weird things already, from children playing with toys while saying the toys were fucking each other to another kid (11 yo) deadass telling me they had had sex and were afraid the girl was pregnant... So the insults don't really scare me anymore.
When I feel like doing so and when I have the chance... I explain to them how wrong it is and why. It's not always that I have the right heart and mind to get involved, if I may be honest. But I also get sad and discouraged from time to time.
The crazy part is that it's loud enough for everyone. I remember being 12-13. I had a foul mouth. My friend group (sadly myself included) made dead baby jokes, Holocaust jokes, and all sorts of other nasty things.
However, I'd have literally pooped my pants if a teacher or adult overheard me saying something like that. I 100% would have cried if a teacher called my dad and just repeated what I said. The huge difference now is these kids have no shame and aren't worried about teachers or parents overhearing them.
The most chilling thing I've come across is a middle-schooler who would write significant dates from the Nazi regime on bathroom walls, etc. No explanation; just a date for others to presumably Google out of curiosity and be led into reading about Nazis.
I notified the school cop but I don't know if they ever figured out who was doing it.
Reminds me of when I use to work in electronics at Target during the holidays, I would get parents buying their kids GTA 5 and then after Christmas bring it back complaining about the content even though I explained to them about the rating system on the cover and what the game entails. 🤦♂️
We did the exact same thing when we were younger, and that was before the internet. It's kids testing boundaries with little regard for consequences. It has happened since time immemorial.
Don't act like this is some big moral failing of a single generation. That hyperbolic shit doesn't help. You should just punish them and hope one or two learn the lesson before puberty ends.
You're surprised? Kids curse and say unsavory shit. It is what it is...The internet has done gone fucked their heads up. Most kids are not young Sheldon.
I graduated in December and am very new to the classroom environment thanks to COVID and I definitely agree. I was a menace in middle school, but these kids take the cake! And surprisingly (not suprisingly?) It's the homophobic ones I see and hear the MOST doing "gay" esque things
It was definitely going downhill before Covid but man post covid allowed kids to say anything they want and think it is okay. I teach 7th grade and you are 100% spot on with the amount of comments I never would have even thought to say when i was that age (not to mention the whooping I would have gotten at home had they recieved a call from the school with me saying those things). Sad part is the parents talk the same way and do nothing when they are contacted about it anyway so the kids think it is ok to act and say those things.
This was rampantly going on when I was in jr. high, and I’m 53. Not much was done about it then either. It makes me chuckle when parents worry about the innocence of their children being stolen by the evil of the moment and forgetting what we did and knew when we were that age.
Middle schoolers will mimic what they see. They have spent a long time seeing behavior from national spot light people that make it look like it’s okay to do things that are actually inappropriate. Add to that parents are either to involved (helicopter or lawnmower) or not involved at all. It is a perfect storm …
It’s coming from the internet. Social media has become an outlet for the outrageous things that most people would never say in public. And it creates an echo chamber of others who speak similarly and all validate each other into thinking it’s okay to talk like that - and then children emulate it.
This is not a result of Covid. I’m 22. I very much remember calling my friends border jumpers, beans, illegals (all Mexican and a few white people) etc. and I graduated 8th grade in 2016. Slurs and repeating what’s popular is very common. Diddy party stuff comes from a streamer who plays gta roleplay servers and one of his characters is diddy or someone who works for diddy and invites “attractive men” to “the biggest party in America”
I make it a point to clamp down firmly on this.
If I hear a student say something repulsive in the corridor, I'll make an example of them by isolating them and giving them a sanction.
By being firm and fair, word will spread about your just and respectable nature and kids begin to change their behaviour... at least around you!
If you don't like something at work, change it! 👍
Student here
This year I made a call to my resource officer because I heard a group of kids (5-6 strong) gathered next to my locker. And the first thing I hear is “is that a g*n?”
The fear that I felt as I almost ran down the hall was so overwhelming I could barely speak to our resource officer. He’s a great guy, supper nice and genuinely cares about us kids.
Kids were pulled into the office, lockers were searched, nothing, false alarm.
After all that, all I could think of was…
#WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD FIND THAG FUNNY
THERE IS NO FUCKING JOKE THERE!
The humor has become down right sickening, and it scares me
If we really boil this down, ever since the pandemic kids have been GLUED to phones, tablets, any type of device. I've worked in food service (restaurants, coffee shops) for about 4 years and I can't tell you how many families I've seen come into a nice Italian restaurant, just for them all to sit on their devices, parents included. I've had families of 6 totally ignore me when I'm offering them more water or to clear plates off the table. The parents are rude to the waitresses and don't tip, and that is the example they leave for their kids.
Kids are given devices nowadays just to shut them up and keep them busy. I grew up in early 2000s, and even back then when social media was brand new, I still got into all types of adult things online before I was even 10. Now, I can't even imagine the kinds of websites and games these kids are finding, since the internet and media has become so much more openly vulgar.
It all starts with the parents, but I really think that a lot of kids desensitization is stemming from them constantly being buried in a phone or device, with the whole internet at their fingertips. They know their ways around parental blocks and restrictions. Then, for the rare case that a parent isn't allowing their child to have a device for these reasons, the child is made fun of for not having the same devices as their peers.
Parents and teachers are either so burnt out that they don't care anymore, or they're exactly the same as the children. These kids have no discipline and society is wondering why they're getting so bad, but we've allowed this to happen. There is no consequence for failing, there's no consequence for not trying, and there's no real consequence for the way they talk and behave. For some reason, disciplining children has become something that is looked down upon, because they're just "innocent kids" and "they don't know any better". Except they're not innocent, and they understand so much more than we can even begin to imagine. If they don't know any better, it's because we, as adults, are not teaching them any better. They're not going to become kind, successful, and hard-working members of society if WE don't teach them how.
They know teachers aren't going to do anything about what they say, so why would they care if a teacher overheard them? They'll laugh in the teachers face before being afraid of consequences, because there likely won't be any. We need to start treating kids like KIDS. They need guidance and stern instruction, and without it they'll get into all sorts of things unsupervised. The stuff they say in front of authority figures is just the tip of the iceberg. If something isn't done, I'm terrified to think that I'll still be alive to see these current middle schoolers & elementary schoolers graduate and be shoved into the workforce barely knowing how to tie their shoes. Our future lawyers, doctors, teachers, if they even make it that far.
