When he was in first grade, my son Jake confessed that he and a friend were interested in a couple of girl classmates and were trying to get their attention.
"We act cool," he said.
"How do you do that?" I asked.
"Well, we walk by them when they're playing ponies, and say swears and spit."
"You spit at them?" I asked, alarmed.
"No, Mom! We spit on the ground."
"Does it work?" I asked.
"No," he said. A long pause. "How do you make girls like you, anyway?"
Not swearing and spitting in the immediate vicinity would be a good start, I thought, but clearly Jake was close to figuring this out on his own. Beyond that, I wasn't sure. Would the sort of canned advice dished out to youth in dime store paperbacks--ask him/her about his/her hobbies; be friendly; smile; and so on--be helpful on the first-grade social circuit? Probably not. It seemed unlikely that Jake and his spitting-and-swearing pals would go so far as to develop an interest in My Little Pony accessories, which at the time were the ruling obsession of the girls.
Anyway, Jake is now in fourth grade and, as far as I know, no longer spits near potential romantic interests. In truth, I am not sure there are any romantic interests. To find out, I would have to hack into his hand-held data-crunching mini computer--which is the rage among all the boys these days--and intercept the messages from his friends that, Jake informs me, mainly concern "who loves who."
Even if I knew the password, however, I like to think I would respect his computer privacy more than my family respected the tiny gold lock on my seventh-grade diary. And besides, I've come to accept the fact that the social world of elementary school is something no parent can or should fully penetrate--no matter how well-meaning he or she may be. From the first day of kindergarten, our kids must find their own way in this parallel universe of drinking fountains, cafeteria lines, soccer games, tattletales, bullies, cliques, clubs, gangs and whistle-blowing playground monitors. However much we may wish to save them from the fate of the outcast, we simply don't know the formula. Most of our own hard-won experience is probably outdated or simply not transmissible. When I was in fifth grade, the secret to popularity, for example, was to wear three or four petticoats and to know the jingle of the local rock radio station, something of little use to Jake.
In the preschool years, things are different. The parental influence over a child's social life is similar to the role of a prime-mover-type deity in the world: You make it happen. A parent must dial a phone number and arrange a play date and, more often than not, sustain one when host and guest veer off on their divergent courses. The correct parental role at this point is to mediate by frantically grabbing something from the game cupboard and saying, "Candy Land, anyone?"
For a parent of a fourth-grader, though, playing social chair requires far more subtlety. At age 10, Jake and his friends are in full tribal mode, with their own secret rituals and initiation rites: games of truth or dare, discussion of body parts, exchange of video game codes and fascinating though usually erroneous facts. At this point the acceptable parental role is that of a vague, helpful, hovering presence offering food, drinks or rides to the mall, and then receding to the background.
I have found that this tactic allows access to the hidden culture of kids. Just as the presence of the experimenter inescapably taints an experiment in quantum physics, so the presence of a meddling adult inevitably distorts the interactions of children. While chauffeuring Cub Scouts around last year, for example, I discovered that if I minimized my presence and refrained from commenting on the swearing, I could simply observe, in the manner of an anthropologist visiting a remote tribe, and thus gain valuable insight into my son's life. Indeed, I learned a great deal. It seemed that every boy in the car, including mine, had been personally involved with a major hurricane or tornado. (I held my tongue when Jake described the "small tornado in the water" he had supposedly witnessed in the Gulf of Mexico when he was four.) There had also been a wide variety of paranormal experiences, and many of the adult males in the boys' families were 6 foot 8 inches tall or taller (and some either played in the NBA or "almost" did).
But I also learned that beyond the sniggering, the boasting, the raucous laughter, the candy abuse and the endless discussion of stats, Jake and his friends genuinely care about one another. When one of them did not make Little League recently, the others were truly sorry. And when a classmate's dog was dying, Jake tried to comfort him by telling him that his dog was deceased, too, even though Jake has never had a dog.
"Well, it was sort of true," he said to me when we were alone and I could point out the apparent prevarication. "Remember that goldfish that died in the plastic bag before we got it home? I felt really sad about that."
Judith Hooper is a freelance writer living in Amherst, Massachusetts.
