I am writing about parent stuff all week. I have kids on the brain and feel like talking about them. For those who show up for politics, check out this interesting discussion about religion and the Democratic Party with PZ Myers and Amy Sullivan.
When my kid started Kindergarten last year, I mistakenly thought “Whoo. One down. One to go.” I thought that elementary school was sort of like college with lunchboxes. My work was mostly over, and I could return to being my usual self-involved, work-obsessed self. Not so.
Well, first of all, the school doesn’t really let you off the hook. I often get phone calls from the school nurse, because my kid has done something stupid like kicking his shoe onto the roof of the school. There’s the homework and paperwork and fundraisers and pizza day clogging up my brain and taking up time.
And then I’ve also been slowly realizing that there is a lot of behind the scene action by the other parents to insure their kid’s popularity.
The kids who are considered cool, also have the super involved PTA moms who all know each other and arrange for playdates at each other’s homes. The kids pick up on their mom’s feelings of being in the in-club. Those kids never have mom who forget to send in money for pizza day. The A-list moms make sure that their kids are A-list also.
For the boys at least, popularity is also determined by sports ability. Sports ability is greatly enhanced by taking lots of lessons — Karate, soccer, baseball. There are traveling teams and special leagues. All of which require lots of schlepping, lots of money, and lots of energy. These activities help them gain points during recess and reinforces relationships with the other sporty boys.
Raising kids is sort of like waging war. You are always fighting the last war. I got picked on in elementary school, because I read too much and because my academic parents raised me differently from the working class parents in the town. I am very fearful that the same fate awaits my kids. I don’t want them to be the most popular. I just don’t want them to get picked on. They need to blend a little.
Reluctantly, I have stepped in to raise my kid’s popularity stock. In the past week, I have had several kids from school over the house. (Next post is about what happens at these playdates.) I signed him up for Karate classes at the same gym where the cool kids go. I signed him for swimming lessons.
We debated whether or not we should get an X-Box for Jonah just so that he isn’t left out from those conversations at school.
I’m not all that pleased about this. I don’t like this puppet master parenting thing. I don’t like dragging the kids around New Jersey. I don’t like playing nicely with some of the other parents. I don’t like being pressured to look like everyone else just because that is so important to kids. But I also don’t like seeing my six year old come home in tears because another kid called him a loser.
How far do we go to save him from those tears?
Apt. 11d 
Wow, is popularity really something that can be engineered? I mean, suspect that you can boost it a bit by working things at the margins, but, well, I don’t think I would have been popular despite anything my parents might have done. My mother was active and involved in my school (though I can’t stay that she did things to strategically to improve my position, so the counterfactual isn’t perfect), and I still was a major outcast. In fact, the best thing they did was encourage me to do what I loved and remind me that it didn’t matter what the other kids thought (even when it seemed to at the time).
The risk of trying to engineer popularity, I would think, is that your efforts might fail, your kid is aware of your efforts, and thus feels that s/he is a failure as a result…
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It would be so much nicer if you could change the parents instead of the kids? How come the parents can’t be convinced that X-box is a waste of time?
You need to move to a commune, Laura.
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De-lurking to say . . . boy, do I hear you. I went to my first PTA meeting, in preparation for my kid’s entrance to kindergarten this fall. Boy oh boy. I think I need to move to a different demographic. . .
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Popularity changes as they get older. In a year or two it will NOT be cool for you to be involved at school. Jonah will cringe if he sees your face anywhere near the school doors. I regret the so many hours that I wasted worrying about my social position in school. I was always friends with the popular crowd, but I cared too much what they thought and was always not quite “in”. Now I just wish I had as much confidence as my little sister does and had done what I wanted and hung out with whomever I chose. It’s also funny because I remember a group of kids who were popular in Elementary and Middle school who became druggies in high school and were then seen as “losers”.
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For my #1 boy, there is a core group of boys who are on a series of teams – soccer and baseball and basketball, and there is flag football during school. And it works for him. In teacher evaluation session his teacher said, ‘clearly this is a kid who would always rather be somewhere else than working on his math homework, he want sports. But he is polite and respectful and does his work.’ So, yes, I schlep him around to games and practices a lot. We’ve only been to a couple of PTA meetings, and I don’t think the kids are made to suffer for it. I worked the teacher lunch during the evaluation days, not because I thought my kids would be benefitted particularly but because I felt I had not been doing my share.