What you are experiencing is group of kids who have access to the vast information on the internet. Also they see that bold, and outrageous behavior is usually rewarded through views and likes. This pushes kids to act out more to be noticed and liked. This sort of behavior happened when we were kids just not to this magnitude. Social norms have also changed, curse words are used daily in all forms of media. Crude behavior or jokes are marketed as pranks or comedy. These students are still in that soft spot of still a kid and not yet an adult. So they haven't fully grasped the consequences of their actions and their words. I would say that parental guidance or the absence of it is the cause. But kids will act however they please when not being watched. (peer pressure)
In my district, there's nothing you can even do.
I had to send kids out during state testing because they were being too disruptive.
Then they got sent back up without my permission and continued to be disruptive.
I left last year, and I've never been better.
I tell anyone that will listen to NEVER teach in Hillsborough County Florida.
Because wokeness went too far and society is flexing the other way now. Preteens are just the right age to start rebelling and that means pushing the counter culture. I’m legit frightened for the next few years.
Downvotes but completely right. This is pretty much the way me and all my friends talked in middle school. Completely normal in the developmental stage of your life to test boundaries, push back in orthodoxy, and question “why can’t I say that?” As a result, you’ve got kids embracing Andrew Tate and edgy Kick streamers. These people do not have their ear to the ground at all. Funny to see their reaction to the youth when you can see it all happen over the past 2 years online.
Whoa! 🤣😂I didn't even know because normally I get matching hate mail in my inbox. But not a peep this time—just love. Weird. Doesn't matter. You're right, I’m right, Andrew Tate is not. 💐💛
As a retired middle school teacher I can say without doubt the kids whose parents were involved and cared to be a parent were fine. The kids described here have no guidance at home.
Pushing boundaries as middle schoolers is developmentally appropriate. Unfortunately what we are seeing is the result of unfettered, unregulated access to the internet’s treasure trove of adult topics.
This. As a millennial, I also had access to edgy stuff on the internet, but mostly not until I had my own laptop computer, which happened when I was 18. Before that I had a phone, but our phones weren't smart back then, so it wasn't an issue. Even having unfettered access at 18 was too early for me, in retrospect. But now these kids are getting access to the open internet in 5th, 6th grade? This is not going to be good. Their brains are not ready for this.
My mom and I were talking about this recently. She wasn’t the type of parent to check in on our internet activity regularly. We were all 3 pretty well-behaved, trustworthy kids so she didn’t see the need. I closely monitor the content my children consume. Not because I don’t trust them, but because I don’t trust the world.
That is very different from my experience as a millennial, same for most of the kids I went to school with. Maybe it is because we were a very rough school but most of us were looking at things with shock value from 11+, kids also had dumb phones loaded with porn too. It might not have been right but it is no different to what kids are doing these days.
So, I did see stuff before I was 18. But I didn't have the same level of access to it then. I had to go through some trouble to see what I shouldn't see, and being a teenager, I did go through some trouble on plenty of occasions... but I still think there was a big difference between what I could manage with parents who watched me pretty closely and who had parental controls on the family computer and what I was able to get to with my own laptop later on. Like, for example, I wasn't looking at 4chan on the family computer. And the kids now, a lot of them have the same access I had at 18 at a much younger age. That said, yeah, there were kids who could get stuff more easily than I could. I just have the sense that the problem is more widespread and harder to control now.
Plus it’s literally proven (and intended to be) addictive.
[удалено]
I also turned out pretty well overall, but there are things I struggle with that I think might not have been a problem if I'd been born in an era before the internet.
Gen X here. Obscene words, racist and sexist language were in my vocabulary when I was in middle school (1987-1990). Blame cable TV? Explicit language warning labels on CDs or cassettes? I don't know. However, we know when to use that language and when not to. and I think that is the difference. Would you believe I learned most of my curse words from my parents?
I would. Y'all's generation has the reputation for having been left to fend for yourselves a lot, so it's not surprising to me that you would have known these things. I did too, in high school, and I probably had a more watchful parent than you. I think, though, that there's a big difference in the ease of access to things now. You mostly knew all of your bullies, right? They were just as vicious, but they weren't random internet strangers you knew nothing about but who were still mean to you for some reason. And there probably weren't as many. And maybe you found abandoned porn in the forest or got ahold of Dad's Playboys (so did I! lol), but that's not the same in quantity or obsenity as what was just sitting there on /b on 4chan every day, or what kids can find now.
True to your point that quantity and severity are a bigger issue now. Yes we knew our bullies but I do not think we would let a screen intimidate us. I would hope we would have enough sense to walk away from the screen. But I can not imagine having a bully in person in school and then going online and seeing them there too. Different times different dangers.
> not until I had my own laptop computer, which happened when I was 18. I'm also a millenial (among the older ones), and this was similar to my case. I didn't get a desktop computer in my room until around age 16. While I certainly did start looking at porn and other stuff (whatever was available in the 1990s), I was well past the very impressionable stage of childhood, and I had developed enough self-control to put work before play.
So much this! Parents are worried about what their kids have access to in the library, but then put the whole Internet in their kids' hands....smh
It’s infuriating!!! 3rd graders watching violent rape porn but heaven forbid they learn what being nonbinary is????
I agree with you! “Pushing boundaries”. What boundaries are the kids pushing though? We had a kid here punch a teacher and get a $5 gift card to Walmart from her “restorative circle.” It’s an industry problem. The boundary is so low that it’s not even a boundary anymore.
You know, this is interesting. It’s like the erosion of decorum and lower stakes boundaries mean that kids have to really push the envelope in order to push them now.
Chicken vs the egg. “We” (society, parents, the industry) lower the standards and the get lower, so we lower them so they all pass, so they push more, so our county made it 100% promotion and graduation rate irrelevant to grades, so they push more.
I think that’s what OP is getting at. The kids are GOING to push boundaries. If the boundary is already at an inappropriate place, these kids have to go even more inappropriate.
