The mere whisper of the word brings back memories of the eighth grade and a girl named Allison. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to travel in the circle of Allison’s favor. Everyone wanted to be “popular.”
A Frame of Reference
Now, it is my children and the children of my friends who are eighth-graders, and I revisit the phenomenon of popularity-seeking from an adult perspective. There is still the classic concern, among children and adults, that a child have many friends who are the same age as she is.
Personally, I think the concept of children having many friends their own ages is highly overrated. I have a friend with six grown children who are all really lovely. She says that if your children are “popular,” then you worry. One of the blessings of home education has always been socialization. So often the question of socialization is thrown out as the stumper. “Surely,” the critic asserts, “you can’t socialize children adequately without a vast collection of same-aged peers.” On the contrary, the absence of a huge peer group is nothing but a benefit to parents whose goal in socializing their children is mature wisdom.
We don't want them to grow up to act like 12-year-olds, so they don't spend hours a day immersed in 12-year-old culture. I've noticed that when my children have spent a lot of time with their peers outside the family that we have to do some debriefing. They need to be reminded not to act according to the lowest common denominator.
When they are home, playing mostly with each other, under my supervision, everyone is well aware of the family standards. And those standards of behavior become habits, with each of them modeling and reminding for the others. They get into mischief, they squabble, and sometimes they even throw punches. But it's all within the context of our family and so it is all filtered through the sieve of our values. This is not to imply that there haven't been times when my kids have made the wrong choices. Unfortunately, there have. But our lifestyle affords us the ability to step in pretty quickly and our standard of behavior — of socialization — allows us to rectify the situation consistently. It's a frame of reference. It's not about being popular; it's about growing in wisdom.
What is the Measure of Popularity?
Someone commented recently that life as a suburban housewife is like junior high school, with everyone clamoring to be popular and in the “in” groups. Mothers wring their hands over who is in or out of their social cliques. They gossip incessantly about each other and worry not about the moral implications of such loose lips. The sad thing about that adult behavior is that it rubs off on the kids. The moms worry so much about number of friends and fitting in and the latest party that they lose sight of the real goals in raising children, even the real goals in socialization. We are raising children with heaven as the ultimate and immediate goal. We are purposefully raising our children to be social misfits. We want them to reject the quest to be popular, and embrace instead the mission to be holy.
We want them to reject the social mores of our time. We want them to reject the popular culture with its ugliness and its unabashed promotion of selfishness. This is the culture that John Paul II called the culture of death. And it is taught in the eighth grade to little girls by the Allisons of the classroom. They wear short, tight skirts and encourage — no require — everyone else to do the same. They walk suggestively and teach the sway to all the girls who aspire to be just like them.
Now, thanks to the Internet, not even families who invest in home education or Catholic schools are immune to Allison. Adolescence isn’t the same as it was a generation ago. Now relationships, more often than not, are developed at a keyboard. Popularity is measured by the number of emails waiting in one’s inbox, IMs open on the screen and friends on the myspace.com page. While this encourages keyboard proficiency, it does little to develop relationship skills and so much to encourage amassing large numbers of admirers and acquaintances at the expense of real friendships. There is a real and present danger in popularity.
A Cyber Space Danger to Your Child’s Soul
Myspace.com is a gathering place on the Internet. There, children from every walk of life, every family situation, every moral persuasion are given a blank Web page. On it, they can post their pictures, their hopes and dreams, the daily minutia of their lives. They can gather their friends’ pictures as well and myspace.com keeps track of how many friends they have. That running tally encourages the child to add as many faces to the pages as possible, a testimony to her popularity.
Some children are so consumed by bringing people to their sites that they post racy pictures and text that goes way behind flirtatious. And people come. They flock by the hundreds. Even children whose sites are innocuous are affected. If a careful mother goes to an innocuous site and clicks on a “friend” and from the friend’s site clicks on another “friend,” she is two or three clicks away from a site with pornography — every time. No one is immune.
During my recent myspace.com education, I saw kids from public schools, Catholic schools and home schools — all in their underwear! With every click, the stakes went up, and so did the popularity ticker. Suddenly, we are no longer talking about who has the most signatures in her yearbook and who made the cheerleading squad. We are talking about the very lives of our children — morally and physically. Sites like myspace.com have taken the innate quest for popularity and exploited it to such a degree that an entire generation is threatened.
If you have a teenager, ask her if she has a myspace page. Then, educate yourself. Turn the family computer upside down to discover if it’s been to myspace. Ask a computer geek to help if necessary. And if you find yourself at your child’s site, click on every picture, every link, every “friend,” to discover who is really feeding your child’s soul.
Elizabeth Foss is a freelance writer from northern Virginia. Real Learning: Education in the Heart of the Home by Elizabeth Foss can be purchased at www.4reallearning.com.
(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
