by Colby Atwood, Parent of Harbor School Alumni

When I was growing up, the conventional wisdom was, “Save for your child’s college education!” The implication was that those were the years of schooling that really mattered. Now that my own children are at the end of high school and in college, I realize that their most important school years were, in fact, their middle school years.

Child development experts have a lot to say on this topic, but here is what I saw: In the years before middle school, my children were focused on figuring out the basics – their place in their family, how to be away from home at school, some of the discipline of learning. It was during their middle school years that they really began looking outside themselves to understand where they fit in the bigger world. From the fourth through the eighth grades they developed or solidified what I think of as their “strategic” relationships, such as

• Their attitude toward learning and teachers
• The kinds of people they would seek as friends
• Where they tended to place themselves in social and group situations
• How influential their parents were going to be compared with their friends
• Where they stood on drug use and other perils of modern life
• … And most importantly, the quality of the relationship they would have with themselves – their personal integrity

In retrospect, I see how important it was for them to be fully supported to make the best choices they could around these formative decisions. Their Harbor School teachers knew them well, which meant that they were more likely to receive good guidance at the right moment; their teachers also had high expectations of their academic performance, which helped them to realize the value of working hard and taking pride in their accomplishments. Being in a small school also meant that they had opportunities to – necessarily had to – get to know classmates whom they would never have known in a bigger school. My children were amazed to discover that each of their classmates had something valuable to add to the group and to their own lives.

Although my children are well beyond middle school, I still see the profound influence that those years continue to have on who they are now. They are self-confident, self-directed learners who respond well to new environments and experiences.

If I had it to do over again, and I had the resources to invest in only a few years of tuition, I would put it where it would do the most good: grades four through eight.