by Ron Fournier
I always had certain unrealistic notions of what Tyler would be. One of them was that he would be popular. You know, the boy whom other boys want to be like, and whom the girls want to be with. That moment in Florida—My ears hurt!—shook me to my core. I ached for my boy, of course, but also there was a selfish side of me. The side silently chastising Tyler for defying my expectations.
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The pecking order of childhood has roots in a social change that occurred about a century ago, when we started grouping kids in school by age. Until that time, most children were taught at home by their parents or a neighbor. Or they were grouped by school rather than by age—in small, one-room buildings staffed by teachers who educated children of all ages.
Before this shift, children developed self-esteem, social skills, and social mores with little input from age-equivalent peers. They modeled and learned from parents and other adults, largely independent of the competition and bad examples that modern-day children get from each other.
Perhaps the first empirical study on popularity among children appeared in the 1930s, when sociologists such as H. L. Koch and J. L. Moreno identified kids who were most liked and accepted by a majority of their peers. These “sociometric stars” shared a wide variety of positive attributes that would carry them through a lifetime of popularity and success, concluded early-20th-century experts on childhood.
For the next five or six decades, as parenting advice grew into an industry of magazines, books, and self-appointed gurus, a message freighted with pressure was drilled into parents: Popularity is good for your kids, and it’s your job to help make them cool. The subtext: You’re only as successful as your child is popular.
Toward the end of the 20th century, researchers started to question both the definition and the benefits of popularity. In a compilation of research called Popularity in the Peer System, the book’s three editors cited a watershed study in which children were asked to list characteristics of popular kids. Researcher Antonius H. N. Cillessen expected to hear responses such as “kind,” “funny,” and “helps others out.” While he did get some of that feedback, Cillessen also heard a surprising amount of negative responses, including “mean,” “snobby,” and “hurts other people.”
Only recently, sociologists determined that “popularity” means something far different to them than it does to most children and parents. In simplest terms, sociologists study the quality of relationships, while parents sweat the quantity. Researchers focus their greatest attention on determining the depth and durability of friendships. They want to know how well a child knows the people closest to her or him, and how long the friendships might last. Is this a Facebook friend or a friend for life?
Parents are more superficial, which shouldn’t be a surprise. We are not the experts, after all, and the actual experts told generations of parents that (a) popularity equals success and (b) good parents raise “sociometric stars.” Both pieces of advice were wrong and destructive. Mothers and fathers learned to obsess over whether their kids are considered by their peers to be cool, and to measure popularity by the numbers. How many boys came to Tyler’s birthday party? How many girls came to Gabrielle’s sleepover? How many playdates did Holly get invited to?
I’ll admit it: Lori and I counted our kids’ friends. We yearned to see our children accepted by the so-called popular kids. We even lobbied the cool kids’ parents: “Are you sure Heather can’t come to Holly’s party?”
After both Holly and Gabrielle graduated from college and moved out of state, Lori admitted that she had felt pressure to make our girls popular kids. “I was hoping they’d have friends and the social life I didn’t have. I thought buying them things was the way to make that happen.” Our baby girls wore designer clothes, and as they grew into teenagers their closets swelled with trendy styles. We drained our bank accounts for the hottest toys and electronic gadgets (I still maintain an unhealthy dislike for Cabbage Patch Kids). Lori pimped out our house for playdates, kept two refrigerators stocked with sodas, and had the pizza delivery numbers on speed dial. “I thought I could buy them friends.”
I asked Tyler more than once, “How many friends do you have at school?” This, too: “Why don’t you invite them over to the house this weekend?” Inadvertently, my prodding signaled to Tyler that friendship is a concept so superficial that it can be quantified by numbers and defined by an afternoon in our basement. It was a dangerous message.
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Despite all our efforts, Tyler was not a popular boy. The children who lived on our block had little patience for a marble-mouthed kid almost half their age who insisted—beyond almost any reasoning—that they all play by his rules. Their objections angered Tyler, and he didn’t know how to control that emotion. He stomped and yelled, and he pushed the bigger kids.