#2 is less sociable and less sporty, and we try and work in a lot of play dates for him.
I think it goes with the territory. They want and need contact with other kids outside of school hours, we’re not going to let them just walk off down the street. If I wanted to be writing the Great American Novel in my off hours, it would be a problem, but I don’t, so it’s not.
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Well, with boys it may be sports. With girls, especially as they approach middle school years, it’s hair/clothing/thin-ness. Last fall I observed an ice cream booth at a community function that was staffed by middle school moms–and I realized that the reason middle school girls are the way they are (catty, obsessed with appearance) is because that’s how their moms are!
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This book convinced me of the importance of peer groups to child development. If you have the money and you have no strong objections to the items, it is a good idea to get your kids the peer group desirable toys and clothes so that they won’t be seen as outcasts.
I think Tammy is right about how soon direct parental involvement at school becomes a problem. She is also right that the social position right below the “in” crowd is a bad one to be in.
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I just wrote about PTA Pergatory on my blog! Agreed that PTA sucks, but as they say, “Someone’s gotta do it!!”
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Joe O. — I haven’t read the book you link to, but if the importance of “nurture” is a myth, why does the peer group have any greater effect on the child than the parents (except that the peer group is the one they spend most of their time with)? In other words, if parents refuse to accede to the “Lord of the Flies” socialization that goes on in most schools by opting out or changing the system in some way, would the influence of the peer group *in that case* be more important than family? The blurb at Amazon suggests that the author’s argument is to “guide your child’s choice of peer groups wisely,” not to abdicate that choice altogether. Or am I not understanding your point?
And why give in to the materialist/consumerist principles of the popular peer group rather than, say, finding your child a peer group “outside the system” (homeschooling comes to mind) or encouraging him/her to choose peers based on criteria other than looks, dress, sports ability, possession of gadgets, etc.?
Maybe the problem is that you don’t really choose a peer group; the peer group chooses you.
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My son, age 4, gets none of the “cool” status-items, can act quite wierd at times and has pretty abnormal parents. He is also very popular. I’ve got a few theories on why this might be.
1.) He somehow just inherited very good social skills. His way of relating to people is very similar to my sister’s, even though she lives on the other side of the country and only sees him a couple time a year.
2.) We’ve been able to choose schools where abnormal parents are common.
3.) He’s big for his age, and naturally very athletic.
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I should mention that my son does still come home crying sometimes because he was called a poo-poo head, or something. If namecalling is going on a lot a school, role-playing at home helps them come up with good comebacks, ideally without being mean. For poo-poo head, we taught him to turn it around to – that’s a funny word, he’s just saying that because he likes hearing himself say poo-poo. If you can help them see that name-calling is about the other kid, not them, then they can take it less personally. Trying to do everything you’re “supposed to do” is a fools errand – they’ll just keep raising the bar.
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this is one of the reasons why we decided to homeschool our girl (age 5)…i saw outcast coming a mile away for her…she’s got academic lefty parents in a working class town…she went to a small ‘child centered’ preschool in the city where self expression was supervalued…she’s of south american/afr american background in a town segregated by ethncity…and she’s got this thing about talking. a lot. we chose homeschooling for lots of other reasons but the whole “fitting in or not fitting in” question did a play a role. (btw we’re in northern nj, too)
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If you can’t find a school where you and your children are normal and home-schooling is not an option, finding anyplace where your child can feel normal might be a plus. For me, as an outcast at school, the fact that my parents took the time to find little communities of wierdos (art classes, summer programs for the gifted, etc.) where I could really just be myself was key to my coming out less scathed than average.
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My kid isn’t unpopular at school. His teachers tell me he’s a very likable kid. He isn’t the most popular, but he also isn’t the least popular. He’s good at sports, so that helps enormously.
The problems are that I worry that if I don’t keep up with the Jones on this popularity prodding, things will decline. And he’s also a super sensitive kid. That one poo-poo head comment will send him into a tail spin. He really does need to toughen up. He’s also very competitive, so it really bothers him that he isn’t the most popular. Again, he’s going to have to learn to chill out. Sounds a lot like you, Tammy.
