Author Q & A

Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children
by Michael Thompson, Ph.D., Catherine O'Neill Grace, Lawrence J. Cohen, Ph.D.

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Q: As the author of Speaking of Boys and coauthor of The New York Times bestseller Raising Cain you've gained a reputation for being a boy expert. Yet your new book, BEST FRIENDS, WORST ENEMIES, isn't just about boys. How did you arrive at the subject of friendship and popularity?

A: Long before Raising Cain came out I worked for many years as a child psychologist in co-ed schools. That's when I first became interested in issues of friendship, popularity and social cruelty among children. I would often see even the most veteran teachers brought to a grinding halt by these issues. They'd have a student in one of their classes who was being victimized and they didn't know how to help. Because they didn't want to draw attention to the victimized child they would often become immobilized. Seeing gifted experienced people paralyzed in such a way was an intriguing mystery to me as a psychologist.

Q: Other books have explored the social lives of children. What sets Best Friends, Worst Enemies apart?

A: Much of the popular literature on friendships and the social lives of children is descriptive rather than explanatory. Best Friends, Worst Enemies is quite the opposite. Readers are going to come away from this book with a better understanding than they've ever had of what's happening to their kids, and also what happened to them when they were their kid's age. If this book makes the reader remember their middle school years, and see those years through a new lens, then we've accomplished what we set out to do. The social scientist Deborah Tannen once wrote, "social science is always at its best when it explains what we know but don't fully understand." My aim as a popular writer in psychology is to do just that-to increase people's understanding of what they already know. Too many of the books that have preceded ours on friendships fail to provide added value when it comes to understanding the issues of children's friendships: how they grow, how they become deeper and broader, and what kind of friendship abilities kids develop as they grow. I think this book tells an interesting developmental story that hasn't really been fully explored.

Q: This past April, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a nationwide study on bullying. The study found that bullying affects nearly one of every three U.S. children in 6th through 10th grades. What do you mean when you say, "the media's focus on the bully and bullying has oversimplified the issue and confused the public?"

A: What do you imagine when you hear that one third of these children have been bullied? Who's doing the bullying? Most of us picture a big, swaggering, loudmouth boy with a gang of followers who doesn't give a damn about what adults think, doesn't do well in school, and gets his kicks from tormenting one or several victims. Such bullies do exist but, for the most part, they are a distinct minority. In fact it's the popular and accepted kids, the so-called "good kids," your child or mine, who are doing the bullying. And why do they do it? Because when they're in groups kids have a diminished sense of personal responsibility. They go along because everybody does it. In this book we don't talk about bullying as a major aspect of children's social lives. Instead we look at friendship, popularity and social cruelty as different and understandable phenomena.

Q: What's the difference between friendship and popularity?

A: A seventh grade boy put it to me this way when I asked him if being popular means having lots of friends. He said, "oh no, if you're very popular you can't be sure of any of your friends. You don't know if they're really your friends or if they're your friends because you're popular." He understood that friendship and popularity are two different things. Friendship is something that happens between two kids that's intimate, reliable, and trustworthy. Popularity is the group's consensus that you have some attractive traits. Not all our kids have those traits and therefore not all our kids can be popular. The two important points this book hammers home are that, with the exception of those kids at the bottom of the social hierarchy ladder, there's no relationship between popularity and later mental health; and that when faced with social cruelty, having a friend or two can save you.

Q: Can it damage a child to be teased? And, if so, how much teasing is traumatizing?

A: If you're in the bottom ten percent socially of the kids in your class, you're seriously at risk for depression and for psychiatric maladjustment in adult life. A fifth grade boy in California described the social situation in his classroom this way: "In this class we have the king and the queen, the court and the commoners." The problem is there are also the untouchables. The greatest and cruelest power popular kids have is to keep their peers from befriending rejected kids at the bottom of the social ladder. In many ways it is a power worse than overt bullying. In the classroom overt bullying gets seen eventually and you get labeled a bully. But it's the power of a popular person to say, "why would you want to be his/her friend?" that isolates a rejected child. Unfortunately it happens all the time.

Q: What signs should parents and in turn, teachers, look out for that signal an unusually cruel or dangerous situation in a classroom, or a rejected child that needs serious intervention?

A: If your child is sad all the time; if the phone never rings with other kids or parents calling; if you hear about social events such as birthday parties and realize your child is being systematically excluded; you know you've got a problem on your hands. Another indicator is if your child is afraid of other kids and you start to see a pattern of avoidance. One clear, but fairly rare, indicator is when your kid actually gets hit or hurt. Much more common, however, is suffering in silence. A lot of children are too ashamed to go up to their parents and say, "I think I'm not popular. The other kids think I'm a total loser." It's hard to present yourself to your parents as a socially unacceptable child when you want them to admire you and think you're good.

