The Truth About Playground Popularity
By Sharon Estroff

When I first started teaching, I couldn’t begin to fathom what would possess an otherwise with-it mom to morph into a verklempt neurotic disaster at the sheer mention of her child’s social life. I mean I could have just wrapped up a thirty minute conference with Mrs. Xberg about Junior’s math and reading woes without so much as a sniffle, only to watch her well up in tears and start fishing around in her purse for the Kleenex the moment we broached the issue of playdates and friendships.

What’s the big deal? I used to think to myself. Can’t Mrs. Xberg just tell Junior to go play with the kid down the street? But when my own son hit grade school, and I began reflexively agonizing over his social existence, I alas had a glimmering. I realized that organizing a playdate for my first-grader took more pre-planning and forethought than a summit meeting at Camp David; and that the idyllic looking schoolyard with its playful slides and swings, actually housed a social hierarchy so complex it could floor a seasoned political scientist.

The more articles I would read about the critical role that social skills play in children's lifetime success, the more I’d freak out over my son’s popularity quotient. At one especially low point, I’d even managed to convince myself that my shy six year old was positively destined to grow up to be an anti-social recluse, whose only friends were a bunch of raccoons!

What’s happened to me? I’d wonder following these playground-induced freakout episodes. How did I – the cool as a cucumber teacher – suddenly evolve into a maternal tossed salad? How did I- the voice of reason for scores of frazzled parents – end up in the trenches of verklempt neurotic disasterism agonizing over my kids’ every social hiccup?

Now, four kids and many, many freakout episodes later, I have finally determined exactly what had happened to me. I’d obligingly bought into the modern day mommy premise that my children could only be happy if they collected friends like Yu-Gi-Oh cards - and I did everything in my parental power to perpetually boost their decks!

But you’ll have to believe me when I tell you, my fellow trench inhabitants, that a sandboxful of research has proven this is hardly the case; and that sky high playground popularity is neither a realistic nor necessary goal for us to hold for our children. Studies consistently show, you see, that on any given school playground at any given time, the following statistics are apt to apply: 15% of the children will be wildly popular. 10% will be socially rejected and 75% will fall somewhere in the middle. In other words, it’s a safe bet that our son or daughter will neither be the most popular kid in the crowd nor the least popular. And that’s okay. Really! Because the evidence doesn’t suggest that the super cool popular kids are any happier than anyone else in the pile.

What the research does overwhelmingly show, however, is that having just one or two true, blue friends can keep kids afloat in the stormy social seas; enabling them to weather the inevitable rejection, disappointments and losses of grade school social existence. In other words, despite a diehard societal belief to the contrary, we serve our children much better to focus our efforts on building their friendships rather than their popularity.

Here are some suggestions toward that all-important end.

•  Focus on playdate quality over quantity. Since it’s far more important for grade schoolers to have a few close friends they can count on to sit with them at lunchtime than to have a playdate with every kid in the class under their belts by Hanukkah, our parental goal in playdating is to plan plenty of repeat performances with a few of the old standbys. Thus, enabling our kids to deepen and solidify friendships as much as possible.
• Enroll kids in group extracurriculars .Team sports, Brownies, cub scouts, choirs, orchestras and synagogue youth groups provide ideal venues for kids to foster friendships with other kids who share their interests. (Assuming, of course, that our kids’ extracurricular activities reflect their interests - not ours.)
• Find models for friendship in favorite characters. Hey, the invention that brought us Desperate Housewives couldn’t be all bad! The truth is that books and TV are some of our richest resources for teaching kids about how to form and maintain friendships. So the next time you catch your child watching the Rugrats, point out how Tommy is such a loyal and caring buddy because he shared his very last cookie with Chuckie. And how nobody wants to be with Angelica because she is so darn bossy! Or crack out a dog-eared copy of Charlotte’s Web and a full box of tissues and show kids the true meaning of the word friendship.
  

Sharon Estroff is a nationally syndicated parenting columnist with graduate degrees in education and child psychology. Her years in the classroom and four preciously challenging children give her a steady flow of material. Her first book, on modern Jewish parenting, is due out in 2007.