One day, when I heard what was happening, I pulled Tyler aside and scolded him, just as I had done with his older sisters, and just as my father had done with me. Sternly I told him he couldn’t behave that way and still expect to have friends. “I need you to apologize, Tyler. Tell them you’re sorry.” Showing no emotion, Tyler spun around and walked back to the kids. “Can we start over?” It wasn’t an apology, and Tyler was impervious to the fact that his playmates were shaking their heads. But I remember chuckling to myself and thinking, What a cute thing to say.
Like his sisters and so many other millennials, Tyler was enthralled by Harry Potter books and movies. Most kids develop affinities for the Hogwarts houses associated with intellect, courage, and ruthless ambition. Tyler considered himself a member of the Hufflepuff tribe, the most inclusive among the four houses, valued for hard work, patience, loyalty, and fair play. Hufflepuffs are kind and lighthearted underdogs. In the real world, they’re most aptly compared to nerds or geeks. I asked Tyler once, “Why do you identify with the Hufflepuffs?”
He shrugged. “They are the ones nobody cares about.”
It was worse in school, where even teachers shunned him. His preschool instructor complained about Tyler cracking jokes in class and said he was “too hyper and disorganized.” She was right, but what struck me was her lack of empathy. “You seem very angry at my son,” I told her. “Why is that?” We soon quit the school.
One of his first elementary school teachers, a well-meaning but overwhelmed public school veteran, could take only so much of Tyler’s fidgeting, off-topic obsessions, and interruptions. In front of the class, she would tell him to put his head on his desk: “Take a nap.” Ostracized, again.
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Why do parents crave popularity for their kids? In addition to decades of bad advice from the expert-industrial complex, there is the matter of our own egos. Stephen Gray Wallace, a school psychologist and president of the Center for Adolescent Research and Education (CARE), explained it to me this way: “We all want to be liked, right? On some level, we all want to be the coolest man or woman in the room. One way to do that in today’s culture—as perverse as it sounds, as perverse as it is—is to raise a popular kid.”
The “popular kids” are brilliant and funny and athletic and beautiful—endowed with the teenage mojo that makes their peers swoon while their moms and dads bask in the other parents’ jealousy. “He’s a chip off the old block.” “That girl’s got great genes.”
Some parents are clear-eyed about yoking their self-esteem to their children’s social status. Take John S., for example. The communications director at the attorney general’s office in Michigan told me, “When we’re at T-ball or baseball or football, I can tell that the other parents all do stuff together because their kids are together all the time. But they don’t call us. They don’t ask us to join them in whatever they’re doing. When that happens, I feel a touch of ‘I want that.’ ”
John is honest about his feelings and quietly owns them. I’ve seen other status-envy parents turn into graying versions of the petty blond social climbers featured in the 2004 movie Mean Girls. The ugliest example came one late October night, when I sat i
n the stands at a high school football game near our home and took notes on the conversations around me.
“This section is reserved for dance team parents,” a father barked at me and a dozen other parents whose kids weren’t members of the popular squad. We slouched away, like the scorned teenagers we hadn’t been for three decades. In my new spot, I cradled a cup of coffee between my knees while listening to the conversation between two mothers in front of me. They were assessing the Yorktown High School homecoming court as several young couples strolled onto the field to take their bows.
“Can you believe what she’s wearing?”
“Yes. She’s a slut.”
“Her date’s going to play college ball.”
“He doesn’t have a brain in his gorgeous head.”
It went on like this for 15 minutes, until one of the moms switched topics, bringing up her own son. “You know, it’s not right that these kids are so damn happy and my Bobby can’t make friends. It’s not right.”
Her friend nodded. The chatter stopped while the moms took sips from Styrofoam cups, the steam curling up toward me. “You’re right. She’s a slut.”