Q: What enables some children to experience intense pain and yet grow from social cruelty, while others are crushed by their peers?

A: The love of their parents or being valued in other arenas of life. Having a place in your church group, in your grandparent's heart, or with your cousins can go a long way toward ameliorating the pain of social exclusion. It also helps if you have skills other kids don't have and someplace where you can exercise those skills. Extracurricular activities can be extremely important for kids who are socially excluded.

Q: What do you think will most surprise readers of this book?

A: I think readers will be surprised when their own middle and high school experiences come flooding back and they find themselves saying, "Oh, my God, that's so true. I remember that." We all have vast experience with the social lives of kids in school because we all lived through grade school. And we all have at least some scar tissue from those experiences. If this book succeeds, it will do so because it is evocative for readers.

Q: What surprised you most as you were writing it?

A: I was surprised at the extent to which experiences of social cruelty are universal, and the extent to which those experiences remain vivid in people's memories. I was also surprised at the lack of framework most people have for understanding what's happening to their children now or what happened to them when they were kids. One of the things we're trying to do is to provide readers with a theoretical foundation for understanding the underlying forces of group life that create the social dynamic among kids.

Q: Watching our children suffer socially is hard to bear. What are the biggest mistakes parents make when they try to help their children negotiate rocky social terrain?

A: Most kids will tell you the biggest mistake their parents make is that they try to pick and choose their friends. Too often parents try to discourage bad friendships when they should be supporting good friendships. Or they support good friendships in dorky ways that no kid could ever take seriously. Let's take a situation where a mother tells her daughter "Why don't you be her friend, she's so nice!" How do you think the daughter will react to that? A different option might have been for the mother to try to get to know the prospective playmate's parents and be in community with them. Perhaps she could invite them all over to dinner. What are the two kids going to do if their parents are having dinner together? They're going to go play. That's how you support a friendship. Telling your children not to hang around with this or that kid because they use bad words or because they'll be a bad influence is one of the least effective strategies there is. The "bad" kid becomes forbidden fruit and therefore highly appealing. It also sends a message to your child that you see him or her as weak and as a follower.

The biggest problem I see in schools are moms who want to arrange for their children's popularity in a way they weren't able to arrange for themselves when they were in school. Imagine for a second that I've gotten my hands on your 7th grade class picture and that I'm holding it up to you. You may have been in 7th grade 40 years ago but I bet you can rank order those kids in terms of popularity. At the very least you can give me top third, middle third, and bottom third. And if I asked you more questions you'd be able to tell me who had a fancy home, whose parents had an intact marriage and whose were divorced, which student had a crazy or alcoholic parent, what kinds of vacations they went on, and more. You'd have a bucket of information. Why? Because when you're in middle school you're always evaluating who's got what. That's what middle school is all about. We all went through it. Our children have to go through it. You can't, as a parent, go back and make it different for your child.

Q: You say the ongoing debate about childhood violence, particularly in the wake of events like school shootings, tend to be limited to punishments, media images, and access to guns. What's missing from the discussion?

A: The overt violence we've seen at places like Littleton, Colorado is the tip of the iceberg. The violence we don't see, and which we tend to pay little attention to, is the day-to-day cruelty that kids inflict on one another in school. It is this factor that is often overlooked. One government study connected all the school shootings by finding in them one common theme: teasing and rejection. It might be a boy rejected for a date or a kid being teased by the school's athletes. The recent case in Santee, California involved a boy who had moved from Maryland, where he had been popular in school, and found himself lonely and alone at the bottom of the status ladder constantly being teased by his new schoolmates. He tried to warn people that he was distraught in the way boys do, by making verbal threats, and nobody reported it-not even the adult he told. I believe it was his social suffering that was at the core of his problems. He lost his friends and now he was being relentlessly teased. That's catastrophic for a ninth grade boy.

Q: Are you suggesting this in some way absolves him of responsibility for his actions?

A: Absolutely not! No amount of teasing can absolve him-or any other school shooter-of murder. There are certainly many teased children who don't shoot other kids, perhaps because they have better support at home or a confiding relationship with an adult. But feelings of being socially excluded or marginalized are among the most intense feelings kids have and I can understand why they do what they do.

Q: What can schools do to combat social cruelty?

