Popularity at School

Getting picked for teams, sitting with a certain group at lunch, receiving invitations to parties: all these situations create enormous pressure for junior high school students. As if these anxieties weren't enough to cope with, many kids undergoing puberty lose the self-confidence they had in childhood and become obsessed with their looks and actions. They live in a bubble, unable to escape labels such as popular, average, or unpopular.

In their book Cliques: 8 Steps to Help Your Child Survive the Social Jungle, former teachers Charlene Giannetti and Margaret Sagarese break these groups down even further and provide parents with advice for bolstering a child's confidence. According to the authors, the most popular group tends to be composed of wealthy, attractive, and athletic kids, who capture the attention of their peers and even their teachers. Most children, though, fall somewhere between the popular group and the 10% of students who have few or no friends.

Giannetti and Sagarese emphasize that popular kids face pressure, too; knowing that someone on the fringe can easily replace you if you do something to jeopardize your popularity produces stress. Popularity may also lead to high-risk behavior, like drinking, drug use, and unprotected sex. Since pre-adolescent experiences affect the ensuing teenage years, counselors urge children to make decisions according to their values, whether these decisions make them popular or not. More than ever, junior high students need to have hobbies and scholastic goals to focus their attention on self-development rather than popularity. Indeed, despite their proclamations to the contrary, kids do welcome parental involvement, so make sure to ask your children questions, encourage their hobbies, and help them learn to respect themselves.