From middle-school misfit to an appearance on NBC’s Today show, celebrated speaker, author and educator Michelle Icard helps kids, parents and teachers navigate the tricky middle school social world.
Written By Patricia Grandjean
In the 7th grade, Michelle Icard ’94 suffered from being what she calls the typical “middle-school misfit,” complete with oversized glasses, a lopsided coiffure and all the wrong clothes. A relative newbie at Buckingham Brown & Nichols, a pre-kindergarten to grade 12 private day school in Cambridge, Mass., she describes herself as “an insecure kid whose family had moved around a little bit, and who wasn’t really confident making new friends.
“I had the classic experience of being friends with a girl who became friends with someone else, then I got booted out of the relationship entirely,” Icard says. Other kids teased her about her awkwardness. “So, middle school for me felt disconnected, lonely and a little confusing. I remember that all I wanted was to be invisible because I felt like I kept making mistakes in public.” Then, in her freshman year of high school, she built up her courage and won a place in the chorus of the BB&N school musical Sweeney Todd. Suddenly, she had become part of a team, with friends who shared her interests. Though her self-doubts started to evaporate, she never forgot the misery they’d created for her.
Thirty years on, Icard has become the master of the Middle School Makeover (to borrow the title of her popular and critically acclaimed 2014 advice guide for parents, subtitled Improving the Way You and Your Child Experience the Middle School Years ). Focusing on these years as a period of intense growth for children—in the physical and chemical developments of their brains, the complexity of their relationships with peers and their academic/familial responsibilities—she has forged a career devoted to teaching these kids, and their parents, how to navigate sometimes treacherous waters. This instruction takes many forms: public speaking dates and TV appearances, parent-child workshops, school curricula, summer camps and a personal website, michelleinthemiddle.com, all coordinated from Icard’s longtime home base of Charlotte, N.C.
She hadn’t always planned to be a middle-school maven. An English major during her undergraduate years at Wittenberg, she loved modern American literature and hoped to teach it at the college level herself. “But in applying to graduate schools, I aimed too high,” she says—one of her dream targets was Duke University—“and I didn’t get in anywhere.” Having minored in education, she became certified to teach English for grades 7 through 12, which she did for a time in the Springfield school system. This experience, too, made her feel awkward and inadequate.
“I mostly worked with high school juniors and seniors, but because I had always been a little young for my school grade, the age gap between me and my students was tiny, just a couple of years,” Icard says. “I felt like I had no authority. I thought maybe I shouldn’t teach—I really second-guessed myself.”
After graduating from Wittenberg, she drifted a bit—deciding, on a whim, to visit Charlotte with friends. To her surprise, she fell in love with the locale and decided to stay, embarking on a series of odd jobs from hotel front-desk representative to cocktail waitress. “Then, I decided a career in public relations might be interesting, so I literally opened a phone book and cold-called every firm in alphabetical order, or knocked on doors and handed out my resume.”
Ultimately, her flirtation with PR shifted to a fascination with consulting. In 1997, she landed a position in Atlanta, Ga., as “knowledge manager” at the accounting firm Arthur Andersen— more notoriously known as the firm that criminally mishandled the books for the energy company Enron. In the wake of the 2001 Enron scandal, Icard became one of 80,000 Andersen employees to lose their jobs when the company folded. “At the time, I had a 1½-year-old child and was seven months pregnant,” she says. “I realized I had to get very creative, and this is where the real story begins.”
Her new entrepreneurial spirit took root with a home-based business as a middle-school tutor. Within a few years, she found herself more interested in her students’ social development than teaching them academics. “These kids were telling me stories that were gut-wrenching, and I related to them because of my own experiences,” she says. “I remember one girl telling me she would take her lunch and eat it in the bathroom, because the kids in the cafeteria were so mean. Meanwhile, the parents would say, ‘We can’t figure out what’s going on—things seemed fine in elementary school, now she’s not talking to us.’ They typically assumed it was an academic issue; that their kids’ grades were slipping because no one taught them how to prepare for a test or manage their study time efficiently.”
Icard decided that what these kids needed was a kind of “It Gets Better” campaign. Initially, she teamed up with two other self-employed professionals—one a psychologist, the other an occupational therapist—to set up such a program for middle-school girls. “We thought we should take these girls aside and say, ‘Look, we all had a miserable time in middle school; but we’re happy now, we all have our own businesses,’” she says. When her colleagues dropped away from this plan, Icard remained committed. “I ended up doing a ton of research. I had friends who gave me psychology textbooks, and I read everything I could. I consulted with psychologists. I wanted to focus at first on self-esteem because a key component of high self-esteem is knowing where you fit in within your community. And that’s a really difficult concept for a middle-schooler to get.”
