Many of your articles have a theme: "Being likable is a skill. Some people have it, others can learn it."
I have a 12-year-old daughter. Picture Lisa Simpson. Smart, kind, well-meaning but also anxious and a bit of a know-it-all. To other girls, she can be "a lot."
Anyway, I got her this book that really helped her understand herself and social grace. It's called "How to Win Friends and Influence People for Teen Girls."
The hard part too is that it's really hard to explain to kids that feeling socially awkward/anxious in middle school and high school is a pretty universal experience. A lot of kids around you that you don't even talk to much are feeling the exact same thing. Heck, a lot of the kids in the "cool kids" group are actually feeling the same thing and kind of faking it.
It obviously isn't great advice for the immediate here and now to say "don't worry, in like 6 years time, a lot of this stuff will just go away once your peers are actually physically, emotionally and hormonally closer to being actual adults". But it does have the benefit of probably more often then not being true.
CTY is indeed great! I learned both the primary topic of my career (theoretical computer science and Scheme programming) as well as my primary hobby over the subsequent 30 years (ultimate Frisbee) in the same summer. Although, in what is probably a sign about me, I barely remember any of the other kids I was classmates with.
Ugh. Middle school. As you all know, I am a resident oldie here, so my experience was with junior high back in the day. I wasn't overtly bullied too much, but I was so anxious that I brought a case of alopecia on myself. Losing half your hair during that horrible period didn't help me much. It grew back, if anyone is interested ; ).
Anyway, it was hard. My parents, being seventies style parents, weren't quite as on top of it as yours were, but they did haul me to every after school activity they could find. Having to integrate myself with new people and learn new skills was extremely good for me. I become almost a social extrovert, and can now talk to almost anyone. It was a long road, though, and I don't think it completely took hold in my life until I was in my late twenties.
I'm glad CHH found her way out of the cauldron, and I am feeling hopeful, reading these comments, that todays parents are more aware and proactive in helping their kids when bullying or general social distress rears its head.
"I become almost a social extrovert, and can now talk to almost anyone." I basically have had the same experience and if you told 15 year old me that middle aged me can basically start a conversation with anyone, 15 year old of me might have slapped middle age me across the face and said "are you nuts?"
“All they could do was create a separate environment for me—one with real-life kids my age—where I was cool.”
I wish my parents had done this. They kept me in the same small school - around 20 kids per grade in K-6 - with kids who spread sexual rumors about me when I was TEN, and I literally had no other options of people to be friends with. Not even neighborhood kids, because we lived in the country and our nearest neighbors were cows.
I turn 40 in a couple of months, and I still have to work to not give into “learned helplessness.” The ongoing pattern in my childhood was that my parents wouldn’t let me physically leave any place where I was desperately unhappy, and because I didn’t have the skills to deal with those situations, I’d just isolate myself until the school year (or time at camp) ended and I was allowed to go home.
“It’s hard to keep your kid off social media and I won’t pretend to know how. Anecdotally, I’ve seen parents have success banning phones in the bedroom at night. Even after I was allowed to use the Internet, I could only use the family computer in the kitchen. I’m aware this is just not how the world works anymore, but I have seen parents ban all forms of social media until sixteen and have strict limits on screen time, with quite a bit of whining but not a whole lot of Internet-based trauma.”
My oldest child is eleven, so I can’t speak about high schoolers, but if you don’t give younger kids a phone, it’s not that difficult to keep all computer or tablet use in one public room in the house.
I feel like I was only the main character on bluesky once for like an hour and it was enough to scare me off the site. Not sure if I'm Yglesias-tier main character, but either way, I'd rather not know about it bc it gives me tremendous anxiety.
I've never even looked at Bluesky and never will (I gave up Twitter about ten years ago, so what would be the point?), but this was an insensitive thing to bring to your attention after an article about bullying.... My apologies! I just happened to look at UnHerd and see my browsing worlds briefly collide.
Ooooh I just realized that was written by Kat Dee- she knows me and has more intel into my Bluesky shenanigans than your average person. Now I get why I was mentioned lol.
I gotta say, feel like the story that BlueSky is overrun by extreme Progressives constantly "cancelling" center left or even legit Progressives is way overstated.
Yes, I know the Will Stancil thing happened where a bunch of people tried somehow claiming that he was somehow part of the problem in Minneapolis when he was doing yeoman's work exposing ICE tactics. But honestly, I see way way more commentators actually pushing back on those extreme progressive voices or noting how absurd they're being. Or to bring it back to one of CCH's recent posts, it's really not at all clear who people like Hasan Piker is speaking for and it seems abundantly clear that only a very small fringe number of people agree with his views. Almost all of the people I've seen on BlueSky, including some pretty proudly "lefty" accounts are calling him some version of a clown (and attacking the Times for making him out to be some bigger force on the left then he really is).
