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[quote=Anonymous]My kid is in his first year of working now, so not really a kid.  But he was popular, and it always kind of amazed me because he was raised by two introverted bookworms.  I used to watch him with his peers (I was a teacher at his high school) and just marvel.

Here's how he was different from dh and me:

The primary thing was that he is/was super confident.  He never seemed to consider that anybody could think anything bad about him.  Somehow this made him especially kind and pleasant to be around.  He always seemed to assume that people he knew were fair, reasonable, and similarly well-intentioned.  He really was/is nice to everyone.  I know common wisdom seems to indicate that the popular kids are mean, but my ds and his friends really were nice to people.  he was once suspended from school for beating up a kid who had been saying some disgusting things about girls (not one girl, but a few).  One day my kid stood up in the lunchroom and just went automatic, beating this jerk to the ground.  As a teacher, I was appalled.  As a parent, I was so proud (other teachers told me how they supported my kid in this too).

He has a great sense of humor (and a hilarious, infectious bellow of a laugh).  He could find the absurd in a situation and laugh at it, and others laugh with him.

He was good at school and had interests.  He loved animals since he was little and as he got older, he focused a lot on his science and math grades because he knew he wanted vet school.  He was known as the guy to call when you found a baby bird on the ground or if your parents said you had to get rid of a pet.  Girls seemed to find this endearing.  His interest in getting and keeping the grades he needed to achieve his goal kept him mainly out of trouble.  The peer study groups he participated in further cemented good friendships with kids who were motivated and had priorities.  Parents liked him and wanted their kids to be friends with him or date him.

He was tall and handsome.  Not his fault or doing and not something you can do much about, but I do think being good looking made him a source of fascination for some people.

He wasn't/isn't perfect.  His room was a disgusting sty and he is not a creative person: I wish he had been/was able to find pleasure in art or reading fiction, but no, that just isn't him.  But his strengths seemed to align to make him "popular" in high school, for what that is worth.

I will say that some of my ds's classmates who were less popular really thrived and bloomed in college, so just because a kid isn't "popular" in high school doesn't mean that this sets the stage entirely for all his future social endeavors.  (Though dh and I were and are both introverted and avoid the kind of intense social scenes our son craved/craves).[/quote]

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