Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Agree with the PP teacher that for ES boys, being sporty and outgoing is pretty much a guarantee of popularity. OP, is soccer one of the sports your son has tried? If he’s a decent athlete, his size won’t hold him back at all as a soccer player, and it is fun for kids to play at recess

Agree with others that he should focus on activities that he loves and that play to his strengths, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with working on learning to be good at a sport at the same time.

While my son is a coordinated athlete, soccer is too rough for him.

Wtf. Then what sport does he do if soccer is too rough for him?

Swimming, tennis, golf, sailing, and baseball.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Agree with the PP teacher that for ES boys, being sporty and outgoing is pretty much a guarantee of popularity. OP, is soccer one of the sports your son has tried? If he’s a decent athlete, his size won’t hold him back at all as a soccer player, and it is fun for kids to play at recess

Agree with others that he should focus on activities that he loves and that play to his strengths, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with working on learning to be good at a sport at the same time.

While my son is a coordinated athlete, soccer is too rough for him.

Too rough in what sense, OP? Is he afraid of contact or just goes flying when someone runs into him? All recess sports are tougher than their organized versions, but if he learns some soccer skills and how to make accurate passes, he should be able to avoid contact most of the time. The burly kids who love to drive toward the goal regardless of who is in their way will be happy to receive a pass from a teammate. Another idea is flag football, where he could work on his agility and playground ball skills without contact. Again, it’s not that he has to do sports, it’s just that team sports tend to give kids a lot of confidence and a built-in friend group. It’s so great for kids to have friends from different groups and schools, IMO.

I’ll add that in our neighborhood at least, academic ability is not considered a negative at all. Lots of the most popular athletes are also excellent students, though that probably will surprise some of the folks down the line who are forming opinions about kids based on their playground behavior in 3rd grade. Many of my kids’ friends who went to parties most weekends in HS were also top students, which I still find kind of surprising.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Except that "popular" for a child is different than "popular" in an adult's mind.

After years of volunteering in elementary school, I have never observed kids identifying the sporty group as the "popular" group. Amongst themselves, in their minds, they try to be included in a group that they LIKE, according to their interests: sporty, imaginary play, conversational, etc... Often children will try several groups, because they're interested in all of these things. Groups are fluid and change with the years.

There is no hierarchy in their minds that a group is socially better than the other. Your kid might say: "I want to be with the kids that play soccer at recess! It's the best group!" But this comes without a social judgement. It just expresses exactly what they want to do at recess, with the people they like. The social hierarchy concept is an adolescent and adult construct that parents often project on their younger children's groupings.

Middle school is when children experiment with perceived social hierarchies. It's when kids are full of hormones yet still immature and don't understand that ruthless categorizing of their peers is cruel and unnecessary. It's when there's the largest range in physical development and the highest risk for misunderstanding motives and impulses among the groups.

And then usually they grow out of it sometime in high school.

Nope. As an elementary teacher this just isn’t correct. It usually ends up being the sporty boys (who are often older and/or physically more mature) are the popular boys. These boys alongside the witty boy who is the class clown. OP’s
son is perceptive.
If he enjoys swim team then keep him swimming but for school popularity it doesn’t transfer. More boys are playing basketball or soccer at school in pick up games so being able to play those can be helpful at recess.

Sorry, but I have to disagree. Perhaps they're popular in your mind. Or theirs. But most of the students in any given school just don't care that the sporty ones are "supposed" to be popular Also, it's funny that it's just always certain kinds of sports, and not others.

I've got high schoolers. I've been at this for some time. Every time a thread like this comes up on DCUM, and a bunch of posters agree with each other that certain sports=popular, I have to laugh. Perhaps you're all in a self-reinforcing social circle where you feel this is true, but you've got to accept that a lot of other families just don't see it that way. So if you've got kids who are suffering from a perception that they're not breaking into whatever group they wish to break into, you have to encourage them to seek out other friends, and socialize with new people. Don't fall into the flawed thinking that your child's little circle is a reflection of the wider world.


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Since when do "families" determine who is popular in high school. PP: I hate to break this to you, your kids weren't popular. And that's okay.