I think the point is, it's clear to me how much of attention extremist voices get on social media is downstream from the fact that lots of people are trying to highlight these voices for their own reasons. I think a lot of people need to step back and ask themselves if what they're doing is creating all sorts of mini "Streisand" effects.
Did they never consider changing schools, or talking to your teachers about bad behaviors from the other kids? Whenever you talk about this, it feels like you got off to a rough start at this school and it just kept being that way. Maybe a fresh start would have helped? Or did they feel like it wouldn't help?
Both my kids are autistic, and both were bullied when they were younger. Honestly it is much easier with boys, because the bullying is so overt that everyone—including school officials—has to acknowledge that it is going on.
Here’s what we did to help our son: We moved to another country. For real! I agreed to move to Prague when my husband got an offer to set up a data science team there so that we could give our son a fresh start. It worked! He wound up with a terrific group of friends, and the senior class elected him to be a graduation speaker. As one teacher put it, “Kids just get him.” He’s now in his mid-20s and has a group of wonderful friends.
Our daughter had a tougher time, because the bullying—which came from a bunch of mean girls—was so subtle that I didn’t even know about it until much later. She bought How to Win Friends and Influence People before starting college, and it definitely helped. She now works in IT helping customers solve their tech issues, and everyone praises her for how friendly and helpful she is.
I think what you’re describing is a huge part of why I have such fond memories of college. Think I’ve mentioned before but there are definitely pictures of me in the yearbook sitting completely alone at a lunch table my senior year. So yeah, I feel yah. But this is also why I felt this need to go to a completely new place for college. In retrospect, my worry about “running into” kids I knew from high school probably was unfounded. But needing mentally to have a “reset” I think was quite good for me. Somewhere and something completely new. And of course the other factor why I ended up loving college (and making friends I still am friends with today) is it was a whole lot of geeky kids just like me. Maybe we weren’t geeks about literally every single exact thing. But there was just sort of a “respect” for other people’s geeky tendencies.
Two things that I wonder about as far as how “typical” as to social hierarchies and school experiences that definitely applies to me. I grew up in a town that was reasonably well off. Not super rich but lots of lawyers, small business owners and some doctors. And it was pretty obvious which kids came from richer circumstances when I got to middle and high school. And not surprisingly in retrospect these kids were probably more popular*. Especially in high school these were the kids who didn’t just have cars but had new cars to drive. Also, dressed nicer. I know by definition not everyone on here grew up in the same economic circumstances as me but I’m guessing a lot of you experienced some version of this.
The second that maybe is more unique to me. There was no one else who was the same religion as I was in school. I grew up Baha’i. My school I’d say was like 40% Jewish and like 50% either Catholic or Protestant. I actually don’t remember many issues with my religious affiliation interestingly. But something I realize now but didn’t realize then is a lot of kids knew each other outside of school and had parents who knew each other. To the point I knew multiple kids who would go to Cape Cod in the summer and be at beach houses next to each other (again, grew up in a well off town). I genuinely don’t think it was intentional but this dynamic meant I was sort of naturally excluded from different social groups.
Anyway, another banger post that clearly your male readership can also relate to
* Feel like the movie “Mean Girls” is aging like fine wine. Absolutely an aspect of why Regina George is the queen bee.
If you grew up in the type of environment I am envisioning, a lot of those kids were probably in Sunday School/Catechism/Bat Bar Mitzvah classes together; their families may have been associating with each other a lot. I can see how isolating that would feel.
I feel bad for some of our past selves, but also proud.
1,000% true. Actually can remember kids talking/laughing about that funny thing that happened in CCD class or Jewish summer camps*.
I mean I also wasn't popular for a lot of the "traditional" reasons of course; geeky/gawky kid who is really into history is not exactly a winning formula to be popular or get dates in high school.
Other aspect unique to myself is I was one of the youngest kids in my grade. In fact in a few cases I 13 months younger than some kids in my class. A negligible difference in middle age, but the difference between being 13 years old and 14 years + 1 month is enormous. As a guy, being consistently smaller and skinnier than other kids until I graduated was uh..not great Bob! But was trying to keep my post to stuff that is maybe more universal across genders.
Many of your articles have a theme: "Being likable is a skill. Some people have it, others can learn it."
