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I talk a lot about popularity here without really taking the time to explain what I mean. Not that most of you don’t know what popularity is–we know it when we see it?–but in my field of research, these days, you don’t utter the word “popular” without qualifying it somehow. There’s more than one definition, and things start to get confusing.
So, without further ado, A Popularity Primer.
Chapter 1. Sociometric Popularity, aka Social Preference or “Likeability.”
This is old-school popularity, the original term for high social status that was coined by developmental psychologists back in the 1980s when research on peer relationships really started to take off. Sociometric popularity referred to kids who had a lot of friends, were well-liked by many and disliked by few, who were nice to other kids, with good grades, and who were on an even keel emotionally. When you heard the word “popularity” used, it meant all positive things. Popular kids were all-around good kids. This is not to say that well-liked kids never have problems–of course they do. But compared to some other children, like the victims of bullies and kids who are rejected by their entire peer group–well-liked kids are doing really, really well.
Chapter 2. Perceived Popularity, aka Being “Popular” or “Cool” or “In”
Sometimes I wonder what your average 13-year-old would have thought if she were to have picked up a few issues of Child Development in the 80s and read some articles about popular kids. She would either have assumed things at her school were totally messed up, or she would have rolled her eyes and made some comment about how adults just.don’t.get.it. (Eye roll.) Enter a few studies done in the late 90s: It started to become obvious that when kids themselves said the word “popular,” they meant something very different than the researchers did.
These days, popularity refers to the kids at the top of the social ladder. Everybody knows who they are, and lots of people want to either A) be them, B) be friends with them, or C) date them. (There’s also D) stay as far away from them as possible, but for some reason, the research hasn’t gotten around to those kids yet. Note to self.) Popular kids are a conundrum, a complex mix of nice and mean, prosocial and aggressive, trustworthy and manipulative. They’re thought to be socially savvy and good at understanding others, but they sometimes use these skills to hurt. Some popular kids fall heavily on the good side of things, some on the bad–and some are a pretty even mix of both. Some stay away from trouble, but others seek it out and flirt with danger, drinking too much and engaging in sex too young. We don’t see the same outcomes in likeable kids.
So, that’s the deal. Two different types of high status, two different sets of attributes and outcomes. I should also mention here that just because it took a while for developmental psychologists to get smart about what “popularity” means doesn’t mean that other fields hadn’t already figured it out–sociologists had been studying the cool kids for quite a while when peer relations people joined the party. We’re indebted to our sociologist colleagues; until popularity research reached a critical mass in our own field, the work of sociologists was almost all we had to go on!
I’m way, way behind in telling this one, but here’s a story about bullying that I’m smiling as I’m writing.
Being the victim of bullying brings with it all kinds of trouble–depression, isolation, loneliness, self-blame. But there are some very cool findings in the bullying literature on the one friend phenomenon. What the research shows is that kids who are bullied, even those who are victimized day after day, tend to fare relatively well in terms of psychological outcomes like depression and loneliness if they have just one good friend that they can rely on for support and companionship. One supportive friend can act as a buffer against those terrible feelings. You can imagine that–how much of a difference it is to go from zero friends to one. It can mean the world.
So imagine going from zero friends, from being bullied every day for years, from seeing your peers wear bracelets that say they hate you and seeing the “I hate you” pages on the internet–to having literally thousands of supporters, with letters to prove it. It happened to a girl named Olivia, and it happened because two sisters who heard her story decided to remind her that not every teenager is petty and cruel.
Emily and Sarah Buder read a newspaper story describing Olivia Gardner’s school life. Horrified, they organized a letter-writing campaign and began with the modest goal of collecting 50 encouraging letters to send to Olivia, who lived in a nearby town. Within weeks, they had 500 letters–and then more and more. The letters were from fellow victims, former victims, even former bullies who regretted their terrible behavior. The letters underscored how long-lasting the effects of bullying can be–both for victims, who never forget what it felt like, and for bullies themselves, who spend remorseful years trying to undertstand why they acted so cruelly.
