cahn | Masterminds and Wingmen / Queen Bees and Wannabees (Wiseman)

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books:nonfic

Masterminds and Wingmen / Queen Bees and Wannabees (Wiseman)

These books describe social roles for boys (Masterminds) and girls (Queen Bees),particularly in the teen years, as well as discussing general parenting for the teen years (including video games, porn, etc). They were recced to me by E's best friend's mom, who has two boys and who said she saw the dynamics in this book taking place as early as kindergarten ...These books scared me, as it sounds rather like raising older kids is even more fraught than I'd thought.

I will heavily caveat these books by saying that they aren't at all (as far as I remember) researched in a methodical way. Wiseman has worked with a bunch of teenagers in groups and individually, and she had a group of boys serve as "editors" for Masterminds. So it's not just her opinions, but it... kind of is just her opinions, in a large way. And especially in Masterminds (she has two boys), she will often refer to her own parenting and use it as an example.

In Masterminds specifically, Wiseman identifies a large portion of the boy dynamics as dependent on what she calls the "Act Like a Man Box," where there are certain specific (American-centric -- this was clearly written for an American audience) qualities that are considered positively masculine, like being good at (particular) sports, downplaying emotion, a quick sense of humor, etc. Because of this, she claims, boys feel forced into acting in a certain way that drive them into particular "roles" in a hierarchical society (where the more you "fit in the box" the higher you are, generally speaking), and things like showing emotional pain are very hard.

I don't know how prevalent this is; as I said, the parent who recced it to me says she saw it happening in their public elementary school. At the private school we're now both at, the dynamics are quite different, I think, because the sorts of parents it attracts generally try very hard not to put their kids in that box (or have kids who don't fit in that box, or both), and because it's so small. (Recently I was in a conversation with three other moms from that school, and I was the only one with a child at the school who didn't like to wear skirts. I also had the only girl of the four of us at that school.)

Queen Bees and Wannabees I confess I skimmed. Okay, so, were all the other girls out there attuned to all the girl-politics that were apparently going on in our middle schools and almost all of which I seem to have entirely missed by hiding out in the library? Like, I was vaguely aware that there were girl-politics going on and that I couldn't hold my own and that occasionally my life would be made miserable (and I will always be grateful to the one popular girl who specifically rejected being mean as a life strategy, even in middle school) but... I didn't know any of this stuff was going on! BFF-breakups-and-getting-back-together, friend group dynamics and hierarchies, interactions with boys and how those interacted with BFF-ness and friend group dynamics... all of it was alien to me. Not quite totally alien, because I've read my share of teen novels, but I think part of me always thought it was made up or exaggerated, that real people didn't actually interact this way! It was very odd because it was basically a sociology book dissecting... my life... and coming to conclusions where I was unaware there was even data, if that makes any sense. (And also when I was a junior and senior I went to the gifted high school where the dynamics were very different.) It's not wrong, either! Any of you who know me and my mom in RL will not be at all surprised that my mom turns out to have been way more clued in to the girls' dynamics than I ever was, and occasionally we have these conversations where something comes up about how X and Y interacted with Z and cut out W and I'll be like "...what??"

Relatedly, no discussion of ASD girls the way there was of ASD boys in Masterminds, probably because the latter was written later.

I skimmed this one because it's just... not going to be relevant for E, for the same reasons it wasn't relevant to me. Like me when I was an adolescent, she doesn't even have the apparatus for detecting all this going on. (I am encouraging her to read books about ordinary kids (not just mice or people with swords, which she prefers) so that at least she has minimal access to this. She is now willing to read Ramona and Superfudge, so: progress!)

Anyway, these were both interesting for me to read, even if as alien sociology rather than explicit parenting guide. I may buy Masterminds for reference when A. gets older (I checked them out from the library). I'll almost certainly buy Queen Bees for my sister, as it's going to be relevant for her daughter.

I am really interested to hear, though, how those of you with older kids have seen these kinds of social dynamics working out (or not), and how they do or don't work out for those of you (like me) with younger kids.

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Okay, so, were all the other girls out there attuned to all the girl-politics that were apparently going on in our middle schools and almost all of which I seem to have entirely missed by hiding out in the library?