I have a 12-year-old daughter. Picture Lisa Simpson. Smart, kind, well-meaning but also anxious and a bit of a know-it-all. To other girls, she can be "a lot."
Anyway, I got her this book that really helped her understand herself and social grace. It's called "How to Win Friends and Influence People for Teen Girls."
The original version of this book helped my daughter too!
The hard part too is that it's really hard to explain to kids that feeling socially awkward/anxious in middle school and high school is a pretty universal experience. A lot of kids around you that you don't even talk to much are feeling the exact same thing. Heck, a lot of the kids in the "cool kids" group are actually feeling the same thing and kind of faking it.
It obviously isn't great advice for the immediate here and now to say "don't worry, in like 6 years time, a lot of this stuff will just go away once your peers are actually physically, emotionally and hormonally closer to being actual adults". But it does have the benefit of probably more often then not being true.
CTY is indeed great! I learned both the primary topic of my career (theoretical computer science and Scheme programming) as well as my primary hobby over the subsequent 30 years (ultimate Frisbee) in the same summer. Although, in what is probably a sign about me, I barely remember any of the other kids I was classmates with.
Ugh. Middle school. As you all know, I am a resident oldie here, so my experience was with junior high back in the day. I wasn't overtly bullied too much, but I was so anxious that I brought a case of alopecia on myself. Losing half your hair during that horrible period didn't help me much. It grew back, if anyone is interested ; ).
Anyway, it was hard. My parents, being seventies style parents, weren't quite as on top of it as yours were, but they did haul me to every after school activity they could find. Having to integrate myself with new people and learn new skills was extremely good for me. I become almost a social extrovert, and can now talk to almost anyone. It was a long road, though, and I don't think it completely took hold in my life until I was in my late twenties.
I'm glad CHH found her way out of the cauldron, and I am feeling hopeful, reading these comments, that todays parents are more aware and proactive in helping their kids when bullying or general social distress rears its head.
"I become almost a social extrovert, and can now talk to almost anyone." I basically have had the same experience and if you told 15 year old me that middle aged me can basically start a conversation with anyone, 15 year old of me might have slapped middle age me across the face and said "are you nuts?"
Great article.
“All they could do was create a separate environment for me—one with real-life kids my age—where I was cool.”
I wish my parents had done this. They kept me in the same small school - around 20 kids per grade in K-6 - with kids who spread sexual rumors about me when I was TEN, and I literally had no other options of people to be friends with. Not even neighborhood kids, because we lived in the country and our nearest neighbors were cows.
I turn 40 in a couple of months, and I still have to work to not give into “learned helplessness.” The ongoing pattern in my childhood was that my parents wouldn’t let me physically leave any place where I was desperately unhappy, and because I didn’t have the skills to deal with those situations, I’d just isolate myself until the school year (or time at camp) ended and I was allowed to go home.
“It’s hard to keep your kid off social media and I won’t pretend to know how. Anecdotally, I’ve seen parents have success banning phones in the bedroom at night. Even after I was allowed to use the Internet, I could only use the family computer in the kitchen. I’m aware this is just not how the world works anymore, but I have seen parents ban all forms of social media until sixteen and have strict limits on screen time, with quite a bit of whining but not a whole lot of Internet-based trauma.”
My oldest child is eleven, so I can’t speak about high schoolers, but if you don’t give younger kids a phone, it’s not that difficult to keep all computer or tablet use in one public room in the house.
Apparently you're notably unpopular on Bluesky, CHH:
https://unherd.com/newsroom/cole-allen-wasnt-radicalised-by-bluesky/
Er... congrats?
I feel like I was only the main character on bluesky once for like an hour and it was enough to scare me off the site. Not sure if I'm Yglesias-tier main character, but either way, I'd rather not know about it bc it gives me tremendous anxiety.
I've never even looked at Bluesky and never will (I gave up Twitter about ten years ago, so what would be the point?), but this was an insensitive thing to bring to your attention after an article about bullying.... My apologies! I just happened to look at UnHerd and see my browsing worlds briefly collide.
Ooooh I just realized that was written by Kat Dee- she knows me and has more intel into my Bluesky shenanigans than your average person. Now I get why I was mentioned lol.
I gotta say, feel like the story that BlueSky is overrun by extreme Progressives constantly "cancelling" center left or even legit Progressives is way overstated.
