WSJ_2001_398781868.txt

Point and Clique --- Your kids are popular; Uh-ohThey are goalies, diligent students and bassoon players. Their weekends brim with Sunday school, ballroom dancing and sleepovers. But lately, these kids are threatened with shaming in their middle schools. They are -- I can barely bring myself to spell out the ugly word -- "popular."
At some time between the early 1970s and the turn of the millennium, popularity came to be stigmatized. What was once a parental aspiration is seen today as evidence of a child's slavish devotion to cliques and a callous indifference to the pain of the unpopular.
Of course, there is a flaw in this particular application of stigma. Popularity, or the lack thereof, is a momentary phenomenon in the lives of children. Those who are securely "in" around Christmas vacation can find themselves "out" by spring break -- if they happen to come to school with an ill-chosen backpack, hit an awkward height, put on some weight or develop a crush on the wrong boy.
But that doesn't keep parents from panicking. I was roused from my own complacent state by a recent morning-news segment on " Cliques," a new book by Charlene C. Giannetti and Margaret Sagarese. The book itself warns that a culture of cruelty has turned recess into a drama of oppression and victimhood. Children are pathologized, and popularity is the yardstick. If you're popular, you may well be a martinet and playground oppressor. If you're not, you may be an equally messed-up "wannabe," a "bystander" or a "loner."
Social pressures force young children into (as the book jacket puts it) "explosive, destructive, and even life-threatening situations," foreshadowing the violence so grimly played out at certain schools. The headlines that follow these tragedies -- "A Curse of Cliques" and "Cliques Made Columbine a High School Hell" -- are absorbed by the parenting industry and trickle down to the junior grades.
In this view, popularity and bullying are intertwined. "Controlling personalities rise to the top," the authors of "Cliques" say, and "unsuspecting young adolescents become targets for the more powerful and popular." The bully is no longer the outsider but "the head cheerleader or president of the class." Popular kids are an elite composed of "the beautiful, the athletic, the charming and the affluent."
What is one to make of this unsettling analysis? After all, some kids will always be more popular than others, either for the right reasons -- because they are funny, strive to make friends, conform to moral norms or master certain tasks -- or for the wrong ones. Is this junior-high "culture of cruelty" a new horror or an old inevitability? Are kids really getting more cliquish?
Not judging from a 1956 text that I unearthed in a Brooklyn used-book shop recently. Titled "Youth: The Years From Ten to Sixteen," it was written by a team of doctors from the Yale Clinic of Child Development and the Gesell Institute of Child Development. Despite some gruesome detail, it was wonderfully reassuring.
Here's how the authors describe their Eisenhower-era study group: "No one can be more cruel than an 11-year-old girl who doesn't quite realize what she is doing. And if her poor victim responds to her chastisement, she is inspired to double or triple her dose." These children are devoted to social division: "There is nothing casual here. They may come together with intent as much for evil as for good. The group may suddenly dissolve to exclude certain unwanted members" and "may or may not allow the excluded one or ones to re-enter its confines."
The authors might have been describing my own middle-school classmates in the 1970s. (One had to be "invited" to sit under a particular blossoming tree on the playing field at lunch time.) Today's children, of course, are attuned to racial and gender sensitivities, as well as to the feelings of those with disabilities and physical flaws. They seem like humanitarians by comparison with the generations before. How often does one hear "fatty" or "four-eyes" shouted out at a playground today?
True, children still whisper, save seats and mercilessly edit slumber-party guest lists. True, too, they stand in self-important and exclusionary hallway clumps, mortifying passing strays. And no feeling adult can help but melt at the sight of a child being left out.
But more newsworthy than an outbreak of kids behaving like kids is the defensive response of some contemporary parents (and I must include myself in this category). Talk to us about the scourge of cliques and you may not find a single adult living today who was ever popular. "Me, I was the A.V. guy with a pocket protector" or "a skinny ugly duckling" or "just so into reading Proust and collecting money for starving Bangladeshis that the cheerleaders shunned me."
Such paragons of unpopularity apparently never cared about clothes, and they certainly never hurt anyone's feelings. It scarcely needs saying that these same people, now parents, belong to exclusive tennis clubs or identify strongly with prestigious professional groups or convocations of neighborhood moms. At a recent parents' meeting, I couldn't bring myself to admit that I did, at one point, achieve a middling popularity (mainly by aligning myself with a band of Alpha girls who dressed alike in Fair Isle sweaters). Instead, I recounted the poignant yet character-building years when I was near the short end of my class, humiliated regularly as a last pick in dodge-ball team selections.
We parents extend this reverse snobbery and revisionist airbrushing to our kids, in part because we're terrified of being branded as the parents of clique "leaders." My child has friends, we'll tell you, but not a group of three or four close friends who might be construed in any legal sense as a clique. Our kids are "floaters" who move between groups. Or "wannabes," so sensitive (and frankly superior) that they can't gain the favor of the shallow, cruel and overdressed bullies.
The Parents of the Popular, meanwhile, are prepared to intervene, often with new forms of social engineering. They would, for instance, discourage kids from hanging around locker areas between classes, thus eradicating that living laboratory of social injustice. But the parental phone-frenzy that erupts after an "incident" of schoolyard cliquishness, back-stabbing or name-calling can involve a good deal of, well, cliquishness, back-stabbing and name-calling.
Of course, the hand-wringing and attention we lavish on our children's social lives could become irrelevant in this age of the nerd's revenge. The A.V. guys are rich; the gawky wallflowers are supermodels (or maybe just happy, well-adjusted adults). And even Bill Clinton, until recently the most popular man in America, seems to be sitting all alone in the cafeteria.
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Ms. Finnerty is a writer who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.