“We never got in a lot of fights. Only a little bit.”
Allyson (aka Ally) remembers her Watauga kindergarten classroom as mostly peaceful. But her mom Vicki Nguyen summons a few dinner-table conversations that 6-year-old Ally (now a first-grader) seems to have conveniently forgotten. “There was a lot of drama!” Nguyen asserts. “She would tell me what was going on: Somebody isolated her, because they wanted to play with somebody else. But by the next couple of days, they’re all friends again.”
They’re not lunching with lobbyists or chatting up the opposition to ram through a tricky piece of legislation, but kindergarteners have their own brand of political maneuvering. The strategies are similar: coercion, compromise, even bribery. But instead of kissing up to voters and consolidating power, kids are trying to find their place in the classroom hierarchy — or just find a friend.
“The very first place where we’re introduced to peers being important is at that 3–6-year-old age,” says Sarah Feuerbacher, Ph.D., LCSW-S, clinic director at the Southern Methodist University Center for Family Counseling in Plano. Prior to preschool, kids are still figuring out that they exist and that other people exist too.
But the process of social awakening begins earlier than we think. “The seeds of being social could start as infants from action between the primary caregiver and the child,” says Diyu Chen, Ed.D., M.D., senior lecturer in the Department of Teacher Education and Administration in the College of Education at the University of North Texas. She explains that children start reading and responding to facial cues — like a parent’s smile — while in the crib; by age 2, they may be aware of themselves as a sentient entity. By 3 years old, that awareness has expanded to include others.
“They already realize they like particular kinds of people,” Chen says. “They prefer to be together with certain types of children or certain behaviors of children.” At this point, kids may begin even subconsciously using strategies to form social connections with those they like.
“The theory is that if there’s a strong attachment with the primary caregiver, that allows us to begin trusting other people,” Feuerbacher says. “The key for strengthening a very young child’s self-confidence and identity is strength with a caregiver.”
Self-confidence lends a substantial boost in the social climb. So does the quality known as “theory of mind,” or the “ability to understand that other people have beliefs, intentions, goals and desires that are different from their own,” Chen summarizes.
Children with advanced development of theory of mind tend to be socially successful at younger ages because they already understand their peers and what makes them tick, while children still developing theory of mind may lack empathy and relational awareness.
The mix of personality, social awareness, verbal and motor development, and theory of mind may be potent enough to catapult a kindergartener to social greatness — or not.
It’s a long way to the top
“You’re like a rockstar!” That’s what popularity means, according to Ally. She would know — Nguyen says that despite the drama, her daughter had no trouble finding friends in kindergarten. She attributes Ally’s social success to her fearlessness and bubbly personality. “She was a social diva,” Nguyen says, “and still is.”
Nguyen’s 9-year-old son Andrew, on the other hand, shied away from his kindergarten classmates. “He wouldn’t participate in any of the activities,” she recalls. “He was more intimidated and more fearful.” He had trouble connecting with the other kids, and Nguyen was grateful he had one good buddy to share the playground with.
The kindergarten shakedown tends to deposit kids like Ally, the fearless leaders, at the top of the pecking order and those like her brother near the fringes. According to Feuerbacher, to be socially acceptable is to be “self-assured, confident, outgoing, helpful and friendly.” These children tend to be more developed verbally and emotionally. They can read their peers and see other kids’ needs — and they’re not afraid to step up and meet those needs in pro-social ways.
Ally claims she’s a diva/rockstar because she assists people. “I help my friends clean up and carry a lot of stuff in their hands,” she explains, noting that her best friend Cameron also “helps people” and “always hugs me when I get to play outside with her.”
That’s not to say the popular kids are always the kindest kids. Some children rise to prominence because they’ve got a knack for pushing the right buttons. They’re socially aggressive, ruthless even, and they have a band of faithful (and fearful) followers to back them up.
Past studies have demonstrated that bullies are way behind in the empathy department, but these queen bees are different. Chen explains that they have a leg up on their peers when it comes to theory of mind and can more easily manipulate others to get what they want. They use emotional and relational aggression rather than physical force, employing strategies like exclusion to gain social resources (which could be hide-and-seek allies, Goldfish or attention from the teacher).
For example, Chen says a bully ringleader might publicly invite everyone in the class to a party — except your child. “He’s asserting his authority,” she explains. Kids in the class will go along with it to avoid the embarrassment of being singled out.
In a move straight out of Washington, a child might also threaten to withhold friendship or a coveted toy unless demands are met (“I won’t be your friend if you play with her today”). The threat (while not likely to be acted upon) places the victim in a tight spot, caught between hurting a friend’s feelings and losing a powerful ally.
The kids who receive these threats may not have the self-confidence to ignore them. Frisco mom Shannon Williams says her now first-grade daughter Malia wound up playing the doormat because she was too eager to find favor.
“We would notice that in order to feel liked by some of the other children, she would allow them to sometimes not treat her the way they should have been,” Williams reveals. “Because she wanted to be liked and loved, she would do whatever they asked her to do. We had to coach her through that and say, ‘While it’s important that you share with your friends, you shouldn’t let them treat you like that.’”
The threats also work because kids have trouble seeing past the lure of material things, which become an easy bargaining chip for any child to offer up in exchange for companionship.