Yes, I know the Will Stancil thing happened where a bunch of people tried somehow claiming that he was somehow part of the problem in Minneapolis when he was doing yeoman's work exposing ICE tactics. But honestly, I see way way more commentators actually pushing back on those extreme progressive voices or noting how absurd they're being. Or to bring it back to one of CCH's recent posts, it's really not at all clear who people like Hasan Piker is speaking for and it seems abundantly clear that only a very small fringe number of people agree with his views. Almost all of the people I've seen on BlueSky, including some pretty proudly "lefty" accounts are calling him some version of a clown (and attacking the Times for making him out to be some bigger force on the left then he really is).
I think the point is, it's clear to me how much of attention extremist voices get on social media is downstream from the fact that lots of people are trying to highlight these voices for their own reasons. I think a lot of people need to step back and ask themselves if what they're doing is creating all sorts of mini "Streisand" effects.
Did they never consider changing schools, or talking to your teachers about bad behaviors from the other kids? Whenever you talk about this, it feels like you got off to a rough start at this school and it just kept being that way. Maybe a fresh start would have helped? Or did they feel like it wouldn't help?
We did change schools eventually, when I was 14
Both my kids are autistic, and both were bullied when they were younger. Honestly it is much easier with boys, because the bullying is so overt that everyone—including school officials—has to acknowledge that it is going on.
Here’s what we did to help our son: We moved to another country. For real! I agreed to move to Prague when my husband got an offer to set up a data science team there so that we could give our son a fresh start. It worked! He wound up with a terrific group of friends, and the senior class elected him to be a graduation speaker. As one teacher put it, “Kids just get him.” He’s now in his mid-20s and has a group of wonderful friends.
Our daughter had a tougher time, because the bullying—which came from a bunch of mean girls—was so subtle that I didn’t even know about it until much later. She bought How to Win Friends and Influence People before starting college, and it definitely helped. She now works in IT helping customers solve their tech issues, and everyone praises her for how friendly and helpful she is.
I think what you’re describing is a huge part of why I have such fond memories of college. Think I’ve mentioned before but there are definitely pictures of me in the yearbook sitting completely alone at a lunch table my senior year. So yeah, I feel yah. But this is also why I felt this need to go to a completely new place for college. In retrospect, my worry about “running into” kids I knew from high school probably was unfounded. But needing mentally to have a “reset” I think was quite good for me. Somewhere and something completely new. And of course the other factor why I ended up loving college (and making friends I still am friends with today) is it was a whole lot of geeky kids just like me. Maybe we weren’t geeks about literally every single exact thing. But there was just sort of a “respect” for other people’s geeky tendencies.
Two things that I wonder about as far as how “typical” as to social hierarchies and school experiences that definitely applies to me. I grew up in a town that was reasonably well off. Not super rich but lots of lawyers, small business owners and some doctors. And it was pretty obvious which kids came from richer circumstances when I got to middle and high school. And not surprisingly in retrospect these kids were probably more popular*. Especially in high school these were the kids who didn’t just have cars but had new cars to drive. Also, dressed nicer. I know by definition not everyone on here grew up in the same economic circumstances as me but I’m guessing a lot of you experienced some version of this.
The second that maybe is more unique to me. There was no one else who was the same religion as I was in school. I grew up Baha’i. My school I’d say was like 40% Jewish and like 50% either Catholic or Protestant. I actually don’t remember many issues with my religious affiliation interestingly. But something I realize now but didn’t realize then is a lot of kids knew each other outside of school and had parents who knew each other. To the point I knew multiple kids who would go to Cape Cod in the summer and be at beach houses next to each other (again, grew up in a well off town). I genuinely don’t think it was intentional but this dynamic meant I was sort of naturally excluded from different social groups.
Anyway, another banger post that clearly your male readership can also relate to
* Feel like the movie “Mean Girls” is aging like fine wine. Absolutely an aspect of why Regina George is the queen bee.
If you grew up in the type of environment I am envisioning, a lot of those kids were probably in Sunday School/Catechism/Bat Bar Mitzvah classes together; their families may have been associating with each other a lot. I can see how isolating that would feel.
I feel bad for some of our past selves, but also proud.
1,000% true. Actually can remember kids talking/laughing about that funny thing that happened in CCD class or Jewish summer camps*.
I mean I also wasn't popular for a lot of the "traditional" reasons of course; geeky/gawky kid who is really into history is not exactly a winning formula to be popular or get dates in high school.
Other aspect unique to myself is I was one of the youngest kids in my grade. In fact in a few cases I 13 months younger than some kids in my class. A negligible difference in middle age, but the difference between being 13 years old and 14 years + 1 month is enormous. As a guy, being consistently smaller and skinnier than other kids until I graduated was uh..not great Bob! But was trying to keep my post to stuff that is maybe more universal across genders.