Column: Combatting FOPO (Fear of Other People’s Opinions) and other tips for navigating middle school with grace

Licensed clinical professional counselor Phyllis Fagell has a new book out, and it’s worth reading for its description of my new favorite diagnosis alone: FOPO.

FOPO, which Fagell credits to psychologist Michael Gervais, is the Fear of Other People’s Opinions. (You’re likely familiar with FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out, and its introvert cousin, JOMO, Joy Of Missing Out.)

FOPO pops up toward the middle of “Middle School Superpowers: Raising Resilient Tweens in Turbulent Times,” Fagell’s follow-up to her 2019 book, “Middle School Matters.”

FOPO is a minor player in this brilliant, bighearted, highly practical guide to helping kids navigate the mess of middle school emotions, mistakes, insecurities and social minefields.

But I love it as an anchor anyway, because naming it, acknowledging it, and helping diffuse it make every other lesson in the book (and maybe in life?) more achievable — for kids, but also for parents, who are as afflicted by FOPO as anyone.

(And can you blame us? From the moment we first take our kids into a store, an airport, any public space, really, we learn they are our responsibility to bear alone, but society’s burden to judge collectively.)

Anyway, the book.

It identifies 12 superpowers that start to form in early adolescence and shows parents and other loving adults ways to help kids leverage — rather than squander — them. The superpowers are: flexibility, belonging, sight, vulnerability, bounce, agency, force field (boundaries, basically), security, healing, balance, daring and optimism.

Fagell relies on her own eyewitness accounts as a middle school counselor near Washington, D.C., and she also weaves in research and perspectives from social workers, psychologists, pediatricians and other experts with evidence-based knowledge on the developmental stage.

“Tweens operate in a complex social system and must solve problems in the absence of life experience or perspective, all while in the throes of puberty and with brains that aren’t yet fully developed,” Fagell writes.

“They’re changing faster than at any other time in their life other than between birth and age two. On top of these challenges, their friendships are unstable; they often struggle to label feelings or ask for help; they have limited coping skills and tend to catastrophize; and they’re suddenly acutely aware of how they stack up to others.”

It’s a lot.

But, she’s quick to remind us: They want to be good people and do the right thing. They just have a hard time reading social cues, they’re not great at accurately interpreting feedback, and their empathy is still developing.

(Pause here to say I can imagine this book being helpful for parents of kids long past middle school, particularly when we recognize that a person’s prefrontal cortex — where rational thoughts and decisions take root — doesn’t fully develop until age 25.)

We help our kids tremendously, Fagell writes, when we teach them to entertain the possibility that the world isn’t out to get them, that the various wounds they’re licking at any given moment may have been unintentionally inflicted.

When a kid is reeling, she encourages them to come up with three to five benign reasons that a person bailed on plans, made a careless comment, left them off an invite list.

“Your child doesn’t have to believe the alternative explanations,” she writes. “The idea is to get them in the habit of appraising situations more realistically and learning to distinguish between neutral and threatening behavior.”

This can also be helpful when your kid is the one who did the wounding. Fagell is a proponent of reminding kids that most mistakes can be repaired — a departure from so much of the doom and gloom we feed kids about the permanent consequences of their actions. (“What were you thinking posting that? You’ll never get into college now!”)

Instead of catastrophizing, Fagell writes, approach your child with trust and a spirit of collaboration after they’ve made a regrettable decision.

“It’s important that adults cast aside their assumptions and start with curiosity,” she writes. “It’s easier to reach tweens if you give them a chance to explain their thinking.”

She finds it pointless to ask a child if they’ve been mean to another child, for example. They’ll just deny it.

“Instead,” she writes, “say, ‘I’m curious — do you think you were your best self?’”

Post-misstep conversations should never focus on a kid’s character flaws, Fagell writes, but on how to make things right.

“Help them preserve their dignity and avoid making things worse,” she writes. “Help them understand the ramifications of their behavior.”

Understanding — ramifications, sure, but also their power, their worth, their identity, their singular beauty and humanity — is a theme woven throughout the book. It’s what infuses Fagell’s writing with compassion and makes it, to my mind, some of the best on this topic.

A nugget Fagell relays from author and educator Ned Johnson, which applies to just about every lesson and tip throughout the book: “Logic doesn’t calm hard feelings; feeling understood does.”

I love that.

“Tweens need to know that bad things sometimes happen,” Fagell writes, “but they’re not alone, and they can and will get through it. Our job is to help them embrace imperfection — and see themselves as the hero of their own story.”

With us as their sidekicks, cheering them on, catching them when they fall, piecing them back together and placing them, cracks and all, back on their path to greatness and, importantly, to goodness.

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