How much does all this parent puppet master thing work? I have no idea. (Thanks for the book recommendation, Jo(e).) I just learned about it after some other parents told me what they do. But looking back at middle school, I seem to remember that the popular kids had all sorts of things that I didn’t have. Like clogs. For some reason my mother wouldn’t let me wear clogs. They watched TV. After we moved to a swanky town, the other kids had their own TVs, cool clothes, feathered hair. Later, some of them came to school in their own cream colored mercedes. Those things matter, too.
ianqui — I’ve always wanted to live on a commune. I like the idea of chickens and naked children running about.
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So, how do the working mothers keep up with all of this?
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Having a preschool child and my own history of social failure in school, just reading this stuff gives me cold chills. It sounds like I’m looking forward to some sort of Groundhog Day scenario, getting to vicariously relive every moment of school misery a separate time for each child, but also living through mommy hell, too! Where’s the escape hatch on this thing?
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Ideally, you would like to do what you can to pick the right peer group for your kid. Pretty much the best you can do is to pick the best school you can for your kid. People already do crazy things to get the best school for their kids. The clothes and toys suggestion is for avoiding your kid from being picked as the outcast.
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Saw on the news this morning a book called about Mean Moms! Geez, I know some of those!
I tried the PTA route, and knowing when to say “no” was the hard part for me. I’ve gotten to the point where I do what I can, and try not to feel inferior or superior to these other moms, I’ve found kindred spirits in the moms that feel “out of the in crowd”! I’ve had the little girls over and been judged by 8 year olds….I think my now 12 year old sees how ridiculous some of this is now, but while young it was really important to fit in. And I think we owe some of that feeling to them. Now she realizes, sort of, that being an individual and having one or two good friends can be better than being a “popular” girl. Let’s see how the next 6 years go!
And I’ve got one starting kindergarten next year, a new start for me!
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To answer Amy P., I am still figuring out how working moms come out on this…
We do have a problem with playdates, my husband who is an academic is much more likely to drop off / pick up then me and mommies are more likely to arrange playdates with other mommies than with daddies. It was worse last year, when my husband was teaching out of town and we had a depressed au pair… but that is another story.
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I have also been thinking about this a lot and it seems like such a no-win situation–does my daughter experience the pain of bein an outcast (my high school experience) or should I help her become/hope that she is popular (i.e. one of the people I _hated_ in high school?) I don’t want her to experience my pain, but . . . I have come to see being an outcast as a valuable part of my identity. I think I’m stronger for it and it prepared me for other experiences later in life. Being popular involved being cruel, shallow, and hiding your intelligence (for girls)–is this the crowd I want her to be in? Hopefully, she will find some middle ground, but this is still a dilemma I wrestle with.
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I have a friend here who’s a working mom with twins. She doesn’t get home until 7 every night. She manages to do these playdates and activities by having a babysitter. But it’s very complicated, because she doesn’t really trust the babysitter. So, she calls me up to find out if the sitter really walked the kids to the classroom for CCD or just dropped them off in the parking lot. My kid has gone there for playdates, but they can’t come here, because she doesn’t trust the sitter to drive more than she has to. She schedules most activities for the weekend. She also has hired a tutor that comes to house four afternoons a week, because the sitter can’t do first grade homework. If she had a better babysitter, there would probably be less problems.
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Your son only needs a few friends. He will find them. I don’t think parents can engineer their kids’ popularity; as my kids grow older, I notice that they, and their peers, are sorting themselves into compatible groupings.
If your child is coming home crying, you can consult your school’s psychologist. He or she can give you insights into the school’s culture, and may be able to suggest ways for Jonah to find kindred souls.
If you want to help him find his friends faster, by all means arrange playdates. I suspect that mothers whom you can respect will be more likely to have sons whom your child can respect.
I recommend that you not buy your child anything for the sole purpose of fitting in. Don’t buy him anything of which you disapprove. If you wouldn’t buy him an Xbox on your own, then don’t buy it to make him popular. If your local boy culture isn’t too sophisticated for Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards, they can be very helpful, as a way for a boy to gain social currency, without turning to electronics.
Ask Jonah what activities he enjoys, and sign him up for those activities. He is most likely to find close friends who share his interests. Ask him which friends he’d like to invite home. Soon enough, he’ll find his circle of friends, and the playdates can calm down to visits to those friends’ houses.
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mml, I’ve never had any problem as the male-main-arranger-of-playdates. Moms have always responded to me just fine as caregiver-with-busy-often-absent-spouse.