I agree!
I agree that the internet via social media is ruining our youth. But I was born in 79 and without the internet. And in middle school, We were VILE! To each other, Our teachers, sometimes even our parents. We were worse than the Southpark kids any day. As a parent of 8, I feel like they grow out of it. If you are lucky, Some skip it entirely.
Also, to add to it, these kids live to provoke a strong reaction from adults. They’ve unfortunately learned that the use of these terms will provide this reaction abundantly.
I think they do it for shock value bc it’s so “taboo”. Thoughts?
I definitely think it is because it is taboo. I remember in elementary and middle school going to the playground and my friends and I saying all the bad words we learned just to see who knew the worst one. But I think what is different from this generation and old ones is their access to anything. Social media has given them an insight into things that no other generation has ever had. They are being inundated with things well beyond what they can actually process. I teach at a private Catholic school, without a doubt these children are so incredibly sheltered and even still they are doing the same thing just not as severe/graphic as in the public schools.
I think it’s access too. Middle schoolers have always wanted to be a bit transgressive. I remember plenty of dead baby jokes when I was in middle school. What middle schoolers haven’t always been able to do is easily find Internet forums fill of whatever hateful drivel some maladjusted adult can dream up and post publically.
Great insight on Catholic schools. Is behavior noticeably better than public in your area?
Behavior in Catholic schools is about 90% better than what I saw in public. Their retirement isn’t as good, but it feels like teaching was in the 90’s and early 2000’s when I could just enjoy teaching and being with students
From my experience, the behavior has been better. That isn't to say all the Catholic schools in the area are great. The type of trouble they get into is generally more age appropriate. But the Jr high students still try to be vile to each other, they have been racist, exclusionary, sexist, and generally bad to each other. But nothing as graphic or as violent as I have seen in public school or what has been described on here. I think middle school especially 7th grade is a time in development where empathy and sympathy have not matched the same desire for attention and the inability to truly understand that bad things in the world like the above. So they try and be "edgy" and cool by saying or doing these things, as well as still acting like a child and not wanting to include people but have a whole new level of understanding about how to exclude.
Kinda? But also, they ARE being exposed to really nasty stuff way earlier than normal. Most of middle schoolers I know are not only watching porn, they are watching it *all the time*, including at school, and the content of the porn is.... *bad*. Like, this is not the porn you grew up with. They are also watching a huge amount of adult animation and content without any filter.
Shock value is what middle school is about. They are trying to figure out where the line is and also be an adult but they have no idea how to do either.
But nobody is enforcing the line. I remember going to college a while back and being a little irked out by guys who thought porn videos were an accurate portrayal of what women like. Even worse, hearing girls say you have to pretend to like XYZ and just do it because it's expected of you. So I'm looking at the shock porn stuff that's rampant now and just..... ew.
Which is why enforcement of consequences is key, but that doesn't happen consistently, unfortunately.
Agreed
We didn't say any of this stuff though when I was that age. I'm from Austria, was 12 in 2002. Even with 14 we didn't. Actually, never, come to think of it. Guys called each other "gay" or stuff like that but genuinely none of what is described in OP's post (or any of the comments).
Internet makes kids better at knowing what is shocking
Maybe your experience is not typical, ever consider that?
That experience is absolutely typical in places outside of the USA
I think so too. If any of us had talked to a teacher or even worse the director like that, it would have been over for us. And yes, also from our parents' side. They would have freaking killed us. One day when we were about 13 (2003 maybe), it came out that a group of guys in my class had been stealing (mostly chewing gum) at a local supermarket for a couple weeks. They were under 14, so nothing happend in that regard but you cannot imagine the dressing down they got from the director and our class teacher (in front of the entire class) for like 15 minutes straight. Some of them were crying by the end of it. One guy wrapped itself in one of the curtains and wept. And that was just for... stealing gum at 13, outside of school.
So show me data that’s not confirmation bias because with out data that’s all the last couple of comments are. “My experience was different so that must mean it’s the standard experience”
Typical for what and when? For where/who?
I teach high school sophomores. I just tell them they're cringe lords and they eventually stop because nobody wants to be cringe. :p
Pretty much this. Middle school is basically just insecure kids being as edgy as possible. The majority are jsut saying it for shock value/pushing boundaries. Yes, maybe a few actually think that way.
See that used to be the case but the problem is in the Trump and post Trump era they stopped actually growing out of it and continue to act like this as adults.
If you do it for shock value the end result should be a significant amount of diamond detention. If you want to play around and test Administration fine don't complain when your butt is sitting in detention for weeks at a time
I think kids have always said racist and sexist and vile things. I remember some kids saying the n word, making fun of Chinese eyes, calling each other the r word, making fun of sped students (the short bus, etc.), homophobia was rampant, etc. Some of it's ignorance, some of it's trying to be shocking and edgy. Tiny middle schoolers dropping f bombs trying to sound cool just makes me giggle inside; they're trying so hard to act older than they are. The racist and sexist stuff is just the grosser version of the same mentality, imo. I'm not saying we should ignore it. It needs to be addressed as much as we can. But I don't think it's anything new or a sign that this generation is any worse than any other. In a lot of ways, kids seem much more inclusive and welcoming than when I was their age.
I generally agree. I’m a young millennial and we said similar things to the examples you listed as kids. It was terrible, though a lot of it was the general culture of the time with adults saying the same things plus kids trying to seem mature. The main difference I’ve seen nowadays is that, in my experience, we didn’t say any of that stuff to or around our teachers or staff and we didn’t have the same online porn access at a young age. Most of us in my group didn’t have that sort of internet porn access until we were teenagers. I think that this language and behavior is coming from younger kids in middle school and being said to and around teachers is pretty crazy, but they also know there’s hardly any consequences for anything that say or do so why would they monitor what they say or code-switch based on their audience? When I was a kid we used different language with different groups of people to avoid trouble.