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Popularity is a trap. The research is overwhelming. For instance, a study tracking nearly two hundred 13-year-olds over the course of a decade found that those who acted old for their age by sneaking into movies, forming early romantic relationships, shoplifting, and basing friendships on appearance were considered by their peers to be the popular kids. By the time the group turned 23, those same “popular kids” were significantly more likely to abuse drugs and break laws than their peers, and their behavior had backfired: Their peers no longer considered them cool.
This University of Virginia study, published by the journal Child Development in June 2014, found that the “cool” teens had a 45 percent greater rate of problems due to substance use by age 22, and a 22 percent greater rate of criminal behavior, compared with the average teen in the study. Such behavior made the popular group far less socially acceptable as young adults than they were at 13, which suggests that while the cool kids achieved temporary social status, they never developed the skills needed for deep, durable friendships. The shortcuts they took in middle school put them on a road to nowhere.
There is an insidious arc to popularity. It starts with teenagers’ misbehaving to get into the popular crowd. Once they’re on the A-list, popularity exposes them to other risk takers—peers who tempt them with sex, drugs, and criminal activity. They are then subjected to intense peer pressure, easily exploited by those who threaten banishment from the in-crowd.
Staying popular is a chore. You might recall the 1988 cult classic Heathers, a black comedy about the high school rivalries among popular girls, in which the lead character grimly complains that the other girls of her clique are “people I work with—and our job is being popular.”
It should be no kid’s job to be popular, said Wallace, the school psychologist and author who runs CARE. Wallace recalled a family friend, a boy whose immense popularity was due to his troublemaking. For instance, John (a pseudonym) was considered cool because he snuck booze from his parents’ liquor cabinet and shared it with the other boys. By his early 20s, John was a heavy drinker. He eventually lost his job and his family, and he succumbed to alcoholism. “He just self-destructed,” Wallace said. “It all started when he was a kid, when he was the cool kid.”
There are better paths. We should stop pushing our kids to be popular, and encourage them to build friendships based on mutual interests, respect, and loyalty. Trust their instincts. Encourage them to follow their intuition, even if it doesn’t match your expectations. Don’t worry that your young teenager prefers to spend Saturday nights at home playing a video game, playing with you, or reading instead of going out with “friends.”
Author Marybeth Hicks remembers joking in front of other mothers that her kids are geeks. “Oh, nooooo,” one mom cooed. “You kids are very popular! Reeeally.” The other mom seemed to think that raising popular children was Hicks’ goal. “It’s okay,” Hicks explained. “We like that our kids are geeks.”
In her book Bringing Up Geeks, Hicks encourages parents to pour their limited energies into raising genuine, enthusiastic, and empowered kids (she spins the attributes into the acronym GEEK). Writing about the anti-popularity parenting philosophy she shares with her husband, Hicks asked, “Are we sadistically imposing miserable childhoods on our four offspring for the sport of it? Heck no. We’re simply committed to raising our children to have good characters and strong values. We are not raising them to be popular in elementary school and beyond. And the longer I’m a parent, the more I’m convinced these two goals often are mutually exclusive.”
Hicks’ approach reminds me of my father, an imposing Detroit motorcycle cop who quietly drilled five words into the heads of his four kids: “It’s cool to be different.” When the so-called popular kids tempted us to sneak a smoke or worse, Dad steeled us with the courage to proudly say no. I’ll pass. I’m different. He didn’t call us geeks, but I guess we were.
Joseph Allen, lead author on the University of Virginia study, told the Los Angeles Times there is a “quiet majority” of adolescents who are destined to be far more socially functional at an older age than their in-crowd peers. Tyler is part of the quiet majority of geekiness—and that’s a good thing. While I stupidly, selfishly obsessed over the wrong expectations, he avoided the popularity trap.
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While we finished our coffee at the strip-mall Starbucks, I tried to explain to Stacey Bromberg how badly I want Tyler to be popular. “If Lori and I could sculpt friends out of granite or program a few robotically, we would buy chisels and computer chips by the gross.”
