Actual photo from my diary in junior high
On Beaver Pond
When I was 11, my friends and I schemed up a way to seclude two cute boys from school into the woods away from their friends, and have our way with them.
It was the summer before we entered junior high, and we’d been reading Seventeen magazine to prepare us. We understood that entering junior high was the big time, where the women would be separated from the girls, and concluded that we would have a supreme advantage if we could start junior high having already secured our first kiss. Girls would respect us and boys would fear us. We imagined the crowds in the sixth grade hallways parting, as everyone whispered in awe as we floated by, worldly women among mere children.
Of course, we had been obsessing about the boys for a year or two already, while they completely ignored us. We harassed them, called them and hung up, and screamed insults at them on the playground, but they were mostly impervious to our advances. But now that we were almost in junior high, a few boys seemed to have finally noticed us back. In fact, Melanie had officially been asked out by Joe, meaning they were the reigning power couple of the fifth grade.
Now, “going out” in those days did not actually mean you went anywhere together, out or otherwise. It didn’t really mean anything, other than that maybe you passed some notes or talked on the phone. It was more of a status, a display of your prowess with the opposite sex — everyone else knew you were going out.
But Melanie had not yet secured a kiss from Joe, nor had anyone else in our grade, and we were determined to change that. Joe’s best friend was Ben, and they were two of the more outgoing boys, who had noticed girls existed. They would sometimes talk to us when we prank called them at slumber parties, and they seemed particularly amenable to playing along with our games of insulting each other. My friend Mandy had given them the finger in the hallway one day, and Ben told her “at least mine’s not a mile long” (Mandy had beautiful, long fingers), and I was so jealous she’d gotten his attention. Meanwhile, Joe had recently established himself as the player of the 5th grade by asking Melanie out.
So we knew these two were ripe targets. They totally wanted it, we could tell. But time was running out, because summer break was about to begin, and seeing them regularly would no longer be assured. We knew we needed to act immediately, and that the first step was to get Ben and Joe alone, away from the rest of their friends and the prying eyes of stupid adults. We knew the perfect place: Beaver Pond.
Get your mind out of the gutter. It was a small swampy pond, with actual beaver dams. I grew up in a small town in the woods, and as kids we all traversed the trails in the forests that connected the neighborhoods to each other via backyard. That’s how we got around. But most people didn’t know about Beaver Pond, which was off the main trails and you had to bush-whack a bit to get to it. I had taken my friends to see it a few times, but most kids didn’t know about it.
So Beth, Melanie, and I hatched a plan. We would entice Joe and Ben on the bus, by telling them we knew a secret spot in the woods where you could see beaver dams. Then we’d tell them to meet us there on the first week of summer break. We knew they wouldn’t say no, because beavers are cool, and knowing secret spots in the woods was a valuable source of knowledge. And then once we got them there, we would play spin the bottle and emerge from Beaver Pond as real women.
But how were we going to get Joe and Ben to suggest spin the bottle?? Obviously we weren’t going to suggest it. But what if it didn’t occur to them? What if Beaver Pond didn’t inspire thoughts of romance? Should we plant an empty bottle there in advance?? We decided we needed to pre-stage Beaver Pond, to make sure that when the boys arrived, they would be in the mood for love.
So the day before our planned event, Beth, Melanie, and I each stole pantyhose and bras from our older sisters. We went to Beaver Pond and flung the undergarments around in the bushes, hoping it would look like someplace where unspeakable passion had recently occurred. Why anyone would be hiking the woods in pantyhose and then discard them by a swampy pond full of giant rodents is anyone’s guess. All I can tell you is that to our almost-12 year old brains, this was a masterful plan. Obviously, Ben and Joe would see the bras, think of boobs, and even though we didn’t have any, the subliminal tone would be set, and they would be overcome by an unquenchable desire to kiss us. We also put on lipstick, made kiss marks with it all over some pieces of notebook paper, and then tore out the pages and strew them around the pond.
After surveying the scene, we decided we’d set the perfect tone, after littering this remote bog with pantyhose, bras, and kiss-marked notebook paper. But we decided against leaving an empty bottle, because that would be too obvious. Instead, we found a nice pointy rock, and set it in the middle of a circle we cleared. If all else failed and they still didn’t figure it out, the plan was that Beth would suggest playing truth or dare, we’d do a few normal rounds, and then I’d dare one of them to spin the rock. We couldn’t let Melanie make these suggestions because she and Joe were already going out, and we didn’t want her to seem too desperate. So Beth and I would assist, and pull it off in a totally nonchalant way. But that was only a back-up plan if the kiss-marked paper and bras didn’t work their magic. Either way, we were sure that once the rock had its first spin, everyone would want to spin it again. Hahaha, they would be ours.
I won’t keep you in suspense about how our plan worked out:
I turned 12 the following week, riding high off the success of our Beaver Pond seduction plot. Our junior high wouldn’t know what hit it, when we walked in. I pictured that first day of school many times in my head, and it always involved us busting open the doors and walking down the hall in slow motion, with a soundtrack playing.
How to win friends, influence people, and dominate middle school.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You want to see what this precocious seductress looked like. Presumably I must’ve been quite the burgeoning goddess of love, or at least scary enough to bully the boys into doing my bidding, right? Alright fine, I’ll show you just how fearsome I was at the time:
I’m not sure what I was mad about on the left. Probably just that I was being asked to smile at 7 am.
Doesn’t look too bad, right? Not exactly the look to destroy all boys and leave them despairing in love and terror, but not too bad.
But this was the first day of school and school-photo day, meaning I was dressed up and looking as good as I possibly could, because I knew my photo was being taken. I still didn’t manage to brush my hair for school photos, but I’m rocking my best-friend earrings and a tie over my tee-shirt, which is how you know I’m cool. But this was as good as it got. My every day look was far more “unkempt street urchin” than tween dream.