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My main goal is to make my kids feel comfortable being an outcast. I was an outcast in school and my mom was always trying to engineer my popularity. I resented her for it. I got accepted by the popular crowd on the surface but I was completely unhappy in that group. I wanted to be with the people who spent their weekends reading books instead of drinking beer.
So far, in our school district, there are so many different kinds of people, the popularity issue isn’t a problem, but maybe I’ll ask my kids about it.
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I wonder if there is more of this engineering going on when the kids are young. Cliques haven’t formed yet and popularity is based on very simple criterion, like getting the high score in the Sponge Bob video game or wearing the cutest dress. Later on, the only engineering that can happen is procuring the right material objects. Like clogs. Mom, I’m still mad about that.
I went to talk to Jonah’s teacher a couple of weeks ago because I was concerned about this social business. He didn’t come home talking about any one particular kid. No best friends. She said that Jonah did fine socically and played with everyone. Interestingly, she said that boys don’t develop best friends until 2 or 3rd grade, while girls pair up right away in pre-school.
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This is the flip side of the other post you put up about playdates.
Basically, if you want to save your kids from those tears, you’re going to intrude on their ability to negotiate. You want to maximize their abilities to negotiate their own relationships, you’re guaranteeing more tears, more experiences of bullying, being outcast, and so on.
There’s probably a happy medium that’s slightly different for each child. But I think so many of us grew up in circumstances where adults allowed (condemned?) us to work it all out ourselves, and felt the pain of that, that we’re determined to do the opposite, and manage the sociality of our children more extensively. I’m not sure which is worse or better, but they are in pretty sharp contradiction to each other.
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I also wonder how much transference is taking place. It sounds like a lot of people were outcasts and therefore have transferred their neuroses and concerns on to their children.
It can’t be avoided, but at some point we have to step back and say, “Is this my issue that I am so resentful of these moms or is it that I am just playing out my own little drama from childhood.”
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Ack. Speaking of transference, I meant projection.
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Michael,
For a long time I figured that my school trauma was preventable. If only I’d gone to preschool, if only my parents hadn’t moved us 30 minutes out of town when I was in elementary school, if only we hadn’t been so broke! However, now that my daughter is preschool age and her personality is starting to emerge (talky at home, active outside, solitary at preschool, huge intellectual curiosity, minimal empathy), it looks like she’s a lot like what I must have been like at that age, only more so, despite the huge differences in environment. That’s why I mentioned Groundhog Day!
We loners can eventually live very productive, happy lives. However, schools tend to be very unsuitable for loners, particularly socially in the early grades. Knowing this, of course I think about whether my daughter will be happy at school, and whether school is the best choice for her! It would be very irresponsible and insensitive not to think about this stuff.
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Absolutely, Amy. My point was that we need to separate out “our” issues from “their” issues. Just because a parent wasn’t able to negotiate life at that age doesn’t mean the child won’t. Especially with homeschooling, the challenge is determining whether it is good for “them” as opposed to good for “us.”
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There is no best. We want too much and too unreasonably so for our kids sometimes. Trying top hard to protect our kids from (our own remembered, or their new) traumas at school will just produce some equal and opposite reactions in the other direction, which then our kids will grow up feeling bad about and wondering why no one saved them from those problems. I see my job as watching for the unreasonable or disproportionate suffering or injustice or pain, not in trying to systematically correct all the ills of a system I know is badly flawed. When I think of the worst stuff that happened to me in school–boredom, getting the shit kicked out of me by bullies regularly, exclusion, arbitrary power-tripping teachers and administrators, there isn’t much of it where I can see how my parents or my teachers could have made it otherwise. Or the cure would have been worse–having some panoptic authority hovering over my shoulder all the time. There are a few occasions where I would have appreciated a teacher who was more sensitive to cruelty; there were a few times where I had such a teacher. A few occasions where I would have appreciated a teacher who was more appreciative of my interests and love of knowledge; a few times I had that. A few times where maybe my mom or dad could have been more assertive about protecting me; but mostly they were just right about that, and always comforting.
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My instincts as a parent tend to towards the noninterventionist. If my kids fight, I like to see them work it out on their own. I assumed that Jonah could find friends on his own and, so far, he has.
