It’s impossible for thoughtful parents to not to worry about their child’s popularity. You can’t remember your own Lords-of-the Flies-with-hairspray high school social experience and not wonder whether you’ve prepared your child to navigate the fraught social landscape of not-quite-adulthood.
If you’re like me, you’re worried your little one will be high-school-friendless, eating lunch in the restroom and envying the popular kids. But don’t breathe a sigh of relief if it doesn’t seem to be headed that way. There’s always something to worry about, and if your kid is liked and admired widely by their peers, it could point to a different kind of problem: They might be too popular.
Different kinds of popularity
In determining whether your child is too popular, you first have to define “popular.” According to popularity expert and psychologist Dr Mitch Prinstein, author of Popular: Finding Happiness and Success in a World That Cares Too Much About the Wrong Kinds of Relationships, there are two kinds of popularity: Social reputation (status) and social preference (likability), and our likability is a key factor that determines our outcomes. “It’s key to how to be successful in a modern-day world. But it’s an area we spend so little time teaching and monitoring—to everybody’s detriment,” Prinstein told KQED.
Status as defined by Prinstein is something like “power, dominance, and influence.” These are the traits of the stereotypical popular clique. All the other kids know the high-status kids—these are the jocks and mean girls of 80s and 90s teen comedies—but that doesn’t mean everyone likes them. In high school as in life, high status people often maintain their standing through bullying, intimidation, and Machiavellian intrigue, traits that can put you at the top of the heap in high school, but don’t necessary make you happy and healthy as an adult.
The second kind of kids are “popular” in that they’re likable. This is the kind of popularity you want to encourage. It’s the popularity favored by younger children, before they are set adrift in the storm-tossed sea of puberty. Likable people welcome others, are inclusive, empathetic, and kind. This doesn’t necessarily result in a wide circle of friends in the tween and teen years, but it does tend to result in deeper friendships and relationships.
This classic longitudinal study on teen popularity indicates that around a third of students are considered to be in the top-tier popular clique by their peers. About half of the late middle school students surveyed were considered middle status—they tended to not like the popular people, but had their own small social circles. The remaining 20 percent were either hangers-on to the popular people, or socially isolated loners. The outcomes don’t look great for the most popular third of kids.
Research conducted by University of Virginia psychologists indicates that the “cool kids” in middle and high school don’t stay that way. The things that make a 13-year-old socially desirable and admirable—risk-taking behavior, seeking social status through friendships with other popular people—gradually seem less desirable to others as they get older. By the time they’re in their early 20s, the cool kids were more likely to have drug or alcohol problems and criminal convictions than their uncool peers, and they’re also more likely to be seen as less socially competent. Think of getting drunk at the club: If you’re 25, you’re seen as a fun person partying; but if you’re 45, you’re seen as pathetic.
As for the not-popular-but-not-friendless group: Research published in the Journal of Child Development indicates that students with a few, close friends are more likely to be more mental healthy adults than their peers who had many, shallow friendships. The kinds of people who seek social status are more likely to develop anxiety disorders, perhaps because the things they did as young teenagers to influence others no longer work.
“Our research found that the quality of friendships during adolescence may directly predict aspects of long-term mental and emotional health,” wrote Rachel K. Narr, Ph. D. candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Virginia, who led the study.
How to help your kid become the “right” kind of popular
While aspects of popularity are genetic (good-looking people are more likely to be socially successful, for instance) likability can be taught. Modeling pro-social behavior when your kids are very young correlates to kids who are more likely to be better at being social, where parents who model aggressive behavior can dramatically affect the way their children interact with peers. It’s a cliché, but it’s true: Your kids are looking at you for guidance as soon as they are born, so how you relate to others will be imparted to them.
When your child is old enough for “play dates,” set up a lot of them. Parents can instill good social skills in children as young as pre-school age by simply setting up a lot of opportunities for them to interact with other children.
By the time your child is in middle school, they’re likely pulling away from their parents in favor of taking cues from their peers, but that doesn’t mean you have no input. Parental influence is still important even to teenagers, although you have to be careful to do it in a way that respects the autonomy of the child—you can’t decide who your kid is friends with like you could with play dates, but you can be a trusted mentor.
Social media, friendships, and popularity
As you’d probably expect, according to Prinstein, social media encourages the “wrong” kind of popularity; kids (like many adults) who are chasing the kind of shallow, ego-boost social interactions analogous to high-status popularity can find a lot to obsess over online. “This predilection seems to be becoming even more pronounced now that teens can enter a social rewards lottery with every mouse click on social media,” Prinstein warns.
Research on young adults and social media suggests a link between depression and heavy use of social media, although the bulk of the research in this area was done on older platforms like Facebook and Twitter. New platforms with younger user bases, like TikTok, have different structures and user experiences than “traditional” social media platforms, so it’s unclear if the same correlations hold.
Anecdotally, my own tween kid and his friends have no interest in any social media platform, but they’re online playing Apex: Legends together every freakin’ night. Will shooting his friends for hours a day add up to the kind of deep friendships that I’d like to see? Will he and his nerdy boys develop deep bonds, like virtual brothers-in-arms in a virtual foxhole? Or is it just the same status-seeking of the popular cliques, with high kill/death ratios substituted for touchdowns and tackles? I don’t know the answer, but at least I’m worried about it, so I must be doing something right.
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December 07, 2021 at 02:30AM
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Is Your Child Too Popular for Their Own Good? - Lifehacker
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