I went to a fairly tiny private middle school (5th-8th grade, strictly capped at exactly 48 kids per grade), and . . . don't really remember many "girl politics." I mean, there were definitely cliques, I knew who my friends were and who my friends weren't, but in a school that small you didn't really have a "popular" set that I noticed that had any significant position of, I guess, social power over other students? It was more "those are the femme girls who are into clothes and makeup, I am not into those things so I'll just hang out with the other kids who like dragons, and we'll mutually ignore each other thanks."

High school was bigger, but I still don't recall much interaction with people outside my immediate (mixed gender) nerdy clique.

*nod* I think another thing was that your middle school actually had other kids who liked dragons, which mine didn't. My (second) high school had dynamics much more like what you describe, where there were some girls into clothes and makeup (and sports, maybe?) and some kids (we were also a mixed group) into dragons. A couple of kids went back and forth between the groups, but mostly we ignored each other :)

My elementary school (which went through 6th grade) had one queen bee, I, who had one sidekick, N, in my class of 50. Some people cared. Some didn't. I was at the bottom of the social pecking order and still had three female friends, and a couple of male friends until we hit fourth grade and boys and girls felt they weren't allowed to be friends across the gender divide anymore. It was really clear to me that I and N would never give me the time of day. It was also clear to me that I had no real reason to care, since my friends were still my friends and there was no outright bullying.

My high school (grades 7 through 12) had 250 people per class, and quite a lot of social intermingling among the 1500 students as all the clubs and publications were open to all students. There was much more nuance to the social groups than it sounds like this book covers. And it was a magnet school with a diverse population in a large city, so social groups were more like "those guitar-playing kids who hang out in the second-floor hallway" and "the members of the Asian Christian Society" than jock/nerd or what have you.

My middle school had some bullying, though much less once one of the queen bees took a stand against it. (I seriously am indebted to that girl.) I didn't have friends really in middle school, though some of that may have been my spectrum-y tendencies showing up in ways that made it harder to make friends at that time, coupled with a whole lot of not having that kind of option of friend open to me. (Most of the kids were nice but not particularly interested in the kind of thing I was interested in, and vice versa.)

My second (magnet) high school was ~250 per class, and I think there were a number of social groups as you describe, though I was only aware of a couple of them.

Okay, so, were all the other girls out there attuned to all the girl-politics that were apparently going on in our middle schools and almost all of which I seem to have entirely missed by hiding out in the library?

Probably, but I was hiding in the library too. :P I was vaguely aware that this sort of thing went on in my sister's life, but my sister is also a person who creates drama wherever she goes, so she may be an outlier in the other direction.

In middle school, as I recall, I took a lot of heat for not fitting in with regard to clothing and behavior, but 1) I perceived the teasing as aimed at me specifically by a lot of people acting independently, rather than as part of any politicking, 2) it was boys and girls equally who gave me a hard time, 3) my complete indifference to their opinions and my sense of humor at their jokes meant that a lot of the teasing ended up being good-natured.

I knew even at the time that it *would* not have been good-natured at all if I'd shown the slightest weakness. It would have been outright bullying. But I thought their jokes were hilarious, I throve on banter, and in 99% of cases, I was outright relieved that they perceived that I was not like them, because if they hadn't, I would have had to set them straight. It was actually validating to be mocked for being different.

I know this because when I moved to another state to go to high school, suddenly I was popular with those students, but I was still the same antisocial person and knew that I still didn't have anything in common with anyone else, so I instead spent my time hiding from people who wanted to hang out with me and make friends.

Right before I graduated I remember, as valedictorian, being interviewed by some newspaper or something, who asked me about the existence of cliques and whether I'd felt I had any trouble sitting at the "popular kids" table or anything, and I said, "Look. If I wanted to be friends with these people it would be trivial. I keep getting invited to parties and people want to eat lunch with me. I keep having to avoid them so they won't talk to me about boring things while I could be reading something more interesting."

My sister, who joined the high school 2 years after I did, and who spent our entire childhood relentlessly mocking me for being a nerd, came home from school in the first week and said with shock and horror to my mother, "Mildred's POPULAR!!" She seemed devastated.

So I know my experience was completely unlike anyone else's, but it just goes to confirm your experience that it is possible to miss out on all that, one way or another.

Hmm, interesting! I agree that the indifference and the sense of humor (neither of which I possessed in middle school) went a long way :P

My indifference and sense of humor were definitely at their weakest in middle school, I have to admit!

Helping E to build mental models via fiction (since she seems to be willing?) seems very useful, to me. I'm not on the spectrum and that's still more or less how I did it. :) (I saw it going on, but it almost never affected me directly and I didn't care for it or about it.)