> I generally agree. I’m a young millennial and we said similar things to the examples you listed as kids. It was terrible, though a lot of it was the general culture of the time with adults saying the same things plus kids trying to seem mature. > The main difference I’ve seen nowadays is that, in my experience, we didn’t say any of that stuff to or around our teachers or staff and we didn’t have the same online porn access at a young age. Are you sure you're a young millennial? Young millenials would have been very familiar with sites like Newgrounds starting around age 11 and more ready access to shocking material on straight early youtube and other sites. Maybe there was a difference in how open they were with some of the behavior towards teachers, but nearly 20 years ago, and we were still seeing open racisim, homophobia, death threats to teachers in letters, etc... > Most of us didn’t have that sort of internet access until we were teenagers 100% not true ( flash games, runescape, java applets, all super popular, would not exist in the cultural zeigest at all if most didn't have access to the internet ) , Note that millenials start from 1981 and go to 1996, I think you might be mistaken and could be an *older* millennial, someone pre 1990 would be an older millenial, and you could have been old enough to skip some of this, though even that's dubious, many of the people making content for these sites were actual teenagers at the time, so would have been late 1980s or early 1990s millenials. It may also be that you were a younger millenial, but lived in a rural area, in which case your experience isn't really representative of the majority of the population, most of the population [had internet as early as 2000 in the US](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/) and by 2000, [70% of 18->29 year olds used the internet](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/), I think it's fair to say that this extended further down the age groups as well, so we're likely looking at 75% of teenagers having access to the internet by 2000.
My mistake, I wasn’t intending to speak for everyone nor was I trying to say we didn’t have the internet. I was just speaking about what I recall about me and my friends at that age. I did grow up in a city and we mostly got the internet around age 10 and I am a younger millennial. We were on the internet before Google was popular, so we definitely got exposure to early internet, early YouTube, flash games, etc. and we mostly had to type in entire urls to get to sites as the search engines weren’t that good, so in my experience porn wasn’t really that easy to find nor was I interested at that age. I absolutely had some terrible internet experiences, but I also had great times before everything on the internet was monetized or owned by the same three companies. What I meant about the porn aspect was that yes, we talked about sex, but while I’m sure some of my peers experienced porn at younger ages, in my personal experience, I started seeing actual internet porn around 13. It definitely was not to the same caliber as other commenters mentioned kids talking about it nowadays with middle school kids casually saying “do you like BBC” and “are you a squirter” to/around teachers or how I’ve heard kids talk about “choking/strangling” so casually. (In my day that was erotic asphyxiation and we only heard about weirdos doing it to themselves). Also really anything BDSM wasn’t something I easily came across or that anyone I knew talked about. As I said, in my experience we absolutely said terrible racist, homophobic, etc. things to each other and to our peers (and I’m an actual lesbian and experienced a lot of homophobia at the time) and we said terrible things *about* our teachers, just not *to* our teachers actual faces. If we did we faced real repercussions and consequences. That was more my point. Just that I personally didn’t see internet porn before 13 and didn’t repeat the abhorrent things we said *to* or *in front of* our teachers and it’s surprising what kids will say to teachers nowadays compared to when I was that age.
>I think kids have always said racist and sexist and vile things. I remember some kids saying the n word, making fun of Chinese eyes, calling each other the r word, making fun of sped students (the short bus, etc.), homophobia was rampant, etc. Yeah the problems are 1. When the black kids punch the kids saying n word they usually take all the fault and punishment 2. These kids grow up with this then we act shocked when we see tiki torches
Shocker, someone gets punished when they physically assault someone for saying a word. The horror
I had a 6th grade boy asking a girl if she was “ a squirter”.
My God
🤢
WTF 🤮
God fucking damn wtf is this generation gone to
Imagine having unlimited hardcore porn on your phone. Anything new that you hear somebody say or referenced online can be googled instantly. Now imagine all of your friends have the same access. It’s totally normalized now.
Yup.
Oh my. I'm confident a large percentage of adults have no idea what that means. I couldn't imagine the poor girls reaction, especially at that age.
I have so many questions, and I don't want answer answers to any of them.
……
I had a freshman tell me to shut the fuck up and that he would beat the fuck out of me. He didn’t even meet with admin
😲
Well did he? Did you die? Get tf back to your classroom then. -Admin /s
can anyone here name another job where you can be assaulted and your supervisor completely ignores it?
Social media brain rot. Access to social media & smart phones at such a young age has really, seriously, messed up these upcoming generations. And that's a gross simplification of these issues.
I'm sure SM has had a negative impact but I also remember being a middle schooler and being targeted by other students my age. They were feral little sociopaths in 2006 too.
Same. 2001 was vile. And I watched my nephew go through it all in 2014ish, and he was a nasty feral racist misogynistic little turd. Ignoring him or calling him out ("dude, wtf, that's so gross, you want to bang X's 49 year old mom. Why, are you having that bad of luck with girls", or "you realize your family has Jewish ties right, and that the nazis would have burnt your family.alive for their religion. You ok?") Really was what worked the best. He recently turned 21 and we had him over for steak and he laughed at how much of an idiot he used to be.
In the 2005-2006 school year I was in the 8th grade and had moved away from Louisiana after Katrina. Kids made fun of the fact that my home was devastated by a hurricane. Kids have always lacked empathy. I agree that unfettered access to social media is making it worse though.
Yep, can tell the dinosaurs are who haven't dealt with a middle schooler in 30 years are. They were saying the same kinds of stuff 20 years ago, edgier stuff sometimes because homophobia was way more tolerated, especially in media and comedy, and actual murder and violence, and disgusting fetish shit was way easier to find.
When I get the option for a password recovery question "what was your childhood nickname", I'm reminded it basically was the F-slur. I'm not even gay lol, that was everyone's favorite word in the early 2000s.
Had a student ask a Para if she likes "BBC". She didn't realize what they said until the ride home
"I don't watch cable news."
wtf
She probably was thinking of the NPR kind of bbc
Big British Company. (Technically true)
Honestly, middle schoolers are feral animals that should be denied human rights. Teaching them how to not be tiny terrorists becomes more vital than any level of content.
This. It’s more human to deal with it when they’re young, than to make excuses for it until they outgrow the excuses. Kids who spout off nasty shit in my classroom get labeled misogynists or misandrists who are speed-running growing old alone and bitter. Publicly shaming this crap is the only way to get the youngsters to realize it’s not funny in the real world.
