How to help my middle schooler when they are stressed out about school?

In the 23 years I have worked with kids, I have learned that the most important things you can teach them are:

There are many options to get the success they want in life
On paper, I probably did not look like a kid who would have much success in life. When all my friends were receiving their acceptance letters for college, I asked my friends “how did you get that”? They said “I applied”. I asked “how do you apply?” They said “it’s too late, you already had to apply and you had to take the SAT last year”.
I was the first one in my family to go to college so I had no idea how my friends knew in 12th grade where they would be going the next 4 years or how they found out that they needed to take the SAT and how they found out that grades were important to get into college. I started asking questions and eventually landed at a community college and eventually at a 4 year school to get my Bachelors Degree and then eventually got my master’s degree and eventually became one of the happiest people that I have ever met. On paper, no one probably would have guessed that I would have made it.

The definition of success is different for everyone
Some people are focused on money, some are focused on happiness, some are focused on security, and some are focused on something completely different. The definition of success is truly different for different people. If your child truly understands that, then they will learn to listen to their internal dialogue about happiness and listen less to what everyone else is telling will make them happy. Ultimately, no one knows what you want more than you know what you want. Just because your friend thinks they will be happy using drugs, that doesn’t mean you will be happy using drugs. Just because your friend is happy being the CEO of a company, that doesn’t mean that will make you happy.

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” ― John Lennon

Effort and hard work get people to “success” more so than any other characteristic
When you teach your child that hard work and grit (I will explain later) is way more important than anything else and as long as they work hard, then the right things will happen for them, it takes a lot of stress out of results (grades). This doesn’t mean that if they study 24 hours a day, they will be good at math, but it does mean that the natural selection process will work for them. For example: No matter how hard I worked, I wasn’t great at higher levels of math. I studied hard, worked hard, and accepted my B or C grade. I knew that because I worked hard and didn’t really ever understand high levels of math, that perhaps I wouldn’t want to do it for a living 8 hours a day. Instead, I chose something I was good at and something I liked. When you choose something you like, you are probably going to be better than other people at it. Everyone has something they like. The struggle should be more about “how do I find a career I like and I am good at?” rather than “how do I master things I don’t like?”.

Imagine this: Your kid LOVES the game Fortnite (or World of Warcraft, or whatever the next big game is). Imagine they found a job where they were paid to play Fortnite (and there ARE jobs like this called Video Game Testers). They would probably play 8 hours per day at work and then come home and read all about how to play better. Who am I kidding, they would watch Youtube videos on how to play better. Then they go to work and wow their bosses with their skill. The other employees who don’t really like video games, but chose it because it paid good money don’t do the extra “work” like someone who loves doing it. What happens next? They get promoted, they succeed and they are happy because they are getting paid to do something that they like.

The challenge is in finding a job that requires something that you love doing instead of trying to get good at something you don’t have natural skill to do.

GRIT: Check out this Ted talk about “growth mindset” (which is a strategy many schools are utilizing). The basic idea is that you learn to take failures as a challenge to do better and have the belief that with the right information, training, and hard work that you can do more than you believe that you can do.

So, now what?
Teach your child organizational skills, study skills, anxiety management skills and other skills that they need to succeed in school and in life. Teach them the benefits of learning subjects they hate (I will give ideas below). These skills tend to be big factors in a kid succeeding in their transition from elementary school (where they tend to be coddled by teachers) to middle school (where it feels like they are thrown to the wolves to fend for themselves).

Benefits of learning subjects you hate:
Math: when you are buying a car and you notice that your monthly payment on the car is more than what your cost plus interest is, you will save yourself a lot of money by catching the banks “mistake” (was it really a mistake or do banks know people are bad at math?).
Science: When you are making nachos in the oven and the nachos catch fire (I have actually seen this happen), you will know that when you open the oven, oxygen will feed the fire, so it might be best to not put your face in the opening of the oven when you are trying to put out the fire.
Language Arts: Who can get a job with a resume that isn’t spelled correctly? Do you really want to trust someone to tell you if the contract you are about to sign is what you verbally agreed to (you could be signing your house away)?

Ted Talk Direct Link: https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_grit_the_power_of_passion_and_perseverance/up-next