She smiled. “Me too.” From the speaker above our heads, I heard a young man singing to his father. Now it’s just too late and we can’t go back, ended the Simple Plan anthem. I’m sorry I can’t be perfect.
Bromberg told me about the day she volunteered at Gavin’s school, stuffing folders with a group of fourth-graders. “One of the kids got to have a Lunch Bunch, which means he got to pick a couple of kids to eat a special lunch with. I watched this—I saw kids talking back and forth, laughing—and I started to cry,” Stacey said. “A teacher asked me why I was crying, and I pointed to the kids laughing together and told her, ‘My son doesn’t do that.’ ”
One of my favorite bloggers is sportswriter Jeff Pearlman, who, while procrastinating on book projects, likes to reflect on his personal life. In 2014, he wrote about watching his fifth-grade daughter get razzed by classmates after a mediocre relay race. “Watching from about 20 yards away, I saw her face turn sad, but tried to stay out of things. As a parent, sometimes you need to let your child face hardship sans intervention. Then she approached and began to cry. Small tears that got a lot bigger. I gave her a hug…and that’s when the magic happened.”
A female classmate gave his daughter a hug and yelled, “Group hug!” Boys and girls engulfed her. “Suddenly, at the same time her tears dried, mine formed,” Pearlman wrote. “I was wearing sunglasses, so nobody noticed. But it was one of the most beautiful things I ever witnessed.”
Beautiful because of what it says about his daughter and her peers. They are forming friendships with depth and durability. They are learning to stand up for each other—and stand against bad-acting peers. They are developing attributes of respect, compassion, and courage that will serve them well into adulthood. They are popular kids.
SUPERSTAR
“My Kid Was a Great Player…”
Grand Rapids, Michigan—Dad looks old. Just a year ago, he was lifting his weight and walking the treadmill at the gym every day. But now he shuffles his feet and slouches, his once ramrod posture diminished and shaped like an S. Today he’s transfixed by the past—specifically, he’s staring at a life-sized, black-and-white photograph of Detroit riot police clashing with angry protesters. Tyler and I are in Grand Rapids to tour the Gerald R. Ford Presidential M
useum. We’re also visiting my parents, who moved here after giving Florida a brief tryout.
Dad retired from the Detroit Police Department in 1986, ending a career that defined him and included two decades in a motorcycle unit that doubled as a riot squad. “I was just talking to your mom about those days,” Dad says. He lifts a heavy hand and points to the riot picture at the center of the 1960s exhibit. “We fought in the bad neighborhoods, all the while wondering whether the bad guys were burning down our homes, too. It was so close but so far away.” The rioting occurred several miles from a street in northeast Detroit called Coram, a tidy block of middle-class homes where Mom and Dad both grew up, fell in love, raised four kids, and eased their own parents into retirement and death.
Coram also is where my dad taught me how to hit and throw a ball. How to ride a bike and drive a car. How to avoid a fight when you can, and win a fight when you can’t avoid it. How to compete hard, succeed with humility, and never get accustomed to losing. Shortly after I brought Lori home to Coram for the first time, Dad shared his two secrets to marriage. “First, even when she’s wrong,” he told me, “she’s right.” Dad flashed his wry smile, the one Mom calls a shit-eating grin. “Second, always put her first. As much as I loved you kids, I never forgot that you would grow up and be gone, and I’d always be with your mom.”
As we walk through the Ford museum, I wonder how long he’ll be with Mom. Dad has neuropathy, nerve damage that has cost him feeling in his feet, but my siblings and I suspect our parents are hiding something worse. Before leaving for the museum today, over breakfast at my parents’ apartment, I had expressed my concerns to both Mom and Dad. They confirmed that he was sick—but only indirectly and vaguely. “I may need to have somebody drive me around the rest of my life,” Dad said.