IMO a ton of novels with teens in them are exaggerated, both during our approximate childhood years and now.

I think that there's a fair amount of variation. A close friend with a middle-school daughter and 8yo son says that the son has felt sad since the spring about the ways in which his classmates expect him to roughhouse and hide squishy feelings. She's speculated that his sister has fared better so far not because she's older but because she's more aware of ranges of possibility via ... the novels she reads. He reads, too, but much less widely.

Yeah, it helps that she has teachers who are willing to work with her on inference, etc., and we try to do at least a little of that at home too.

IMO a ton of novels with teens in them are exaggerated, both during our approximate childhood years and now.

*has flashbacks to Sweet Valley High, lol*

Yeah, I think you must be right that there's a lot of variation, even just based on these comments. My own middle school was, I think, fairly smack in the middle, except for that one popular nice girl, who seems to have been somewhat atypical.

I also get the feeling that "novels aimed towards boys" have a much smaller set of possibilities than "novels aimed towards girls," these days, in the social-emotional sense.

Yay for teachers also helping!

I was thinking of Sweet Valley, too, but really also Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys (any vintage), Christopher Pike's thrillers, and so on. Like, Encyclopedia Brown (which is aimed toward boys!) was the last time kids sounded like kids to me in books until Lloyd Alexander and Duane's wizard books showed me that sometimes they sound like adults. My library didn't have much Diana Wynne Jones.

Hmm, sometimes. A lot of what Reason reads "for girls" has very limited emotional reasoning--I don't follow her reading closely at this point, but sometimes I flip through something before we return it. In this age range Ursula Vernon's Danny Dragonbreath books are appealing without being gendered specifically, though for boys it's reassuring that Danny is a boy (it's an ensemble thing). We've given a lot of kids vol. 1 as a birthday gift.

Ha, yes, Christopher Pike! I never read much Nancy Drew. I didn't tend to spend a ton of time on those kinds of books (though I did read them, for sure) so they tend to slip off my radar a bit.

Ahhh, I didn't know about the danny Dragonbreath books! I will definitely check them out for E :D She tends to gravitate towards Minecraft novels and the like, which as far as I can tell don't generally seem very heavy on the emotional reasoning (though I only very vaguely flip through them).

I was slightly too old actually to read Pike, but I remember seeing it in the library.

For E you might also consider Vernon's Harriet Hamsterbone stories, which are not strictly ensemble and feature Harriet as protag, sometimes rather cynically but always with heart, IMO. I mean--kids will read what they want and not necessarily what is suggested to them, but Reason folds in some things (and then for others, while we're still at the library, she shakes her head and I reshelve the book). Anyway, whereas the Danny books have splinters you'd recognize, each Harriet book rewrites something, rather as Vernon's books for adults as T. Kingfisher do (or so I glean from synopses--I own copies of two but haven't read them yet).

Hm! Yes, I will look those up, thank you!! I'm always grateful for suggestions for her, as I haven't stayed very current on kids' books, and there's a limit to how much 80's-and-pre-80's fiction she's willing to put up with (although thankfully some these days).

Ha, I was just about the right age for Pike, although one of the few intelligent things I did was realize at some point that horror was Not Good for Me, and I only skimmed his stuff for the most part. (I could have saved myself a lot of trouble and sleepless nights had I realized the thing about horror earlier, though!)

I've been thinking about other things to suggest. I don't imagine that all of these are new to you and E--first, Zita the Space Girl and Amulet, this one.

Then I asked Reason (with parameters "for someone about your age who might like to learn more about how people interact from books rather than straight from watching people, and she has a little brother"), who said instantly, Harriet Hamsterbone. :P

She seconds Amulet and suggests Dogman and Yo-kai Watch, the latter on grounds that learning how to make friends with yōkai is not so different from learning to make friends with humans. They're not really much like yōkai, I think, but that's the conceit.

This sounds great. Also E tends to like animals better than people, so Harriet Hamsterbone looks perfect :P

All of these are indeed new to me -- as I've said before, it's been a weird thing for me that E doesn't really like reading books all that much. Same with recs -- Oh, in the "hamster" theme, I imagine Reason has read the Humphrey the Hamster books? E enjoyed them, although in retrospect I should have saved them until she was slightly older, as I'm sure she didn't get a lot of the "people" stuff out of the books. (She also doesn't tend to reread books a whole lot, although I should probably suggest a reread to her anyway.)