A: With all due respect to state legislators who think they have the power to stop social cruelty by passing laws, we need to recognize that social cruelty can never be fully eliminated. That's why laws against bullying will only be of limited use. In Best Friends, Worst Enemies we argue that school-wide, statewide, system-wide efforts are the most effective ways to combat the problem. Schools need to take a moral stand against exclusion, scapegoating, bullying, destructive cliques, and other cruelties. Teachers need to be trained to identify social problems and taught how to manage them. Above all, they must be given the support they need for spending the necessary time in dealing with social problems. If teachers think what they're supposed to do is merely prepare kids for tests, they may not feel they can stop and take the time to address social issues. But studies show that 80of social cruelty in schools occurs within the eyesight or earshot of a teacher. The notion that social cruelty happens only on the playground, and that we therefore don't see it, is a cop out.

Q: Why is it so important to understand the power of the group in the lives of children?

A: Because every child feels the power of the group every day-the power to make them feel loved and accepted and secure, particularly when their own individual egos may be shaky (i.e., all middle schoolers). Being with your friends makes you know you have a place in the world. The group has tremendous power to affirm and equally great power to disaffirm. A teacher came up to me at one of my school lectures and told me that when she was in sixth grade all her friends turned on her one day and rejected her. They excommunicated her from the group. She said she went into a downward spiral that continued during her middle and high school years. In college she got involved with drugs and alcohol. It wasn't until late in college that she got her life straightened out. She had always trivialized what happened to her in sixth grade until she heard my talk and asked me if I thought her psychic tailspin came as a result of those experiences. In my mind there's no doubt that it did. How many of us would stay in a job where all our co-workers turned on us? But when it happens to kids in school they have nowhere else to go.

Q: Cliques can splinter classroom groups and cause real suffering among lower-status children and yet you say it's important not to make cliques the villain. Why?

A: If you attack a clique you're the enemy. One of the things that makes a group cohere is a common foe. Try and break up a clique and you're guaranteed to fail 99of the time because doing so simply pushes the kids into each other's arms. Instead we should deal with cliques by trying to give them positive direction; give them something to do; appeal to their sense of leadership and responsibility. I've often seen this strategy transform a disruptive clique into a positive social force.

Q: A recent article in the Wall Street Journal said as long as there are boys there will be bullying-that it's natural and inevitable. Some people, after reading that article, might say your suggestions for reducing social cruelty in schools are utopian at best. What's your reaction?

A: What I see, as I travel from school to school, is that some schools are a great deal safer for lower status kids than others. There is a certain irreducible minimum of social cruelty in childhood because kids are discovering and testing the limits of their social power all the time. But you can create an environment in which the level of social cruelty is kept to that minimum. In schools where nothing is done the level of suffering is often much worse.

Q: What do you want readers to get out of this book?

A: Most adults have a simplistic view of their children's social lives. They either think it's great because their kids are popular and accepted, or they think it's horrible because their children's suffering has panicked them. I want readers to have a more complex view of the world their kids live in. It is possible for children to be popular and accepted and yet wield power in cruel ways; it is also possible for children to be in a lot of pain, not because they're being rejected but rather because they have social ambitions that haven't been realized. I think it's essential to know whether your child is being rejected because rejected children need a lot of support and help. They need social skills training, they may need therapy, and they may need the special protection of school personnel. I'd like to see schools work with natural leaders to make them into more compassionate leaders. And I'd like schools to teach teachers how to run collaborative and cooperative classrooms that will enhance the daily lives of kids at the bottom of the social ladder.

Excerpted from Best Friends, Worst Enemies by Michael Thompson, Ph.D., and Catherine O'Neill Grace with Lawrence Cohen, Ph.D. Copyright © 2001 by Michael Thompson, Ph.D., and Catherine O'Neill Grace, with Lawrence Cohen, Ph.D.. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Michael Thompson, Ph.D., is a psychologist, lecturer, consultant, and former seventh-grade teacher. He conducts workshops on social cruelty, children's friendships, and boys' development across the United States. He is the author of Speaking of Boys and coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Raising Cain, as well as Best Friends, Worst Enemies, with Catherine O'Neill Grace and Lawrence J. Cohen. The father of a daughter and a son, he and his wife live in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Catherine O'Neill Grace, a writer and editor, is a former elementary, middle, and high school teacher, and was the editor of Independent School magazine. She wrote a column for young readers about health and psychology in The Washington Post for fifteen years, and is the author of numerous nonfiction books for children. She and her husband, a headmaster, live on the campus of a boarding school near Boston.

Lawrence J. Cohen, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist specializing in children's play, play therapy, and parenting. He is the coauthor, with Michael Thompson and Catherine O'Neill Grace, of Best Friends, Worst Enemies, a book about children's friendships and peer relations. He is also a columnist for The Boston Globe. Dr. Cohen leads Playful Parenting workshops for parents, teachers, and child-care professionals. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife, Anne, and their daughter, Emma.