Popular

by Mitch Prinstein

  Of course, being responsive to children’s needs and involved in their play can go too far. If you’ve ever been to a playground, you have seen what this looks like. When kids are playing, swinging, sliding, and climbing, eventually someone falls. It’s the shock of the fall that is more upsetting than any actual injury, and the child looks as if he may start to cry. But he doesn’t—at least not immediately. The first thing he does is look up at Mom or Dad. If the parent remains calm, the child might brush himself off and return to playing. But if the parent looks worried or upset, the tears begin.

  Some parents may even overreact. They run to their child and coddle them, remaining very close by—closer than is needed for their child’s age—to make sure he doesn’t fall again. Or they may get themselves so stressed over the possibility of a future fall that they decide to take the child and leave the playground altogether. Research suggests that these children are much more likely to be victimized by their peers when they are older. Having parents who are hypersensitive to their children’s emotions and overly protective is a strong predictor of unpopularity.

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  Parents can also influence their offspring’s future popularity by directly intervening in their social lives. Consider Sam, who is a proud dad. His son, Joey, looks exactly like him, with the same curly hair, lanky frame, and freckles running up his arms. Sam loves watching Joey grow up. In the afternoons, he stands proudly in the ballpark as Joey runs the bases. On Saturdays, he likes to be nearby while Joey jokes around with his friends. Wherever Joey goes, Sam is not far behind.

  When Joey’s school hosted a party, Sam called another parent to see if his son could attend it with her daughter. In the gym, Sam looked on while Joey and the girl got punch together, made their way around the dance floor, and sat at a table together. “Don’t forget to share!” Sam called out. When Joey started to lean very close to his date, Sam admonished, “Use your words. Keep your hands to yourself!”

  Joey turned around, red-faced, glared at his father, and ran out of the party.

  Sam was doing what any good parent might do—a parent of a preschooler, that is. But Joey was seventeen years old, and the occasion was his high school’s homecoming dance. In that context, Sam seems far too involved in his child’s peer relationships.

  Do you know parents who effectively become personal assistants to their kids? They set up playdates for their one-year-olds and later enroll their kids in music or gymnastics classes to play with other toddlers. It seems they spend much of the day driving their little ones to activities and appointments.

  Don’t scoff—these are precisely the steps parents can take to help make their children become more likable among their peers, and indeed these are very appropriate ways to parent a toddler. But the effectiveness of this approach depends on when and how parents manage their children’s social lives, according to Arizona State University psychologist Gary Ladd. Ladd suggests three specific ways that parents can increase their child’s likability.

  The first has to do with setting up playdates. While it is important for children to have the chance to play with others, it’s not merely creating the opportunities for play that matters most. Rather, it’s how that parent sets up these encounters that makes the biggest difference. When their children are two, Ladd says, some parents already contact others, coordinate get-togethers, and select friends. While these companions and playdates help children develop a broader social network, parents should change the way they intervene as their kids get older. By three, children should be able to pick which peers they are most interested in seeing. By four, they should be able to choose the activities they will engage in during the playdate, and by five or six, children should start taking the lead in initiating meet-ups.

  Developmental psychologists call this “scaffolding,” and the metaphor is apt. At each stage of his or her development, it’s important to provide only as much support as a child needs, but no more. Structure can be withdrawn as the child is able to stand well on their own. Ladd found that by kindergarten the children who grew up to be most popular were those whose parents taught them how to identify compatible playmates, ask them if they wanted to meet outside of school, and suggest activities. Soon they are able to do so independently, which helps accelerate the learning curve for future social interactions.

  As kids get older, this translates into learning how to introduce oneself to new groups and eventually how to trust others in close relationships. These skills continue to grow more complex, of course, and soon children have to learn how to think of others first, balancing their own preferences with what is best for the group. They learn how to respect differences between themselves and others. Even in middle school, parents can help scaffold more intricate social negotiations, such as whom to invite to a birthday celebration when seats are limited, or how to decline an invitation when two or more events are occurring simultaneously. Each of these tasks is a chance for kids to learn how to live in an increasingly sophisticated social world. Research suggests that children who learn these skills in childhood are better able to transition into romantic relationships later in life.

  A second way that parents can affect their child’s popularity has to do with the way they get involved in their kids’ playdates. The more that parents monitor their children while they play during their very early years, the better. In one study, parents and their one- to two-year-old children attended a play session with other toddlers. At first, the parents were instructed to either join their children as they played or remain uninvolved. The parents then left, leaving the kids to play on their own for a few minutes longer. Those whose parents had been instructed to get involved were more likely to remain happy and play amicably with their peers after the parents departed. Those whose parents had been uninvolved fell apart more quickly. When the same experiment was conducted with kids just a few years older, however, the results were the opposite. For preschoolers, heavy parent involvement was no longer as helpful.

