I recently overhead a mother sharing with other mothers that she knew who the most popular girl was in her second graders class. She knew exactly where her daughter fit in with this girl and even shopped for clothes similar to what the popular girls wore. The mother also shared that she was ecstatic that her daughter was invited to the popular girl’s birthday party.

Does this sound like you?

All too often, the “top” child becomes the “most popular” child and all the other children fall into line depending on the favor bestowed upon them by this most popular kid. There are winners and losers here.

Naturally, this is not a good scene. No one wants her son or daughter to be unpopular or left out. But this is where we parents lose our good sense and make things worse. If we buy into this popularity thing, being happy when the “most popular” child invites our own kid over to play and otherwise worrying about our child’s social status, we add to the problem. We become accomplices in what is a dangerous game.

There can only be one winner in the popularity sweepstakes. If – for now, anyway – your own child is the most popular one, she is anxious about keeping her standing. She is likely to become nasty and manipulative of others – threatening to drop friends who don’t do as she says or encouraging others to join her in verbal bullying of other kids. The queen of the heap only stays queen if she can control her subjects. In supporting your most-popular child, you are helping to create a social monster.

There’s only one winner but many losers in the popularity game, and it’s likely your child is one of these. If she’s near the top of the friendship rankings, she may be plotting a coup by spreading rumors about children more popular than she. If your child is nearer the bottom of the friendship rankings, she may be depressed, unhappy, and even unwilling to go to school or play with other kids. Either way, your child is in danger, of becoming mean and nasty or of becoming isolated and discouraged.

To a certain extent, this jockeying for position happens naturally among groups of kids and is fluid enough to be of only passing concern for parents. But when moms and dads actively participate in the popularity game, by keeping track of the social standing of their child and their child’s friends, then there will be trouble ahead.

1. No matter how much your own popularity mattered to you in school, don’t project your anxiety onto your son or daughter. Don’t live through them or try to fix your own life by manipulating theirs.
2. As much as possible, let your children figure out their own social relationships and settle their own social problems. How will they learn to handle conflict and negotiate solutions if you’re always interfering? Their friends are their business, not yours.
3. Accentuate the positive. Say only nice things about other children and avoid comparing one child’s clothes/toys/vacations/ pets to other children’s. These are kids. Why are you obsessed with them and their stuff?
4. Reject bullying behavior wherever it happens. It’s bullying to call people names, lie about them, uninvite them to your birthday party and threaten rejection just as much as it’s bullying to steal lunch money and hit people. Don’t look the other way when your own child is a verbal bully and support your child when he’s the victim of verbal bullying.
5. Most of all, don’t play into the hands of those who want to rank children by popularity (or intelligence or athletic ability or anything else). Refuse to participate in these conversations. Imagine that others talked about your own rank on the prettiness scale. You wouldn’t like it one bit!

High school taught a lot of us that popularity matters. Most adults outgrow this delusion. Remember that who is the most popular doesn’t translate in any way to life success. What does translate is feeling supported and appreciated.

That’s what every child needs.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Join Dr. Anderson in an online conference for teachers and parents. Find out more at Quality Conference for Early Childhood Leaders.

If your child struggles to make friends, that hurts. It hurts you, who wants the world to appreciate what a great person your child is. And it hurts your child, who may give up trying to fit in and retreat into his shell. What causes a child to be rejected by other kids?

Children who are rejected send out different signals than other kids do. Rejected kids tend to be more aggressive or more shy than other kids, or less able to pick up play cues from others. Sometimes it’s hard to identify just what it is that sets rejected kids apart.

But rejection matters. It can become a way of life and a defining theme in a child’s school experience. Preschoolers who are rejected become elementary school students who are rejected and then become high school students who never fit in. Rejection has been linked with poor school performance, depression, and violent acting-out.

If you are the parent of a rejected child, what other kids do is usually beyond your control. Trying to stage manage your child’s social life can backfire. No one picks a friend because her mother wants it. Your child has to build her friendship skills so she can be an attractive friend all on her own. How can you help her fit in?

First, help your child celebrate herself. The child who is happy, confident and curious is the kid others want to be with. Develop your child’s interests for their own sake (not with an eye to increasing her popularity) and friends will find him interesting too.

Second, cultivate your child’s social skills. Help him know how to invite others to play, how to accommodate others’ ideas, and when to assert himself. Find a play group or team or club and use it as your child’s practice place. If you have trouble seeing what your child does that gets him rejected, ask his teacher for her ideas.

