Popular Kids vs Unpopular Kids

Between grades one through six, which is approximately 6 years of age to eleven years of age, children place priority and importance of popularity, which increases over the elementary school years, this reaches its peak in late middle school and in the early high school years. Studies show that children in grades one through four consider popularity more important than friendship. It was also found that early and middle adolescents generally place more emphasis on conforming and being part of a popular group than younger or older children do. The low-status group, which hope for acceptance into the high-status groups may get some attention, however, rarely do they obtain full acceptance. Erikson, Piaget, Vygotsky, Bandura, and Kohlberg all have theories that address the

Have you ever been an outcast to other kids? The popular kids? Well this very unlucky kid Will, has been there. In this essay about the story Popularity By Adam Bagdasarian, I am going to tell you how he has gotten with the popular group and changed him for the worse. First off he was mean to his previous friends. Next he was trying to be part of the popular group. And finally he became very arrogant.

Media has influenced a lot of today’s trends and ideologies. Adolescents, being on the psychological level of self-identification, bring this deceptive notion of fashion and social classes to school. The problem comes when this trend affects the performance of students and their personal lives. We all remember our days back when the talk was “Who are the jocks, the cheerleaders, the rick kids, the geeks, the losers, etcetera?” Believe it or not, the status quo in schools is always composed of them. These cliques have identities exclusive for each. Students who do not look, act, or dress the same as one group are, more often than not, left out. They could be hurt physically and or psychologically with cruel teasing and rumors. Bullying and

Hanging out with the wrong crowd leads to unintended consequences. It does not matter how smart I am, if the people around me are not smart then I will be judged the same as them. An individual’s own self-importance is overlooked when the whole crowd is involved. That is the lesson that I learned this summer. I obtained the knowledge of the importance of personal responsibility as to who I surround myself with. I did not realize the importance of having privileges’ until I lost them. I learned that good friendships are a privilege, that hanging out with the wrong crowd leads to nothing but trouble, and that their trouble will lead to my privileges being revoked. The lesson that I learned was to be more responsible about my choices and the people that I surround myself with.

Popularity is one of the most commonly studied peer interaction phenomenon. Initially these studies assigned participants to one of the following standard sociometric categories: popular, rejected, neglected, average, and controversial. These studies faded away for two main reasons. The first is that this model neglected to take the school structure into consideration when studying popularity. It ignored that due to the transition between classes starting in middle school students no longer have a small and stable social component that social interactions and sociometric status could be based on. The second is that popularity depends on the adolescents’ perception of popularity rather than how well liked an adolescent is. Popularity heavily depends on the

The problem in my small-town community is that there is nothing to do for not only teens, but all ages. Teens today are often at risk of abusing substances, getting into trouble, and causing violent scenes. They also are still trying to discover who they are, what interests them, who to hang around with, and just discover themselves. An issue people debate about is the actions that teens choose to do. Many teens often hangout in groups at variety locations such as houses, parks, the mall, and other places such as an activity center. Although

Young teens all get a bad rep when it comes to drinking alcohol. Especially college students that are considered “binge drinkers”. When in reality a nation wide survey of students at 168 colleges and university’s found some interesting things about the underage corrupt youth. 93% of all students have never received a lower grade in a class because of drinking too much. 98% of all college students say that they have never gotten into trouble from an administrator from excessive drinking. While the media continually gives the under twenty one community a bad rep, in reality they are continually practicing safe drinking habits and in some cases not drinking at all. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse by the Institute

High school is over and it is your first time away form home, what are you going to do? The typical college student wants to party! Of the people that were surveyed over half believed that the legal drinking age should be lowered. [O’Kane 1] The legal age to drink in the United States is now 21 years old; college freshman, sophomores, and some juniors are not of the legal age to drink. This causes a problem on many campuses; several students are experiencing their first time away from parental care in a setting sinonomus with drinking and clubbing. Some feel pressure from family and friends to receive excellent grades while attending school, sometimes the pressure is too much and going out and

    There are, apparently, many qualifications that you have to reach in order to be popular. If you did not wear the same brand of clothing or did not act like them, you were not popular. In the fifth grade, I was bullied from two main girls that I foolishly wanted to be. Well not a bully ,but to be “popular” like them. One of the two girls was my friend. At least I thought she was. I guess she was using me for when her and her best friend would get into a fight and then she would use me for a friend. She told me i was her friend; she just did not want her best friend to find out she was hanging with me. In other words, she was embarrassed of me. Her best friend was the

In a New York Times article, Laurence Steinberg states, “I favor lowering the drinking age to 19, which would help solve the problem of illegal drinking on campus...while still making it illegal for high school students to drink, thereby limiting the flow of legally (and easily) purchased alcohol into younger adolescents’ social networks” (Steinberg). This may put more stress on college campuses, but it takes away the revolting ideas of the youth, and takes nearly all high school issues out of the equation. In a CNN report, by William Cohan, he tells, “A drinking age of 19 would also mean that easily three-quarters of the students on a college campus would no longer be violating the law by either drinking on campus or in unsupervised homes off-campus”

The abuse of alcohol among teenagers in the United States is universal and destructive. Teenagers believe drinking to be the cool that they must do to fit in with a crowd or become the popular one, when they do not realize all it brings is harm. Underage drinking has been one of the largest unsolved problems in history. Although many ideas have been made and put into practice, like raising the drinking age, harsher punishments, and, at one point, banning it all-together, nothing people do can stop teens from getting their hands on this dangerous beverage.

To most kids in high school, social status and physical appearance are everything. A kid doesn’t necessarily have to be the most attractive person in the school to be considered popular, but sadly it seems to help amongst the more superficially minded teenagers. The jocks are seen as the “top dogs” of the school, due to their athletic physique and luck when it comes to dating. Cheerleaders are considered “the perfect, most beautiful” girls in the entire school, and some of them believe that makes them better than everyone else. I was viewed as a loser when I first moved to Plano, Texas. I had a chili bowl haircut, large glasses, and a thick west Texas accent. I also had a lot of friends who enjoyed playing video games and daydreaming about

Teenagers are America’s greatest natural resource, and they need to be protected from some of the evils that lurk in the world. A subject that needs special attention is the abuse of alcohol by teens. Statistics show that there is a problem currently between teens and alcohol. There are many causes of teenage drinking and effects that prove that drinking is an important issue that needs to be dealt with to preserve American teenagers. Teenage drinking will become worse of a problem if it continues unchecked on its current path to destruction. Alcohol abuse among teenagers in the United States is a plague that is destroying the structure of American society.

I am not staying popular people cannot be friends, but they are friends based on a superficial idea. They care about the clothes, the looks, and what people thought of them, while my sister did not care how she dressed or if what approved of what she was doing. All she cared about was having what she determined to be fun. While most people looked at her as being a nerd, I look at her as being a cool person who was content with her life.

Teenagers face many difficult decisions in their lives and have many people in their lives that influence them. One of the major groups that influence teens is their peer group. “Since teenagers are not yet comfortable with themselves, they have a strong need to be accepted by their peers. And to be accepted, they feel they have to be just like their peers” (Ruth Maxwell, p. 24). From Maxwell we learn that teenagers will use alcohol to be accepted by a group. As age progresses the number of alcohol users progress 73 percent of kids that are from the ages of 16-18 are drinkers. In addition, around 90 percent of high school seniors have experienced alcohol at least once in their life.