  By preschool and kindergarten, parents monitor from afar, which offers them an important opportunity to ask children later what they did with their friends, whether they had any disagreements, and how they helped resolve those problems. These are rich conversations that help kids understand how to identify their emotions, what they were thinking about a given situation, and how they behaved. So, if a kid comes home and says, “When Johnny grabbed my truck to play with it himself, I punched him in the face,” it is a good teachable moment to explore alternative solutions. “How did you feel when he did that?” a parent might ask. “Did he ask you first whether you would share?” “Had you been playing with it for very long?” “What are other things you could have done when he took the truck?” “How does it make you feel when someone punches you?” and so on.

  Not only does this help children in the short term, but it also sets the stage for how they will think about social experiences, manage their feelings, consider various solutions, and evaluate how those solutions worked—a nice framework that many wish adults drew upon more often. These are skills that predict not only which kids will become more popular, but also those who will have higher levels of academic achievement.

  A third tip has to do with how parents coach their children when they have experienced a problem. This is a matter of more than simply listening to children recount what they did during an afternoon with their peers. It involves, rather, a parent’s offering specific instruction and practice regarding the management of peer relationships. Of course, most parents will offer such basic guidelines as “Don’t hit others,” “Share your toys,” and “Say please and thank you.” But the type of coaching that is especially important is the advice adults offer regarding the event in question and the way they model how to act in social situations.

  Typically, parents coach their children to behave like they do. It’s quite remarkable the degree to which children model themselves on their parents. It’s not just the little thi
ngs, either, like the way my own daughter has my facial expressions or how my son uses his hands when he talks, just like I do. Such behavior is also reflected in how kids decide to interact with one another.

  In another one of her studies on intergenerational similarities in popularity, Martha Putallaz asked mothers to bring their children to her lab at Duke to play together. Using a one-way mirror, Putallaz and her research assistants were able to watch the children play and record the extent to which each was agreeable and cooperative, or aggressive. Meanwhile, each child’s mom was observed talking with the mothers of the other children being studied. The children of the women who conversed amicably in one room behaved in the same companionable way with their peers just down the hall. Moms who tried to dominate their conversations tended to have children who were also excessively self-focused in their interactions.

  Preschool children rely on their parents to be coaches—studies have shown that parents talk to their children about how to interact with peers at least once every other day, and this predicts children’s popularity. Of course, some don’t simply coach but insert themselves into their children’s social interactions to help kids negotiate their way into a game or out of a fight. By middle school, such parental behaviors are considered intrusive and remarkably damaging to kids’ popularity. Older children and adolescents still need their parents to guide them, but they like to believe that they didn’t ask for help. Nevertheless, in one study examining how coaching helped teenagers interact with peers they had not met before, findings revealed that parental involvement made a difference. Those parents who spoke with their children about peers, reviewed the best qualities to look for in a friend, or discussed the best ways to act with others had kids who developed closer relationships within just a few months.

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  For all of the speculation on how parents’ own popularity might affect their parenting years later, and all of the research on how moms and dads can affect how well their children do with peers, one question has gone unexplored: should parents try to affect their children’s popularity at all?

  The answer is both yes and no.

  I say yes, because as a clinical child psychologist, I strongly recommend that parents be alert to those kids who are having issues with likability. Sometimes it’s clear that there are problems afoot.

  I remember one five-year-old boy who was so rambunctious and energetic that he never stopped to play with other kids at school. He just ran by as they called out for him to join their games. When it came time for him to pick a partner on a school trip, he didn’t have anyone who wanted to sit with him.

  Then there was the short-tempered girl who only talked to her peers aggressively in an impatient tone. You could almost hear the echo of her parents yelling at her every time she told her classmates that they were being “bad, bad children.” It didn’t take long for her to be rejected by all of her classmates—a status she reinforced every day when she would scream at anyone who dared to try to play with her.

  Another girl was so painfully skittish that just being at school was a difficult experience for her. She clung to her father’s leg until she was forcibly detached, and then she never ventured more than a few feet from her teacher. She cried all day, even when the other kids seemed to have sympathy for her and kindly asked her to join them on the swings.

  It’s these kids—the ones who before first grade already seem to be shunned by peers, those who have more tears than laughs with others, or those who just don’t seem that interested in joining in—who may benefit from some degree of intervention. Because it is these kids who will suffer from the worst manifestation of unpopularity, bullying—a crisis finally getting attention from a worldwide audience.