I would like to report MASSIVE SUCCESS with one out of one, that being Harriet Hamsterbone :)

Me: I have this book for you that a friend with a kid your age recommended, and it looks pretty great. I think you'd like it.
E: Meh.
Me: Well, I'm going to pack it on our trip.
E: OK, I might not read it.

[a couple of days later]
E: Let's read a book before bed.
Me: How about Harriet Hamsterbone?
E: I guess.
Me: *reads one chapter*
E: ...I am going to steal this and read the entire thing tomorrow.
Me: But I thought we were going to read it together?
E: Not anymore!

hee. Glad E likes it!

If y'all have books to suggest back, that'd also be of interest!

I am like you in this--I vaguely knew there were various social intrigues and fashions and stuff going on, but they flew over my head. I knew a lot about the names of the stars and the characters of Tolkien books though. : ) But I also had two fairly close friends, so it's not like I was lonely.

:)

I had a couple of friends, though not super close (partially because my parents discouraged those particular friendships -- one of which, in retrospect, they were probably right to do, and the other of which they definitely weren't), so I was lonely a lot until I went to second high school, where I had friends and which was wonderful :)

I was lonely a lot

A large part of my ability to be indifferent to my peers' opinions even in emotionally fraught middle school was precisely that I don't experience loneliness, don't need friends, don't particularly seek friends out. Friendships happen or they don't, and I don't miss friends or make an effort to keep in touch when we part ways. When I do find myself "missing" someone, I'm really missing an activity to which they contributed, not the person per se, if that makes any sense.

I'm not sure I've ever encountered anyone with this trait, in rl or in books, unless they also had some psychological state that's got an entry in the DSM.

Actually my husband is a little like that, although I think he would say he misses me when I'm not around. I'm not sure he would make the distinction between "activity" and "person" in my case? But I've observed that with friendships, and even with his family, although he is mainly an introvert he can be quite friendly to people he likes, and enjoys hanging out with those people -- but he won't make an effort to keep in touch and won't really miss them. (For example, I am always the one who coordinates calling his family because it just won't occur to him that he hasn't talked to his sister -- whom he really likes! -- IN A YEAR.) I have told him that it's a good thing we got married or else we'd probably never talk (we were friends before we started dating), and I would have missed him.

He's not on the spectrum, although he has a BUNCH of engineers on both sides of his family (and is an engineer himself) :)

(He's not like you in many other ways :P :) )

Edited 2019-09-13 20:38 (UTC)

Interesting, I will add that data point to my data set!

He's not like you in many other ways :P :)

Well, yeah, I hear he doesn't even think Frederick the Great is all that. :P :)

It's not that he doesn't think Fredrick the Great is all that (I confess I haven't been sharing with him all the things I have learned in the past month, so he's mostly neutral on the subject), but he thinks it would be hilarious if I (or him masquerading as me) said it!

Oh, I know, I was just making a callback joke because I couldn't resist! I got what he was doing and why it would have been hilarious (and it would have!).

haha, okay good! I thought that was what was going on but wasn't totally sure :)

Yeah, I could have made that clear. I assumed he has no personal opinion on Fritz (most people don't, after all ;) ).

precisely that I don't experience loneliness, don't need friends, don't particularly seek friends out. Friendships happen or they don't, and I don't miss friends or make an effort to keep in touch when we part ways

I'm quite like this, too. I attributed it to being an only child with an active imagination, who stayed home with family members instead of going to day care when I was little -- so that by the time I got to school and my first group of peers that I was around consistently, I already knew I didn't NEED friends to be happy and fulfilled.

I did have friends -- people who latched on to me, or people who were interesting -- but even the ones I liked very much I didn't really miss, as such, when we moved continents at the age of 11. Even as an adult, I'm very bad at keeping in touch with the friends I have (unless they live on LJ and are beamed into my laptop in one convenient feed). And when I miss people, I miss, probably more than anything, the person I am when hanging around them -- if that makes sense? I have to, like, remind myself to call my parents/grandparents -- whom I love very much and am very close to! -- because I know they expect it and would be hurt if I didn't. But I have no internal driver to reach out to them, even though I enjoy spending time with my family.

But, yeah, I was also unbothered by whether I had friends / an in-group at all levels of schooling, and, even though I had school people I was friendly with, and two close friends outside of school, spent a lot of high school hanging out with my teachers, because they were more INTERESTING. I do miss the teachers, but mostly in the sense that I would like to see them again and show them the person I grew up into, have them meet my kids, that kind of thing.