Maria Montessori believed that middle schoolers were ineducable and should work on the farm until they return for high school.
My kind of woman. What's she up to?
Being dead for 72 years.
AND she's lucky? My heart
They need to do compulsory labor at a work farm for a year or two after 6th grade.
Not a teacher. This shit was said when we were kids, porch monkey is extreme but hearing racist crap from others was very normal. Taboo sums up the reasons well. Saying it front of teachers and admins though - that’s new. We knew we would get punished and we were. The fun was trying to get away with it and the danger was having the things you said repeated to your parents and school punishment. I’m not that old of a fart, high schooler in 2000’s. I guess these are the kids my peers spawned you all are dealing with
From what I hear as a common complaint on this sub, is that punishment can't really happen unless admin also goes for it. Can't punish kids when you're basically not allowed to.
When does administration / middle school campus safety failure become a hostile work environment? Honest question.
Tw: references to rape Agreed. I’ve had to have several “what the actual fuck” conversations with 6th grade boys telling girls they were going to rape them. Honestly what-the-fuck??? It’s developmentally appropriate for them to be pushing boundaries and to be excited by the taboo and strange (we used to love Happy Tree Friends and Salad fingers), but the sheer exposure to *everything* is making them disgustingly obscene and difficult to like. I struggled this year with the boys especially. I can understand that they’re parroting what they’ve read and heard, but I can’t let go of the fact that they’re traumatizing other kids by consistent racism, homophobia, sexism, and downright nastiness without repercussions. When they think no adult is around, their conversations are atrocious. I don’t really care if they’re saying the F word, but it’s so far beyond that. The moaning, shoving their fingers up each others butts, saying they want to motorboat someone, sending porn to teachers through another kid’s Google classroom where it’s got 3 dicks in a woman’s ass…and it’s always “it was just a joke” and the other kid involved doesn’t want to “snitch” so they get away with it even though they’ve been violated or hurt. The need to be told to actually fuck off, but all we can say is “that’s not appropriate” and admin sends them back to their next class because what is the protocol when a 12 year old says he’s gonna rape someone?
Sometimes I think they're just trying to one-up each other for shock value. Sometimes I think it's terrible internet stuff that has seeped into their brains. Some kids are repeating things older siblings or parents say. But often with the younger middle schoolers I find they don't actually understand what they're saying. Like I had some students make some pretty crazy remarks about Chinese people and they did the fake Chinese talking "ching chang bing bang" and said something with a terrible accent like "love you long time!" I really can't stand that kind of thing and stop the whole class and did a big lecture. I think it's sunk into at least a few of them that this was not okay. I really put my foot down and make a big deal out of stuff so when I do I think it kind of drives home that it's important. The only other one I did that with was when they were saying some really inappropriate things about gay people. Stopped the whole class and talked about it. I'm sure there were some boys who went on talking inappropriately out of my earshot but at least it was out of my earshot and they got the message that it wasn't okay.
This sounds like the middle school I went to as a student 15 years ago. Sometimes kids just be wildin.
I think we as adults are going into the “those damn kids era” I’m not that old but I’m old enough to were I had some internet access growing up and I learned all sorts of awful shit that I would then turn around and repeat. This is a tale as old as time and you’re just at the spear point of it all
I mean, I thought the words but I never uttered or acted upon any of it. They’re out of control.
Looking at the comments here and there are a lot of tone deaf responses. Yes middle schoolers are some of the worse, and this age group has been saying some of these things for a long time, but the biggest problem is that they are saying these things out loud. In front of people. They have no filter. There is no respecting the setting they are in. We can blame social media for sure, but their parents don't set any precedents at home for what is appropriate and what isn't.
Exactly. They’ve been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that saying the quiet part out loud is free of consequence or maybe even something to be celebrated.
Yup. Nobody that matters to them tells them off for it.
as someone who was a middle schooler once, this sounds like normal middle school boys, competing with each other to see who is the baddest. they're hashing out the pecking order. this is standard, abhorrent preteen/teenage behavior. you will see the same thing for years to come.
I can’t be the only one googling what on Earth a ‘Diddy Party’ is right? 😬
I remember kids saying the same stuff when I was in middle school.
The fact that Internet site gatekeeping for children is a joke contributes to this.
But we asked them if they were over 18! /s
Absolutely 100% agree. They’re so callous and know words I NEVER would’ve thought to use.
So far, just this morning, I’ve been told I look like “The music producer from Alvin and the chipmunks” followed by “He’s kind of fine though.” I don’t even know how I’m supposed to respond to that.
Just say “thanks, that’s so fanum tax”
I feel this frustration in my bones. Half my class (none of which were Muslim) were saying Allah akbar today. They tried to pull "but it means God is great, Ms. Reads!" Yes, it does, but that's not why you are saying it. 7 days left....
We kept that shit to the Modern Warfare lobby.
We had a kid catch a sexual harassment charge after being warned at least 3 documented times to stop interacting with the victim. Kid kept calling the student a “sl*t” and a “wh*re.” Every couple of years some kid will push it too far and catch a charge, and then for about 2 years the boys will remember it and actually be scared of the consequences, and then the memory fades and they get bold again. Honestly the only thing that’s going to stop it is these young men getting scared straight by the legal system. Fear over contributing to a “school-to-prison pipeline” has made it more difficult for the female students to actually seek remedy. F that, sue the bully’s parents and the school. If the females are going to be forced to be in a school with male students (not a bad thing, but it’s their inability to withdraw that makes it so brutal) then the male students should be forced to learn how to properly respect their peers.
Our culture is steeped in violence, sexism, racism, and other vile things. Of course the kids are copying what our society enables on the daily.
Our middle schoolers are WILD! We had middle schoolers running a gift card scam (stealing gift cards and selling them for ‘less than’ what the card said except they weren’t activated). We’ve had kids not only send other kids’ nudes around but airdrop them to the whole cafeteria! A kid was SA-ing a friend and was blackmailing them to be quiet about it and to comply with them. Plus, we have several who are legitimately already apart of gangs, except what they don’t understand is that they’re being used by the older gang members to run drugs and weapons because they’re easily manipulated. We’ve lost too many middle schoolers and high schoolers to gang violence in the past 10 years. I thought my friends were bad in middle school but I never could have imagined that literal children could be like this.
