 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Kids Forming Cliques at Earlier Ages
Related Product
If you are interested in this story, you may also be interested in these parent videos:This Week's Top Stories
Most Popular Stories
| Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 | Emily Halevy | CWK Producer |
“All of a sudden they all started picking on me, saying I had a quote ‘disease’ unquote. I was lonely, I felt lonely. I felt like I had just been outcast.”
– Stanzi Sanders, 13 years old
By definition, cliques are exclusionary. There is always someone on the outside wishing they were ‘in’.
New research shows that cliques are forming at younger and younger ages - but are these kids ready for the consequences?
“When I hear the word clique I’m like ‘no, no, it’s a bad thing,’” says 13-year-old Katie Shuford.
14-year-old Talley Slater agrees: “When you hear a clique, everybody thinks of people that exclude people and that they’re not really nice to other people, they don’t really care about anybody, besides themselves”
When Stanzi Sanders was seven years old, she had a cold and persistent cough in school.
She says that’s when the harassment started. “All of a sudden they all started picking on me, saying I had a quote ‘disease’ unquote,” she remembers. “I was lonely, I felt lonely. I felt like I had just been outcast.”
New research shows that cliques are forming earlier than ever before- as early as 2nd or 3rd grade.
Experts say kids that age don’t understand how hurtful exclusion can be.
“One of the problems with cliques starting earlier is that kids don’t yet have much of the cause and effect thinking available to them,” explains Paul Schenk, Psy.D, a clinical psychologist. “Then if this, then this happens - so, there’s a problem in not being able to think through the consequences of something.”
And when you’re on the outside, at the age of seven or eight, it’s harder to deal with the pain.
“Kids at that age haven’t developed the coping strategies,” Schenk says, “They don’t have the ability to step back and appreciate what’s going on, the way that they would later in adolescence.”
And he says there’s another problem when cliques begin at such a young age: “Habits are things that we do, again and again and again. So if these behaviors start earlier and they are repeated more often, then there’s certainly the risk of them becoming more a part of that child’s personality.”
Stanzi’s at a new school, she’s made new friends. But, she says, the bullying changed her:
“It’s made me very withdrawn, anti-social - cold-hearted, some might say in fact. And that’s not how I want to appear to the world. I want to appear as a kind person. Kind, open, friendly - and this all just changed that.”
What We Need To Know
- Children have a slower reaction time when it comes to responding to challenges. Help your child come up with alternatives to how to handle witnessing or being the victim of bullying. (Paul Schenk, Psy.D., clinical psychologist)
- Validate your child’s feelings and acknowledge their need to belong. (Paul Schenk, Psy.D., clinical psychologist)
- Never tell your child to ignore bullying. What the child might "hear" is that you are going to ignore it. Instead, ask your child what he or she thinks can be done to help and offer assurances that you'll think about it. (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)
- On the positive side, cliques offer an opportunity for children to develop their social skills, to watch others and to learn ways to behave appropriately. (Paul Schenk, Psy.D., clinical psychologist)
- On the negative side, children in cliques are getting practice in whatever behavior is being modeled - which can be bullying, risk-taking, drug use, etc. (Paul Schenk, Psy.D., clinical psychologist)
Resources
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
- American Psychological Association