(Also an engineer from a line of engineers, incidentally :P)

Have you ever experienced loneliness, if I may ask? Because I read about it, but I don't know what it feels like, and this seems to be a rarity.

ETA: Or grief, because that's another one? It sounds callous, but I feel like if my spouse died, I'd be over it within a month, and that that's not a function of the quality of our relationship, but of the fact that me getting married in the first place was so improbable that it only ended up happening for very non-traditional reasons.

Edited 2019-09-15 23:31 (UTC)

Have you ever experienced loneliness,

I really don't think so! Like, I have experienced being alone in a place and thinking "I wish so-and-so were here with me" -- but because I know they would also enjoy this thing I'm doing / I would enjoy watching them enjoy it. But I don't think I've ever felt lonely in the sense of needing someone to feel... IDK, whatever it is that alleviates loneliness for people who feel loneliness?

Like, I spent a month on my own in a foreign country when I was 18, before there was internet or cell phones, so that my only contact with family was a weekly phone call and letters, and I didn't feel the least bit lonely -- actually I felt great, both being on my own and getting to know random new people.

(Although I should say, when my kids were younger and I was traveling without them, I would see families with children and feel a stab of missing my family. It was different enough from any other kind of missing people that I have experienced that it was quite memorable. There might be something hormonal/phermonal to the mother/young child bond, though.)

Or grief, because that's another one? It sounds callous, but I feel like if my spouse died, I'd be over it within a month,

Similar, I think. I've lost one very important person in my life -- my great-grandmother who was a huge part of my childhood (the one who stayed home with me when I was little), and I've definitely been AFFECTED by her death, but I'm not sure I would describe my feelings as grief. I would have liked very much for her to have lived long enough to meet my kids and watch her interact with them, and my memories of her are important things for me to preserve and pass on; she was in my mind for many years -- I kept intermittently having dreams in which she was alive -- but I don't know that I felt grief as it seems to be described in books?

I feel the same way about getting married, btw. It was never an end goal, and I never really wanted a romantic relationship and tended to feel "crowded" by the people who wanted one with me. But my husband turned out to be one of like two people whose presence doesn't eventually get "too much" for me -- one of the very few people whose company I prefer to solitude over the long term, basically. (And part of that is that he understands me well enough to know that I need that solitude and isn't offended by that.)

If I lost him, I would definitely miss our years of inside jokes and the way he understands me better than anyone else. Beyond that, I don't know, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I would be OK, or at least more OK than one should be under the circumstances.

actually I felt great, both being on my own and getting to know random new people.

See, I was relating right up until the ~~pulling teeth~~ getting to know random new people. :D

There might be something hormonal/phermonal to the mother/young child bond, though.

According to all neuroscientific findings I'm aware of, there is (oxytocin playing a major role). I have such child-antipathy I will never find out, though. ;)

I have a sneaking suspicion that I would be OK, or at least more OK than one should be under the circumstances.

It sounds like you would be! I have to say I like my wife for normal human reasons, inside jokes and shared interests and being comfortable talking to each other and all that, but the only reason we're living together is because she has disabling health problems and that makes it easier for me to help (and we're legally married because that was the only way to legally live together).

Now, pretty much everyone else on the planet can go deal with their own problems somewhere else, far away from me, so there's that, but the neurochemistry my relationship with her taps into is heavily weighted toward the same problem-solving mechanisms that, say, grad school tapped into. I get some of the pair-bonding experience with her, I won't say I don't, but it seems to be a fraction of what you find in a normal relationship.

Huh, that's interesting! I didn't know that about your marriage.

(Also see my response to hamsterwoman below, where I speculate about what makes D's response atypical.)

I didn't know that about your marriage.

It's not something I say so bluntly very often, since it's very easy for that to come across wrong. I think you know me well enough by now that it won't. I consider it a healthy relationship, especially since most of the "help" I provide is emotional support, and the fact that we have a close and affectionate relationship is why it helps her, and I do get emotional support in return. So it's not like I'm her caretaker and we scammed the immigration system by getting married. At the same time, it's also really clear to me that if it were just the relationship parts without the problem-solving, we'd be former internet acquaintances from a long-ago fandom, because that's how I swing.

Also see my response to hamsterwoman below, where I speculate about what makes D's response atypical.