The friendless child may need help in these areas:

• How to strike up a conversation and keep the conversation going with other kids.
• How to listen to someone else. If your child talks on and on and never listens, that’s a problem.
• How to pick up on what other kids are interested in. Your child may be fascinated by fire trucks, but if other kids his age are interested in dinosaurs or NASCAR, then help him develop those interests too.
• How to engage in physical play appropriately. Help your shy child feel confident playing kickball or Twister. But notice if your child is physically intimidating instead and help her learn how to dial down her interactions.
• How to speak loudly enough to be heard… and, at the same time, how to speak without shouting or ordering other kids around.
• How to pick up on jokes and verbal silliness. Kids with poor social skills make not “get” the jokes. Help your child by practicing this sort of interaction.

Observe your child and see where he might need the most assistance. Then work on these skills with your child every day and make sure he has opportunities to practice. You can even role-play different situations. The shy child might find it easier to practice being a friend with younger kids, who aren’t so intimidating.

And finally, make sure your own ideas of popularity are reasonable. Remember that your child is worthy and valuable no matter how many friends she has.

© 2012, Patricia Nan Anderson.  All rights reserved.

Is your child fitting in to her school class? Does she have friends to play with at recess? Does she have friends who want to eat lunch with her? Most children do but some children don’t.

Friends are not just nice-to-have. They are essential to children’s success in school and in later life. Research has shown that children who are rejected or ignored in preschool continue to be rejected or ignored in first grade, third grade, and middle school. The pattern of no-friends doesn’t go away on its own. In addition, those children who have no friends at school are less happy at school, do less well in school, and develop patterns of aggression or withdrawal that become lifelong.

Every parent wants their child to have friends to play with. What can you do if your child has trouble making friends? Here are some ideas.

1. Make sure your child has friendship opportunities. To have friends, kids have to be around kids who are good candidates for friendship. So get your preschooler enrolled in a child-centered child care center or preschool and make certain that your school-age child has chances to play with kids outside of school. Remember that “play” is not the same as organized sports or lessons. Play is interacting with another child without any adult plan for what will happen. So set up play dates. Take time to get your child out into kid society.
2. Show your child how to play. Small children may not know how to sit down next to someone in the sandbox and engage that child in mutual play. Even older kids may feel too shy or uncertain and need to know how to strike up a conversation with another child on the playground or in the neighborhood. So show her how. Get into the sandbox yourself and help your child play with another kid. Introduce yourself and your child to a kid on the playground and help the two of them get involved in a shared activity.
3. Help your child be a responsive playmate. Some kids are better at this than others: they can pick up play cues and adapt to another child’s thinking almost effortlessly. Other children, especially those with ADHD or autism, may have difficulty understanding another child’s point-of-view. Studies show that children who are out of control, self-absorbed or overly-aggressive are rejected as playmates. If your child has trouble in social situations, he needs more opportunities to play, not fewer, and more guidance in how to do it. You may need to teach your child how to be a friend. Make this a priority.
4. Help your child say goodbye. When play is over, demonstrate how to end the play but saying, “Thanks for playing with us. We hope to play with you again sometime.” Easy to do and polite and it cements for your child the idea that, yes, she did play with somebody and it was fun. The shy and uncertain child may have felt uncomfortable during at least some of the play, so reminding her that this was fun leaves the good final impression.
5. Avoid over-managing friendship. Kids don’t become friends because adults say they should. They become friends because they have fun together. So trying to insist that another child be friends with your child or leaning too hard on a particular child to be your kid’s go-to companion is not likely to help your child in the long run. No one, your child included, should feel forced into friendship or forced to have play dates with someone she doesn’t like.

Finally, if you live in a remote area or there are no conducive children living nearby, you may be comforted by the fact that solitary children are not necessarily lonely. Many isolated kids use their imaginations to create a rich inner life or find affinity with pets. Some children with no friends are quite comfortable playing by themselves. The key thing is to notice if your child is really content or if he has simply resigned himself to a friendless fate. If your child is not unhappy, then don’t you be unhappy either.

Friends are good but popularity is not so important. It isn’t the number of friends that matters but the connection to even one person the same age or with the same interests. What’s important is your child’s happiness. Help your child be happy with her friends.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Look for free downloads on Dr. Anderson’s website at www.patricianananderson.com.