SELECT A PROGRAM

(12/2008) - By the time I was ready to go to South Junior High, I knew that I wasn’t part of the “in” group. Even if there had been a “How to be Popular for Dummies,” I couldn’t have made the turn on the road to being cool. I knew there were guys around, but to be popular you needed to be much more comfortable with them than I was. Then there was the “look.” I was off by a mile. I was still chubby, my face (adorned with acne) hadn’t quite caught up with the size of my teeth, and I wore glasses.

By high school, I had thinned out and discovered contact lenses, but my orbit was still not within the constellation of the uber-popular. Fortunately, the stakes were not so high in the 1960s in my boomer-filled school. Being popular meant that you navigated socially with more ease than others, but it didn’t mean you had more power. Fitting in and being noticed, regardless of where you were on the social scaffolding, was within the grasp of most. There were many places for membership—the musicians (my group), the nerds (also my group), ROTC, athletes (pre Title IX— boys only), and thespians. And, as far as my parents were concerned, there was no cache in my being a social diva; nor did they need me to be popular to enhance their social standing.

Times have changed. The stakes are high when it comes to being unable to fit in as a teen today. In Odd Girl Out, author and MHS Scholar-in-Residence Rachel Simmons talks about what we all know regarding the social land mines in the teen culture.ⁱ Popular girls have access to “the booty of womanhood… makeup and boys…and parents born without genes for party supervision….”[156] What is less well understood, she goes on to say, is the role of friendships — the right number and the right ones—in a girl’s social standing. For those girls in hot pursuit of sustaining their popularity, friendship [becomes] “a ticket [or] tool.” [159] On the other end of the continuum, girls desperately seeking acceptance are at great risk for becoming pawns and exchanging their integrity for an invitation from those with social power. It is in settings where adults allow this “merciless competition for relationships” [156] to go unchecked that there are winners and losers and that a girl’s very sense of worth can be challenged so severely that it takes years for her to regain her equilibrium.

Recent research now suggests that there are also long-term negative implications for teens who belong to Club Popularity. Joseph Allen at the University of Virginia has undertaken a longitudinal study of teen culture and points out that teens who are popular are so “in part because they are carefully attuned to the norms of their peer group.”ⁱⁱ He goes on to explain that “as these norms increasingly come to support even minor levels of deviant behavior during adolescence, popular teens may be particularly susceptible.” Specifically, according to Allen, the most socially skilled students are “three times as likely to be drinking by age 14 as those outside the group.”ⁱⁱⁱ

Allen’s work also suggests to me that parents may inadvertently play a role in shifting the norms of the teen culture. His findings reveal that popular adolescents not only navigate well in social interactions with the peer group but also demonstrate a high level of social skill in dealing with adults, including their parents. Teens’ social charms, therefore, may cause us as parents to lose our grip and allow girls to have access to adult forms of entertainment long before they are ready, thus increasing their vulnerability to behaviors that carry risk.

We are committed in this school to providing a setting for girls in which there is no “in” and “out” group and where the norms of the peer culture are wholesome and values are intact. There is consensus that preparing for college (and life) is difficult enough without a girl feeling either that she’s on the outskirts or that she has to keep pace on the social treadmill. One girl described it this way: “It’s not about being popular in the old way here... [it’s] being known for your ideas and your interests as well as the high level of respect in the culture that make the difference.” This student also thought that school size is a factor: “MHS is small, so we all get to know each other.” Another girl, a junior, agreed that the old rules of popularity don’t apply at MHS. She said, “We each have our own group of friends, but we all work with each other.” What is key, she added, is that “we learn to listen to what others are saying and to approach others with an open mind.”

Girls feel this way because we all work hard to sustain the culture they describe; we are all vigilant and respond when things go amiss. What is foremost in our minds as teachers, however, is sustaining a learning environment in which girls come to know that the source of their power is not in what they have or in whom they know. It is in the clarity they develop about what they believe in deeply and in the sure knowledge that the world is waiting for their contributions.

_____________________________________________

ⁱ Simmons, Rachel. Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2002.

ⁱⁱ Society for Research in Child Development (2005, May 17). The Dark Side of Adolescent Popularity. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 19, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com

ⁱⁱⁱ Carey, Benedict, “Spot on Popularity Scale Speaks to the Future; Middle Has Its Rewards,” The New York Times, September 1, 2008.