I saw! I thought it was very interesting, especially the time part. It seems like he gets some of the same emotional outcomes that I do, but from a radically different mental place.

*nods* Yep.

What fandom? :)

One that we never admit to. Non-historical RPS, that's all I'll say. :P

I wonder about grief with D. He's been lucky and has not had anything that would cause a lot of grief in his life, so... I guess we'll see. There are a couple of atypical things going on that make me feel that grief would not be as big a deal for him:

a) he has a very... atypical concept of time; he is capable of getting places on time or abiding by a schedule if you stress to him that he needs to, but things like schedules are kind of alien to him. Similarly, as I said before, it just won't occur to him that he hasn't talked to his parents in a month or his sibling/friend in a year because I think in some fundamental way these units of time are sort of arbitrary to him, which is part of why I think he doesn't experience loneliness in a typical way -- how can you be lonely when as far as you're concerned it hasn't really been that long since you've seen/talked to all the people in your life?

b) His memory for people is just really bad. His memory for facts and numbers and places (and pretty much anything that isn't people) is really excellent, much better than most people's, and he remembers things that happened when he was a kid, but he won't remember specifics about people or things he did with them (e.g., there is at least one trip we took before we got married that he vaguely remembered as having done with a previous girlfriend until I pointed out I had photographic evidence). I can totally imagine that if I died he'd be over it more quickly than typical, in part because he'd mostly forget the things we'd done together. (He wouldn't forget the inside jokes! He actually has a very good memory for those, lol, and he would probably miss those.)

c) He is happy to have romantic/sexual relationships (and can be quite romantic, rather more so than I am!) and friendships, but I don't think it would occur to him to seek them out rather than have them happen organically (as happened with our relationship), whereas he actively seeks out alone time :P I think if our kids were grown and I was out of the picture he would probably just go camping/hiking All The Time and be totally happy.

I don't know how prevalent this is; as I said, the parent who recced it to me says she saw it happening in their public elementary school.

We definitely saw the Queen Bee stuff start at elementary school, super early.

Daughter (L, now 18), had the toughest time in elementary school actually -- not, I hasten to say, all that tough, but in K or first grade (neither of us can remember which, but I think it was K) she was closest friends with a girl who was friends with another girl who would orchestrate all this "love triangle" stuff you read about -- "you can't be my friend if you're her friend" -- and there was a lot of angst and on-again/off-again friendship with the tug-of-war girl. There was drama, and the teacher got involved, and the girl caught in the middle would write apologetic notes to L for excluding her, and then it would all start again. This kept going on for most of the year, IIRC, even though we kept telling L to just... be friends with people who wouldn't treat her like that -- and she did have other friends who were OK, but kept getting drawn back into the love triangle drama. Then the next year L and the tug-of-war girl were in different classes, and everything was fine.

There was a second bout of drama at the end of middle school, but it was a bit different. L had the same group of close friends from third grade on -- they called themselves the Magnet Gang. They started middle school together, but at the end of the first year of middle school (sixth grade) the Magnet Gang girl whom L was closest to, who was sort of the linchpin of the whole thing, ended up having to transfer schools. I don't know if it was related to that or would've happened regardless, but the other founding member of the Magnet Gang turned really mean -- L wouldn't tell me what her specific problem was, but she said that this girl for example made fun of another girl in their friends group who had not started going through puberty yet and was very sensitive about her height and lack of chest -- and basically drove away everyone else. L found a new group to be friends with, but continues to seriously resent the mean girl to this day.

Then in high school she had a semester or so of floundering to find the right friends group. Only one of her middle school friends ended up at the same high school, and they did stay close, but didn't have any classes or lunch together, so they couldn't actually hang out AT school. At first L made friends with a group of girls who seemed prone to drama, but after the first semester she met some muh more interesting folks, who liked reading and were interested in history (including the one I occasionally talk about in my LJ as Awesome Friend Ali). AFA was a theater person, as was L's middle school friend, and through them she ended up becoming part of the "theater kids" crowd, despite not being ever involved with theater herself. Ironically, the "drama kids" were pretty drama free, at least when it came to friendship -- there was some relationship drama.