It’s only now as the popularity thing becomes so important and I watch other parents intervening that I have questioned my hands off approach. If everyone is doing X, Y, and Z to give their kids a social edge, isn’t stupid to not do the same? They aren’t intervening in a supervisory role. They are intervening in a materialistic and managerial way. They buy the X-Box, arrange the playdates, and provide the activities.
I don’t suppose that there is anything new about all this. This went on when we were kids, too. I’m just having to deal with this for the first time, so I’m publicly stressing about it.
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Yeah, it did go on when we were kids. The only thing I can say is that the parents who did it then and do it now too much or too aggressively don’t really reap much of a dividend for their kids in terms of social capital, and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exactly do a lot of good in the building-a-relationship-with-your-kids department either. Even the X-Box, which I would in fact recommend, I only recommend if you think Jonah actually enjoys those things. (If you think he does, I recommend that you guys sit down and play a bit with him, make it a fun thing for everyone.) It would be a stupid thing to get because you think it’s some kind of obligatory accessory. Every once in a while as a kid I asked for things that I thought all the kids had, like a skateboard. But I was lousy at skateboarding and didn’t enjoy it anyway and it turned out that not very many kids actually *did* have one, that I only misperceived how many did. My folks got me a cheap one to let me see if I’d like it, bless ’em. I suppose computer games are a good ‘cheap’ test of the X-Box warning system if you want to see for real whether Jonah would actually enjoy one.
Or go for activities which are kind of different than what the other parents do. We had some of my daughter’s preschool classmates over one weekend a while back to bake brownies–just one of those kits, with sprinkles and frosting they could put on themselves. Simple, pretty cheap, and judging from the reaction, memorably fun for the kids. Didn’t take that much supervision, either.
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What do working mothers do?
Uh, I don’t worry about a lot of these things. It sure helps.
My daughter takes a dance class, but not for the social aspects–for the exercise. I’ll require her to do some sort of athletic activity throughout her life. We’ll do the same with my son, though he’s still a bit young at 3.5 for organized sports/classes. I think we’ll try him in t-ball when he turns 4 this summer.
Are my kids popular? I don’t know. I don’t care. They don’t come home crying. That’s good enough for me. When they do, I’ll deal with it.
We don’t really do playdates. Weekends are family time since we both work and there’s so little time during the week. As it is, dance class takes up our Saturday mornings. My daughter has done playdates a few times with a friend whose mother and I get along (we both love Buffy and Veronica Mars). Once the weather is better, maybe we’ll start inviting others of her friends over–now that we have a house with a yard. 🙂
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Will my kid like x-box? It will be like sending a crack addict to Bolivia for vacation. He’ll love it so much that he’ll count the seconds until he gets to play it. I will constantly be enforcing rules about playing. He will be thinking about the game while in class.
And maybe I’m an old fogey, but I do believe that being outside. interacting with real people, and reading books is better than playing computer games. The time in front of the computer will knock out all that stuff.
I haven’t said yes or no yet to the x-box. Still thinking about it.
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If interacting with real people puts you in a situation where you’re constantly feeling that you’re getting the short end of the stick, the odd man out, the victim, what have you, what’s the point of pushing your kid to constantly be exposed to unmediated sociality of various kinds? All kids find their own friends in time, in their own way, I think. By third grade, I had ZERO interest in just being tossed into the deep end of the social pool and forced somehow to negotiate relationships with any and all who came along. School was enough of an exposure to that raw-nerve process. So yes, make sure your kids have ample chances to meet friends (though don’t forget, that’s part of what school is for, too) but don’t make “interacting with real people” a categorical imperative.
Let’s take another on the list of middle-class virtues, reading books. Hey, I’m a huge book reader, and I was when I was a kid, infamously so. But it’s kind of odd that one sort of solitary activity is so typically regarded as self-evidently preferable to another. We’re now distant from the moment where the book was regarded as itself a dangerous media form, but it was, once upon a time. In more recent times, some genres of books have been classed such–novels or science-fiction or self-help or what have you. I agree that books and videogames are different kinds of media, with different kinds of content, with different kinds of technological effects on their consumers, but the deep-rooted assumption that one sort of solitary, imaginative activity is obviously better than the other seems pretty indefensible to me in its typically asserted form. It’s ok to say, “It’s what I know, it’s what I grew up with”–we all make cultural judgements that way. But the sweeping character of the claim just kind of annoys me.
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