😳I had to look that one (BBC) up. Believe me, this behavior is already present in PreK students. It’s disturbing. Imagine four year old boys pretending to hump their female peers and shouting out that they want someone to suck their balls. This year I was told countless times by PreK students, kindergarteners and first graders that they were going to blow my fucking brains out. These same kids love coming into my resource room at all times of the day to calm themselves and to learn. They tell me they love me. They give hugs. They are unable to regulate themselves, have suffered trauma, and what can I do for them besides keep coming back year after year? I just finished my 7th year with this population that grows more violent each year.
It is absolutely a case of “I’m old enough to kind of know what this means, and definitely old enough to know it gets a reaction out of people.” I vividly remember giggling my way through a teacher’s presentation on Martin Luther King Jr. in the 7th grade. Nothing about it was funny, but my friend and I caught the giggles at lunch and were halfway paying attention. That’s not what my teacher saw, though. Instead, she saw two children giggling at MLK Jr. and his “I Have a Dream” speech. She must have been very concerned at how flippant we were about something so serious. Similarly, I’m from the era where the R-slur and F-slur were thrown around regularly, so much so that we had to have school-wide assemblies about why it’s not okay to say things like that. I’ve had to do a lot of unlearning and learning to make sure I’m not as stupid and ignorant as I was in 7th grade, but a lot of it also comes with time. Time and conscious effort. You can at least rest assured that one of those things is certain.
Middle school behavior basically reflects the online world they all inhabit. The worst things from social media and 4chan wind up at school every time.
Lmao okay but it was this bad when I was a middle school student in 2006? We need to sit down with kids and really talk about what their words mean and how it can affect their peers and themselves. Social media as a whole is brain rotting parents and kids, and it’s unfortunately on the teachers to talk to kids (what a concept) about rights and wrongs. To say kids are worse is too broad of a statement. Kids will always be kids.
We’re in a difficult moment, many fall back on this argument you’ve made. No doubt that historically, the older generations look upon the new ones with shock and appall as to what behavior they see from them. What I think is an important difference is access to internet. Yes, 2006 definitely had notable instances maybe similar to what we see more largely today, but back then there was still an attempt to keep kids away from adult concepts on the internet. The now unfettered access to adult content ranging from adult cartoons to porn exposes them to way too much. Another key development is the lack of secrecy, looking at other comments and seeing a kid ask a para if they like BBC… the boldness in the presentation of these things, followed by a complete lack of accountability or willingness to hear the conversation, is now leaving us in a new situation. I spent all of last 2 years trying to mediate conversations like these, if you found a way to make them try a new perspective through a conversation I’d love to hear how.
> What I think is an important difference is access to internet. Yes, 2006 definitely had notable instances maybe similar to what we see more largely today, but back then there was still an attempt to keep kids away from adult concepts on the internet. The now unfettered access to adult content ranging from adult cartoons to porn exposes them to way too much. Were you asleep for the past 20 years? There was *less successful* attempts to keep kids from this, because parents were much less technically adept, especially compared to their own children, and nobody knew what they were *actually* letting their kids see on the internet. Today it's way easier to block children's access to content, even if it isn't perfect, and parents today have better basic technical knowledge, as a population, than their own children, and tools are harder to circumvent. The kids are the same as they've always been in middle school. They were edgy, violent, and mean in 2004 just as they are in 2024. The problem isn't vague "secrecy" junk, the problem is the same problem everywhere: * Reduced Teacher agency * No repercussions for bad behavior or poor grades. * Worse student to teacher ratios. * No admin support. * Maybe worse parenting, but I'm not even sure there are more shitty parents now a days, or if it's just that more shitty parents are *empowered* to be shitty because the school system is so feckless in dealing with their bullshit. Thing were better on many of these fronts 20 years ago, but it has gradually eroded away, and it wasn't even all that great back then.
I hear kids swear and use racial slurs towards each other all day. It’s how they are raised.
I can't tell you how many times I hear kids from 12 to 15 say "you stupid monkey" Just that alone is concerning can't imagine what else is said that I don't hear
Was in middle school in 2012 at the dawn of the “always online” era and remember this sort of thing being common among the student body in general, mostly the boys but a few girls too. I think it’s a development of the usual boundary pushing/edginess at that age, except tainted/influenced by the way discourse is discourse’d online these days. That of course doesn’t make it right, but I think it helps to understand that most of these kids will look back on this period of their lives and be mortified by the things they said, as was the case in my age cohort, and this reflection and growth is what separates the wheat from the chaff in my opinion. The ones that can look back on that behavior and be proud of it are usually the ones that find themselves no longer welcome in most corners of society.
Join us over in /r/collapse because all you're seeing is just a small facet of societal decay and collapse.
Middle schoolers have always been that way. You don't remember being in middle school?
I think it has to do with what they are watching, the lack of parental figures and discipline at home, as well a lack of being around people due to covid. This is my first year as a para and the number of times I get on the students I'm with about simply not cussing is astounding. They will flat out tell another kid to fuck off or call them some racist name in front of me or the teacher.
Their fucked up shitty parents are the reason. End of story.