With my son (O, now 16), there was very little drama in elementary school for him speicfically -- starting on the first day of K, while we were waiting for teachers to show up, all the boys coalesced into a blob and commenced merrily chasing each other. But there was a Queen Bee girl in their kindergarten class who would make disparaging remarks about how other girls dressed (to the enormous embarrassment of her parents, who were not like that at all). Elementary school was relatively drama free, although O drifted apart from one of his best friends from K, who grew up into an annoying kid, and there was stupid stuff like the boys playing rough and accidentally breaking each other's things or hurting each other -- but it just seemed like dumb stuff, not bullying.

In the first year of middle school there WAS some drama for him -- one of his closest friends from elementary school suddenly gave him the cold shoulder, and although O didn't say much about this -- he is not one to talk about emotions -- he was definitely hurt. But he quickly found a different group of friends, some kids not from his elementary school, and some elementary school friends that he just got closer with -- and most of them are still his friends now that he's in high school.

High school has been entirely free of friend drama so far, and O's gang (orchestra kids, mostly) interact in an interesting mix of sarcasm and support. We were traveling for O's birthday, as usual, and he woke up to elaborate Instagram wall posts, with, like slide shows and edits and videos full of inside jokes. I don't know about showing emotional pain -- O is private about that, so it's not like I can tell if he's suppressing it in front of his friends vs his normal baseline -- but I've been pleasantly surprised by how non-stereotypical-masculine O's group of friends is. And he has several close friends who are girls who share his interests (comic books, fencing).

These were all public schools btw -- neighborhood elementary school with ~450 kids, the middle school it feeds into with ~1200 kids from a bunch of different elementary schools, and the city's academic magnet high school (~2800 people). And it may be relevant that the demographics are probably a bit different than a lot of other American schools, too: the elementary school they went to is 80+% Asian (mostly Chinese-American), with a lot of first and second generation immigrants; the middle school and magnet high school are also ~65% Asian.

Wow, that is super super interesting, thank you! So interesting (and kind of frightening) that it began so early -- but also heartening that it doesn't always seem to be the case, particularly in high school.

I do think the demographics must make a huge difference. And with an Asian group, in particular, academics (and meaningful extracurriculars) are going to be more highly stressed and more important. (One of the assertions Wiseman makes is that academics aren't generally considered as important as social and sports prowess, and that this is a culture thing.)

So interesting (and kind of frightening) that it began so early -

Yeah, we were pretty shocked -- I knew to expect that sort of thing, but I did not expect it from FIVE YEAR OLDS!

I do feel like that maybe having those early experiences, and having a student body that had more kids who were encouraged to show interests in academics/meaningful extracurriculars, as you say, meant that there was both an impetus and a way to opt out of later drama. I don't know about the boys, but L reports that there is a clique of the more stereotypical high school girls -- but they're a minority and quite easy to avoid, and are not any sort of "force".

And with an Asian group, in particular, academics (and meaningful extracurriculars) are going to be more highly stressed and more important.

For sure. And I know there's a negative side to this, too: my coworkers who live in Silicon Valley talk about how intense the academic pressure is in those schools, how students feel depressed and occasionally suicidal because their 4.0s and 1400 SAT scores are not good enough for the expectations they are setting up for themselves (regardless of if the parents are pressuring them to excel academically). But my own experiences (I went to the same middle school and high school as my kids did) and those of my kids have been entirely positive -- a focus on academics without going overboard.

O's friends group is almost entirely Asian. He is the kind of kid where I would worry about peer pressure -- if his friends jumped off a roof, he'd definitely be tempted! -- but his friends instead are peer pressuring him into things like taking extra AP science classes and keeping up with violin instead of quitting. It's awesome! XD

*nods* Yeah, for the wrong kid I could see it being a not very good environment.

Lol, O sounds like my little guy A. A is only 4, so we'll see what happens later on, but at least right now he seems like the kind of kid where I'll worry about peer pressure. Unless he gets into a group like O's! :D

My daughter is in fourth grade and sadly I am already starting to see little bits of these 'mean girl' dynamics -- one of her friends is trying out the queen bee role and seeing which girls are intimidated enough by her to pick on other girls at her behest. I should probably reread Queen Bees (I reread long before I had children, when I was working with teens) and see what I can glean from it to help her navigate.

Eek! That sounds so early. I feel like these mean girl dynamics didn't really take in my own school until sixth grade, at least.

My daughter is also in fourth grade, but she goes to a really tiny school where I think there are just not enough people to have these dynamics. Although I feel like I am starting to see some of these dynamics in the church group of girls she does things with (though some of the girls are 1-2 years older).

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Masterminds and Wingmen / Queen Bees and Wannabees (Wiseman)

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