“Young children will trade or give away anything for friendship,” says Shondra Quarles, a kindergarten and first-grade teacher in Dallas ISD. “Yet sometimes later, after they think about it, they want it back. I have had children ask me to get it back for them, so they can give it to a different friend. We have to teach them why it is important to keep personal items and money.”
In some classrooms, the focus on possessions rather than people can be stifling — and it starts with the parents.
“It was evident in the way that the kids dressed and the way the moms dressed that that was important and it spoke to how they were going to treat you,” Williams says of the school where her older daughter Mya attended kindergarten. “People would form friendships based on looks, and the girls were way too concerned about what they had on, even in kindergarten.”
Mya, too, started worrying about what she wore, and both Mom and daughter felt squelched by the environment. The family moved schools, seeking a better climate for forming friendships. “One of her biggest concerns about moving was the uniform,” Williams admits. “But within two weeks it wasn’t a big deal anymore.”
Williams adds that in Mya’s and Malia’s classes, the clique leaders and political masterminds were generally girls. Fort Worth mom Danielle Collins noticed the same trend in her son Wyatt’s class (not their real names) when she volunteered at his school last year. “The girls were a little more verbal, a little more quick to voice their opinion,” she observes. “The cattiness was there already.”
Even as a boy, Wyatt wasn’t immune to their attacks. “He came home and said, ‘So-and-so told me if I don’t bring her chocolate tomorrow, she’s not going to be my friend,’” Collins remembers. “So I had to explain early on what manipulation was.”
To no one’s surprise, girls tend to be “socially-emotionally aggressive” in middle and high school, Chen says. But Collins was surprised to see “mean-girl” behavior in her son’s class. “My baby’s too young to be keeping up with the Kardashians!” she laments.
Feuerbacher contends that social manipulation among girls starts at early ages because girls are relationship-focused while boys are activity-focused. Boys use their hands (or teeth) as weapons; girls use friendship.
“If someone takes something of theirs, [boys] will push them away,” says Gayle McCoy, kindergarten teacher at The Lamplighter School in Dallas. “They don’t do the conversations that girls do.”
Unfortunately for the aggressors (but fortunately for society at large), physical aggression doesn’t succeed as well as social manipulation as a political tool. The class biter may gain the attention he craves, but he is typically not liked. “If a kid is a hitter or doesn’t know how to solve problems, the kids reject that,” observes Quarles. Once the mojo wanes, the physical aggression does too: Most kids grow out of the punching phase as they learn to internalize their problems and shore up preteen angst instead.
That’s when hormones explode and social politics reach new levels of nasty, but the foundation is laid in preschool and kindergarten — or earlier, at home. Both physical and relational aggression can be symptoms of a lack of attachment, Feuerbacher explains. “If children are struggling with their peers or they’re lacking empathy, that’s a red flag that there was a breach in trust with a significant caregiver.”
Children who turn to aggression tend to lack the confidence they need to climb the social ladder in more productive ways, a confidence they gain from positive relationships with their caregivers. Instead, says Chen, they turn to their ill-gotten social achievements for satisfaction and fulfillment. They enjoy being mean girls.
Such kids (and their parents) may need intervention.
“Without intervention, some children do not grow out of it,” Chen warns. The intervention need not be a formal affair (though play therapy can be effective, says Feuerbacher), but rather an intentional probing into the child’s motivations and needs — and how the parents can better meet those needs.
“Different children engage in aggressive behaviors for different reasons,” Chen says. And understanding those reasons is the first step towards cutting the casualties along the campaign trail.
The kids are all right
Thankfully, most kindergarteners who gain power through manipulation and aggression eventually soften. “As we grow older, as we are more mature and more capable, the general trend is we grow out of the aggressive behavior, particularly the physical aggressive behavior,” Chen explains.
Teachers and caregivers play a big role in shepherding kids to pro-social behavior when they see political machinations getting out of hand. When conflict rears its head in Quarles’ classroom, she leads the combatants to a “peace table” to talk it out, guiding them to ask each other questions and recognize the validity of each other’s feelings.
McCoy’s method is similar: she invites kids to practice using their words (nice ones, that is) to respond to animosity so they can manage future issues without her help. “We’re hoping to make the children a little bit more independent,” she offers.
At home, Williams does her best to give her girls productive tools to handle the social turmoil, both now and in the future. “When they say that something happened at school that upset them, I try to understand exactly what the circumstances were and how it made them feel,” she shares. “Then I help them come up with a different way to approach the situation. I try to make it their idea rather than mine, because I think they have to learn how to deal with those things themselves and not depend on me to solve those problems.”
In other words, she’s preparing them for the politics of adulthood, where personality and possessions still matter, but the stakes are higher than a stack of LEGOs. Kids who get too caught up in the politics of kindergarten may carry that social baggage with them into middle school, high school and the real world, approaching relationships with timidity or aggression rather than courage and cooperation.
Other kids use their kindergarten experience as a launching pad for future relationships. “That first impression when you’re first aware of peers and their influence in your life is going to be the strongest for you,” Feuerbacher says. “If you do get a positive experience that builds confidence, it’s going to be hard to break that down.”