Young people today utter things we would never even allow ourselves to think in the 70s when I was a teen. Not sure of why but it is horrible to see. We made so many great changes in the world around race ... We seem to be loosing all of them
I don't think it's just taboo, and we need to look deeper than middle school angst. They are repeating what they hear and they are being targeted by influencers who need an impressionable audience. There's an entire economy around convincing young men that their problems are because of women, gay people, and sometimes people of color depending on who they're listening too, that somehow civil rights and equality has meant white men conceded something, and that the patriarchy is a myth. This starts with the mindset similar to Harrison Butker's comments, that women should focus on building families and supporting their husbands. But if you go down that rabbit hole, it quickly turns into influencers selling vitamins or cream, to selling courses on how to make money, and even further into pickup artists and redpilling. These young men are being told that when people comment on the patriarchy, they're coming for all men (including *you*, 13 year old middle schooler!). They're being told red pilling theory, that women never date down and they only date up, that wealth and status is the most important thing to get women, because women are something to be had. This isn't just middle school angst, there's *money* behind these beliefs. They're being told that you deserve a Tradwife, that will always support you, and that "females" got too independent, that social justice is coming for the western nuclear family, and the only way to fix this is to sign up for a $50 a month course on how to pickup women, how to go viral and make money, and when they grow up maybe they'll attend a $5,000 course where men try to be Spartans and scream at each other in the mud. https://youtu.be/GHkhTIEe254?si=_sMmfFszkYziB9Th This video link is from Some More News, and they cover all of this and more. There's a particularly depressing clip halfway through where one of these influencers meets some of his middle school aged fans at a baseball game, and they immediately start saying vile things about gay people and women, and the influencer almost has a moment of clarity where he looks completely shocked at the damage he's done. This is what our young men are being subject too. I don't know how to fix it, but we at least need to make ourselves aware of the extent of it.
I've heard some of this from kindergartners loud enough for staff to hear. It's not just you.
Edgelords ruin a lot of the experience honestly. I couldn’t teach middle school because I would have the hardest time not roasting those walking joker memes
I am seriously disgusted with the middle schoolers. I swear it rises to the level of sexual harassment towards other kids and teachers. I don't want to hear about GYAT ever again!!! Or 69 or WTF ever 21 is about...
I'm an ESL teacher, our school isn't even that big and we have to deal with those kinds of things, constantly. Me and my boss frequently discuss about the classes "leaving the good age range and becoming savages" that happen around 9/10-12/13. That gap is totally the worst. After that, they are still teenagers, but less savage. I guess they wanna test the world and their boundaries, so I usually am very understanding of those situations. A big part of them repeat those slurs unconsciously, just because people around them (or on the internet) say so. I've had to deal with a range of weird things already, from children playing with toys while saying the toys were fucking each other to another kid (11 yo) deadass telling me they had had sex and were afraid the girl was pregnant... So the insults don't really scare me anymore. When I feel like doing so and when I have the chance... I explain to them how wrong it is and why. It's not always that I have the right heart and mind to get involved, if I may be honest. But I also get sad and discouraged from time to time.
This is what they're hearing at home I think It's also what's happening online when people record things live.
The crazy part is that it's loud enough for everyone. I remember being 12-13. I had a foul mouth. My friend group (sadly myself included) made dead baby jokes, Holocaust jokes, and all sorts of other nasty things. However, I'd have literally pooped my pants if a teacher or adult overheard me saying something like that. I 100% would have cried if a teacher called my dad and just repeated what I said. The huge difference now is these kids have no shame and aren't worried about teachers or parents overhearing them.
The most chilling thing I've come across is a middle-schooler who would write significant dates from the Nazi regime on bathroom walls, etc. No explanation; just a date for others to presumably Google out of curiosity and be led into reading about Nazis. I notified the school cop but I don't know if they ever figured out who was doing it.
Reminds me of when I use to work in electronics at Target during the holidays, I would get parents buying their kids GTA 5 and then after Christmas bring it back complaining about the content even though I explained to them about the rating system on the cover and what the game entails. 🤦♂️
Your talking about a group of people who run on lack of sleep, energy drinks, social media and hormones. Im surprised its not worse!
We did the exact same thing when we were younger, and that was before the internet. It's kids testing boundaries with little regard for consequences. It has happened since time immemorial. Don't act like this is some big moral failing of a single generation. That hyperbolic shit doesn't help. You should just punish them and hope one or two learn the lesson before puberty ends.
I get all this from my elementry kids as well. It's truly disgusting.
This is why I can not teach middle school. High school is not much better but at least seniors keep their heads down.
This is absolutely nothing new
What are you scared of?
You're surprised? Kids curse and say unsavory shit. It is what it is...The internet has done gone fucked their heads up. Most kids are not young Sheldon.
My response to "it's a joke" is "jokes are funny. Explain to me why that is funny."
I graduated in December and am very new to the classroom environment thanks to COVID and I definitely agree. I was a menace in middle school, but these kids take the cake! And surprisingly (not suprisingly?) It's the homophobic ones I see and hear the MOST doing "gay" esque things
It was definitely going downhill before Covid but man post covid allowed kids to say anything they want and think it is okay. I teach 7th grade and you are 100% spot on with the amount of comments I never would have even thought to say when i was that age (not to mention the whooping I would have gotten at home had they recieved a call from the school with me saying those things). Sad part is the parents talk the same way and do nothing when they are contacted about it anyway so the kids think it is ok to act and say those things.
This was rampantly going on when I was in jr. high, and I’m 53. Not much was done about it then either. It makes me chuckle when parents worry about the innocence of their children being stolen by the evil of the moment and forgetting what we did and knew when we were that age.
That's the age when kids start checking out taboos and testing the waters. Fortunately, they grow out of it.
Yesterday I got told repeatedly all day to go back to my country. Reported it. Admin did nothing
Middle schoolers will mimic what they see. They have spent a long time seeing behavior from national spot light people that make it look like it’s okay to do things that are actually inappropriate. Add to that parents are either to involved (helicopter or lawnmower) or not involved at all. It is a perfect storm …
It’s coming from the internet. Social media has become an outlet for the outrageous things that most people would never say in public. And it creates an echo chamber of others who speak similarly and all validate each other into thinking it’s okay to talk like that - and then children emulate it.
This is not a result of Covid. I’m 22. I very much remember calling my friends border jumpers, beans, illegals (all Mexican and a few white people) etc. and I graduated 8th grade in 2016. Slurs and repeating what’s popular is very common. Diddy party stuff comes from a streamer who plays gta roleplay servers and one of his characters is diddy or someone who works for diddy and invites “attractive men” to “the biggest party in America”
I make it a point to clamp down firmly on this. If I hear a student say something repulsive in the corridor, I'll make an example of them by isolating them and giving them a sanction. By being firm and fair, word will spread about your just and respectable nature and kids begin to change their behaviour... at least around you! If you don't like something at work, change it! 👍
Just thinking back on my middle school days...racism, sexism, naziism, classism,ism were the norm then (middle 1990s), just as they are now.