The Buder sisters and other teens like them are my superheroes. And I don’t mean because they did Something Big to help Olivia–because they did something. It just takes one friend, one connection, to help a child who feels like nobody cares. This is where my scientist self and my mom self get to high-five: I read the research about having just one friend, and then I see a story like this, and I’m reminded of the kinds of things I want to teach my daughter.
Many of Olivia’s letters have been published together in a book called Letters to a Bullied Girl. You can browse through some of the letters on the publisher’s website–definitely worth a few minutes of your time.
Given the evidence that supports the long-term importance of strong early attachments, it’s surprising and perhaps disturbing that so little has come of it. It’s a rare policy or practice that has been directly inspired or informed by attachment theory or the research in its tradition, despite the decades of published research. You’d think that such a powerful body of work would make waves in all kinds of areas, from parenting to professional child care, but…..not so much.
So much of the disconnect between research and policy stems from a lack of communication between the laboratory and the real world. Parents, teachers, and legislators aren’t exactly devouring the latest issue of Child Development (jeez, I can barely keep up with reading it these days, and it’s my own field’s flagship journal), and scientists are rarely skilled at seeking publicity for their research findings. So when I came across a reference to the National Scentific Council on the Developing Child, I got very excited.
The NSCDC is a panel of experts who are charged with condensing relevant child development research into manageable, understandable bullet points for use by policymakers and the lay public. They have published working papers on a variety of issues, including one entitled Young Children Develop in an Environment of Relationships that is based partly on research in attachment. Among the points they make are the following:
When I read this brief, all I could think was–YES! Finally! Now maybe issues like family leave, working mothers, and subsidized child care can become informed discussions of what’s best for children, rather than oversimplified political talking points. (Of course, this brief was written in 2004, and I haven’t exactly seen my colleagues all over CNN. Yet. Small steps….)
(And trust me, I’m not as naive as I sound–I understand the financial implications of the programs that brief is alluding to. But I’d like to get scientists in on that part of the discussion, too–a discussion of the financial costs versus the costs in children’s mental health, and the long-term implications of policies that ignore the child in favor of the budget.)
So, the gap is narrowing. Science is doing its job–we’re making the breakthroughs, we’re looking for the answers (and publishing them, at least when they answer big enough questions). Groups like this Council are delivering the results to the doors of the people who make the big decisions, who write the legislation, and who decide what issues to take on in their election campaigns. Will they listen?
As any parent can tell you, there are (far too) many people, books, websites, and magazine articles offering child-rearing advice to the new parent. Much of the advice is related to topics that, frankly, really don’t matter-trust me, the difference between swaddling my daughter “properly” versus swaddling her in my own highly incapable and messy way was undetectable at 4 a.m.; she cried either way.
The big issues, though-that’s where things can get scary. Take, for example, the following advice to late-19th-century parents, which was published as part of a pamphlet called The Care and Feeding of Children by Luther Emmett Holt:
It is tempting to dismiss this kind of bad advice as simply uninformed by more recent advances in research with infants (and in this case, it’s a reasonable assumption-infancy research was virtually nonexistent in 1894). Surprisingly, though, parents are still taught child care techniques that are inconsistent with psychological research with infants and children. Take, for example, the following blog post about cry-it-out techniques from a parenting blog called Partners in Parenting:
“What does this (sleep training) method entail? It’s pretty simple: put the baby down asleep at bedtime and don’t return to the room until the end of the sleep period. So, at nap-time, you put the baby down cooing and gurgling, walk out of the room, close the door, and don’t return for two hours — even if your baby is crying the entire time. Same thing at nighttime.”
This is advice given to parents by many pediatricians, nurses, sleep experts, and parenting gurus. There are lots of variations on the theme, but the gist is the same: Babies will learn to put themselves to sleep, and will go to sleep without a fuss, if parents will stop rewarding the infant’s cry with a response (comforting, rocking, feeding, etc). I can’t emphasize enough how common this advice is-there are numerous books on the topic, child care websites recommend it, and at every single well-baby visit I took my infant daughter to, we were encouraged to “train” Lily to sleep by letting her cry in her crib if need be. (In case you’re curious, we managed to teach Lily to fall asleep without leaving her to cry alone.)
Thoughts? We’re talking about attachment this week in class. Is this advice consistent with fostering secure attachments?