  Psychologists have been interested in understanding the causes and consequences of bullying for many years, but it was only after the massacre in Columbine that the rest of the world began to take serious notice of this problem. On April 20, 1999, two teens who had purportedly been victimized by their peers brought guns and bombs to their Colorado high school, viciously killing twelve fellow students and one teacher, wounding twenty-one others, and ultimately turning their weapons on themselves to end their own lives. Americans stood in shock as the details came to light of how these seemingly typical teens had suddenly turned to rage and murder. It was not the first mass killing to take place in a school and sadly not the last. School shootings in the years since have become so disturbingly frequent that most of us can’t help but simply hope that such tragedies never come to our own community.

  In their wake, however, came a renewed interest in peer victimization. When federal anti-bullying legislation was proposed, but failed, states enacted their own laws, proposing severe sanctions on any student who bullied another on school grounds. These laws and the rise of public attention to the issue have helped. Overt forms of bullying no longer occur quite as frequently in those schools that have imposed severe penalties. But the popularity dynamics that underlie bullying haven’t gone away, and of course kids have found plenty of ways to bully one another more covertly, whether anonymously, away from school, or even online.

  There is now evidence that some anti-bullying measures are effective at reducing instances of peer victimization, but it would be wishful thinking to believe that all bullying will stop, as kids have been victimized by other children since the beginning of time. What’s needed is an equal focus on helping children cope with those moments when they will be teased, excluded, tormented, or even derisively talked about by their peers. And psychologists know exactly how parents can help.

  Have you and a friend ever experienced a stressful event and both walked away with a completely different reaction to it? That happens all the time, and it’s due to the fact that what we feel about a given situation has much less to do with what actually happens to us than it does with what we think about what took place.

  Imagine two children who fail a history exam. One blames herself, regrets the decisions she made the night before the test, and begins to feel hopeless that she will ever do well in school. The other blames the teacher, decides the test was unfair, and remains emotionally unscathed.

  The difference between how these two students responded to a stressful incident is what psychologists call “attributional style.” Do you attribute negative life events to your own characteristics (“I’m stupid”) that are both global (“I can’t do anything right”) and stable (“I will never do well at school”)? This kind of attributional style is a fast track to depression. Ascribing all negative events to ourselves, leaving no room for improvements or alternative explanations, enables stressors to have their worst impact on us psychologically—particularly if this is the way we habitually react.

  Or do you attribute such experiences to things that have nothing to do with you (“The test was poorly constructed”), are specific (“I don’t do well when tests use multiple choice”), or are unstable (“I would probably do better if I had more time to study”)? This is the healthier response, though it does not imply that people shouldn’t also take responsibility for their actions.

  In 1998, Sandra Graham and Jaana Juvonen did a study in which they asked 418 sixth- and seventh-grade children to talk about how they would respond if they were victimized by peers. The group had widely different responses. Some said that if they were teased it would be due to their own failings or self-deficits. (“This will happen to me again.” “If I were a cooler kid, I wouldn’t get picked on.” “It’s my fault, I shouldn’t have been in the restroom/locker room.”) Graham and Juvonen found that it was these kids who were at greatest risk for depression, anxiety, and low levels of self-esteem. They were also most likely to be rejected by peers and at risk for further victimization.

  But others had a more adaptive response that recognized that being bullied may not have had as much to do with them specifically. (“These kids pick on everybody.” “It was my bad luck to be in the wrong place at
the wrong time.”) These kids were fine in the long run.

  Parents have a very significant influence on the kind of attributional style their children develop, and again, the similarities across generations are remarkable. Attributional style is also a characteristic that is relatively easy to modify.

  Imagine a world where we cast the bullies not as those with the power to intimidate others but as those who likely are experiencing the most profound psychological difficulties. They may seem cool, and they may get lots of attention when they successfully victimize others. But this is only a sign of the kind of popularity we recognize as based on status, which ultimately leads to bad outcomes, like loneliness, addiction, and an ongoing preoccupation with social standing. Bullies often have the harshest upbringings, having watched their parents fight and intimidate one another. They have often been victims themselves, and their aggressive ways may be cries for attention, in the form of status-seeking.

  In some ways, it is troubling that new zero-tolerance legislation immediately expels bullies. While it is an effective way to protect their victims and sends a strong warning to other aggressors, these are the kids who may be in most desperate need of help. Expelling them from school offers a good short-term solution, but it may be sending those who are highly vulnerable directly back to where they learned to become so aggressive.

  While no one expects victims to easily or suddenly sympathize with their tormentors, parents can help in a way that few others can by teaching their children to understand why other kids behave this way. When victims realize that they have a choice about how to interpret why they have been bullied, they are more likely to emerge from victimization bruised, perhaps, but psychologically unharmed.

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  Earlier, I suggested that there are cases, such as those described above, when it makes sense for parents to try to influence their child’s popularity. But does it follow that parents should always try to make their children more popular?