Student here This year I made a call to my resource officer because I heard a group of kids (5-6 strong) gathered next to my locker. And the first thing I hear is “is that a g*n?” The fear that I felt as I almost ran down the hall was so overwhelming I could barely speak to our resource officer. He’s a great guy, supper nice and genuinely cares about us kids. Kids were pulled into the office, lockers were searched, nothing, false alarm. After all that, all I could think of was… #WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD FIND THAG FUNNY THERE IS NO FUCKING JOKE THERE! The humor has become down right sickening, and it scares me
Ugh do you work at my school? Because I could've written something nearly identical.
Middle schoolers have always been like that. You picked the worst age group lol
Social media brain rot has hit these kids harder than crack.
Where you never in middle school?
If we really boil this down, ever since the pandemic kids have been GLUED to phones, tablets, any type of device. I've worked in food service (restaurants, coffee shops) for about 4 years and I can't tell you how many families I've seen come into a nice Italian restaurant, just for them all to sit on their devices, parents included. I've had families of 6 totally ignore me when I'm offering them more water or to clear plates off the table. The parents are rude to the waitresses and don't tip, and that is the example they leave for their kids. Kids are given devices nowadays just to shut them up and keep them busy. I grew up in early 2000s, and even back then when social media was brand new, I still got into all types of adult things online before I was even 10. Now, I can't even imagine the kinds of websites and games these kids are finding, since the internet and media has become so much more openly vulgar. It all starts with the parents, but I really think that a lot of kids desensitization is stemming from them constantly being buried in a phone or device, with the whole internet at their fingertips. They know their ways around parental blocks and restrictions. Then, for the rare case that a parent isn't allowing their child to have a device for these reasons, the child is made fun of for not having the same devices as their peers. Parents and teachers are either so burnt out that they don't care anymore, or they're exactly the same as the children. These kids have no discipline and society is wondering why they're getting so bad, but we've allowed this to happen. There is no consequence for failing, there's no consequence for not trying, and there's no real consequence for the way they talk and behave. For some reason, disciplining children has become something that is looked down upon, because they're just "innocent kids" and "they don't know any better". Except they're not innocent, and they understand so much more than we can even begin to imagine. If they don't know any better, it's because we, as adults, are not teaching them any better. They're not going to become kind, successful, and hard-working members of society if WE don't teach them how. They know teachers aren't going to do anything about what they say, so why would they care if a teacher overheard them? They'll laugh in the teachers face before being afraid of consequences, because there likely won't be any. We need to start treating kids like KIDS. They need guidance and stern instruction, and without it they'll get into all sorts of things unsupervised. The stuff they say in front of authority figures is just the tip of the iceberg. If something isn't done, I'm terrified to think that I'll still be alive to see these current middle schoolers & elementary schoolers graduate and be shoved into the workforce barely knowing how to tie their shoes. Our future lawyers, doctors, teachers, if they even make it that far.
What you are experiencing is group of kids who have access to the vast information on the internet. Also they see that bold, and outrageous behavior is usually rewarded through views and likes. This pushes kids to act out more to be noticed and liked. This sort of behavior happened when we were kids just not to this magnitude. Social norms have also changed, curse words are used daily in all forms of media. Crude behavior or jokes are marketed as pranks or comedy. These students are still in that soft spot of still a kid and not yet an adult. So they haven't fully grasped the consequences of their actions and their words. I would say that parental guidance or the absence of it is the cause. But kids will act however they please when not being watched. (peer pressure)
i was in middle school in the 2010’s and kids wrre doing this. middleschoolers are just an amalgamation of the worst things theyve ever heard
I can see it first hand as a student too, can't speak out without getting clowned on so I have no choice besides just quietly sitting there.
its normal they grow out of it by like 15 they realise its cringe and corny
We used to say those words when I was in grade 6 and 7 in 2008/09
Discipline them
They have been disciplined. They don't care
In my district, there's nothing you can even do. I had to send kids out during state testing because they were being too disruptive. Then they got sent back up without my permission and continued to be disruptive. I left last year, and I've never been better. I tell anyone that will listen to NEVER teach in Hillsborough County Florida.
Love that this was the response from “StopblamingTeachers” lmao
Their comment history is wild lol
"Have you tried forming real relationships?"
lol what’s that?
The number of comments I have heard about my race and changing my name to become a racial name to label me blows my mind
If you lie you are a liar. If you cheat you are a cheater. If you say vile, racist ignorant shit you are a vile, ignorant racist. It’s that simple.
This has been happening forever. I’m almost 27 and it was the same for me in middle school.
Because wokeness went too far and society is flexing the other way now. Preteens are just the right age to start rebelling and that means pushing the counter culture. I’m legit frightened for the next few years.
Downvotes but completely right. This is pretty much the way me and all my friends talked in middle school. Completely normal in the developmental stage of your life to test boundaries, push back in orthodoxy, and question “why can’t I say that?” As a result, you’ve got kids embracing Andrew Tate and edgy Kick streamers. These people do not have their ear to the ground at all. Funny to see their reaction to the youth when you can see it all happen over the past 2 years online.
Whoa! 🤣😂I didn't even know because normally I get matching hate mail in my inbox. But not a peep this time—just love. Weird. Doesn't matter. You're right, I’m right, Andrew Tate is not. 💐💛
You spoke a truth on reddit. That is not how we do things here!
🤣😂🤣😂Your user name. 💣💛 I was due for a good downvote spell. It’s creepy when it's just applause. If Oprah can't please everyone, why should I?
Yup. Kids are not only going to go for the edge factor, but you see how far from post-racist society we are by what kids choose to say.
As a retired middle school teacher I can say without doubt the kids whose parents were involved and cared to be a parent were fine. The kids described here have no guidance at home.
I don’t have the spoons for this.
Woke ain’t doing it no mo and the pendulum is swinging the opposite direction
Dude are you really acting like being on the same level of maturity as a literal middle schooler is somehow a win?
Reaping what they sowed