With the goal of presenting these ideas in a form that middle- school agers could relate to, she developed a program for girls—now known as “Athena’s Path”—that began with a lesson on the middle-school social structure. “I decided, let’s name the cliques in school and talk about social power and perceived social power,” Icard says. This grew into a 10-lesson series that she introduced in two week-long summer camps in 2004. She begged parents to send their kids to those first camps, and let a lot of girls come for free. “We had one camp with 20 girls and another with 12, and we ran sessions from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. each day,” she adds. The following summer, demand had grown enough to fill eight camps. Currently, she oversees 15 to 17 camps in Charlotte every summer—incorporating both an “Athena’s Path” program for girls and an equivalent for boys called “Hero’s Pursuit”—each of which hosts 15 kids and is run by a combination of 10 trained teachers and a group of high-school interns.
She also developed “Athena’s Path” and “Hero’s Pursuit” classroom curricula—complete with teaching manual—that middle schools can purchase and implement during the school year. To date, Icard estimates nearly 40 schools around the country have used her programs, which are best described as a combination of open conversation, socialization and having fun. “I call them leadership programs,” Icard says. “They’re really about how to be a social leader. My favorite parts of the curriculum focus on how to be a creative problem-solver. We take kids through a six-step process for any issue that can come up in their lives, including brainstorming, visualization, critical thinking and analysis. It’s great fun to watch because kids’ first impulsive reaction to solving a problem is really kind of cuckoo.”
Parents are a crucial factor in helping to develop such skills, and they’re also active participants in Icard’s workshops and public talks. A few years back, Haynes Paschall, a former middle-school counselor (and current professional health coach), participated in a mother-daughter workshop with her then 11-year-old daughter Hannah, as well as attending a session exclusively for parents. “I walked away with a much better understanding of what was ahead of her, and me as her mother,” Paschall says. “We also gained some great tools to teach us to communicate well and navigate the waters.” Her younger daughter, Alice, age 12, has similarly benefited by participating in an “Athena’s Path” school curriculum led by Icard herself.
Open communication between parents and children, Icard teaches, is key. “My girls have had some conflicts with friends that led to hurt feelings and lost friendships,” Paschall says. “But they’ve come to talk with me about them, and let me help them work out the best way to respond. That’s huge—a lot of girls in middle school won’t talk to their moms. Mom is uncool, mom is embarrassing, and the last person you’ll go to because you want to be independent and grown-up.”
Of all the tools Paschall gained, her favorite is one called “botox brow”—involving the ability to remain outwardly calm and steady in the face of childhood crises. Such strategies are particularly important in this era of social media, which many parents still fear for its perhaps over-publicized risks. Icard, a social-media enthusiast, preaches the virtue of parents and children sharing the experience as much as possible, particularly when it comes to photo-sharing sites that seem to captivate middle-schoolers most: Instagram and Snapchat.
“Parents worry that their kids are going to sext or share nude pictures,” she says. “Some kids do, but not as much as we think. Still, it’s critical for parents to be on these platforms with their kids, using them and understanding their language. That way, they can see what their kids and their kids’ friends post and have conversations about it. Children need help processing the experience.” Icard makes social-media discussions a part of her workshops with middle-schoolers as well, often focusing on news stories about kids who’ve gotten in trouble with one platform or another. “I’ll say, ‘Man, did you see what happened in Oklahoma— that was crazy! Let’s talk about this; what could that kid have done differently?’ Children this age are very empathetic, and they love solving problems.”
Icard’s expertise has brought her to a number of career high points: an appearance on NBC’s Today show, speaking engagements at parenting events across the country, pieces in The Washington Post and Chicago Tribune and what she calls a “phenomenal” opportunity to conduct her programs in an American International School in Mozambique: “I worked with a very diverse population of kids who live in a country that isn’t always safe for them. That’s a hard way to live when you’re in middle school and want to be a little rebellious.”
Her public relations linchpin, michelleinthemiddle.com, is about to expand to two websites. One will remain a resource for parents with articles, FAQs and information about camps and conferences; the other, michelleicard.com, will be a media hub where members of the press—or those wishing to hire her for personal appearances—can make contact. Though she’s happy with her current position in life, she still exhibits a little middle-school-style insecurity from time to time, particularly when she talks about completing her follow-up volume to Middle School Makeover. This one will be a manual for kids. “There’s no more vulnerable feeling than putting a book out,” she says. “I get in knots thinking about it—it’s terrifying.”
For more information visit: MichelleIcard.com