And things quickly got worse in that department. For one thing, I got braces to fix the messed-up teeth, though that wasn’t much of a hindrance. The far worse problem was that all my friends began developing into actual women, and by 8th grade they all looked like stand-ins for Baywatch.
Meanwhile, my legs grew about a foot while the rest of me stayed exactly the same, and by 8th grade I’d reached my present height just shy of 5’10”, and resembled a praying mantis. I looked like I was walking around on stilts, and towered over virtually everyone in my grade, including almost all the boys, by a good six inches.
The top photo below shows me sunbathing with my normal human-being-proportioned friend. It doesn’t look that bad laying down. Standing up I looked like a circus freak with hockey sticks for legs. I have almost no full-body photos from this period because I was constantly slouching and hiding in baggy clothes to try to conceal my beanstalk physique. So instead, I’ve added a photo of my older sister at 13, since she had the exact same build and suffered the same indignities of looking like what happens when you build a human out of popsicle sticks.
Resembling Jack Skellington did not exactly make the boys’ hearts flutter. Instead, they all called me the Jolly Green Giant and asked how I kept from slipping down the drain when I took a shower.
But if you think that stopped me, oh how very wrong you are. Did it matter that when we square-danced in gym class and they called out “now swing your partner round and round” that every boy had to leap in the air to get his arm over my head? Nope. Did I care that people were starting to go to second base in 8th grade, and that any boy who might try with me would just be endlessly searching for the boobs I didn’t have? Well, yes, I did care, quite a lot, and was deeply mortified of my boob-less-ness. But I was certainly not going to let that prevent me from being popular with the boys, by sheer force of will.
I was just going to be funnier and cooler and a better friend than everyone else. I resolved to make sure everyone always wanted me around, because I was so much fun. At a pool party I would scream Everyone Watch This! and then do a flip off the diving board and land directly on my face, just to make people laugh. I would tell dirty jokes and make all the cool kids in the back of the bus pee their pants laughing. In seventh grade I wore MC Hammer harem pants to school the first day, with the crotch of the pants located somewhere beneath my knees, and looked absolutely ridiculous yet convinced everyone it was the coolest outfit in all of history and everyone asked to borrow my pants — even the boys.
Most importantly, I knew the fundamental unwritten social rule, which was that you NEVER show any sign of uncertainty or embarrassment, and portray utter confidence at all times. Act like you know what you’re doing in a totally self-assured manner, and people will believe it. Inside, I was constantly worried that no one liked me or that I was being made fun of for being a gross skinny beanpole, but I never, ever let that show. If they were going to laugh, it would be on purpose, because the second key social rule is that you must fully commit to the bit.
Things like dancing or being funny often seem mysterious to people, who can’t figure out why some people seem so naturally good at it, while others are so awkward that it makes you cringe to even watch them. Here’s the key: you push past and fully commit to the cringe. Don’t awkwardly do your dance with hesitancy and embarrassment, be Napoleon Dynamite. Commit to looking as ridiculous as possible and like you’re having fun doing it. That works for comedy too — you need to deliver your joke as if you have total confidence that everyone will be rolling on the ground laughing. Because the weird thing about humans is if you act like that, people follow your cue.
This is especially true in junior high, when everyone’s going through puberty, meaning the stage that they move from the comfort of their parents’ protection and enter the social arena on their own, flexing and jockeying for status. It’s brutal. Everyone is paranoid no one likes them and everyone worries they’re too lame, ugly, or uncool. Everyone is constantly on high alert to pick up on the social signals of what’s cool and what’s not, and petrified of being put in the uncool category.
But there are no hard and fast rules on what’s cool. What’s cool is just whatever the cool people say it is. People are just looking to follow a leader. They respond viscerally to cues of confidence, and are repelled by the opposite. So since I was already going to stick out and tower above everyone, I figured I might as well pretend to be the leader and just be more obnoxious and outrageous than everyone else. This wasn’t really a conscious thought at the time, but looking back on it and reading my diary for this post, it’s clear that’s absolutely what I was doing.
The other thing you need to do is spread the bounty of your pretend confidence around and let it boost other people up. Never try to tear someone else down to build yourself up. You do the opposite. You stand up for them, defend them, and loudly and publicly smack down anyone else who says different because how dare you talk about my gorgeous, hilarious, wonderful friend like that?? Take whatever social capital you have, even if you have none and it’s fake, and be generous with it and show everyone what a benefit it is for them to have you as a friend.
The teen movies are fake, because all they show are mean girls and bullies. In real life, dominating by fear only lasts so long, because everyone secretly hates you and wants to take you down, and they’ll do so at the first opportunity. It’s a much more solid and long-lasting method to win friends by actually being fun and nice and making it beneficial for them to have you around. There are studies on this: the most popular kids in school are the ones who like the most other people.
So, these were my methods. I would not be the prettiest girl, or have the best body, or be good at sports, or have the best clothes. I would just be the most fun, act like a clown to make people laugh, and loudly challenge and stand up to any mean girls or boys if they picked on anyone.
And it totally worked. I always had lots of friends and all the cool boys wanted to go out with me, even if they had to stand on their tip-toes to give me a kiss.
So now we get to the obvious question and the whole point of me telling you these stories: How did I know all this when I was 12??
One Answer: Daycare.
It’s as simple as that. Because here’s the thing. I am NOT naturally extroverted, at all. In fact I qualify for an autism diagnosis, in all seriousness. I had my nose in a book constantly as a child, and noises, tastes, and textures that didn’t bother other kids sent me into a furious meltdown. I had a habit of walking around spouting facts about my special interest, like being a human encyclopedia was a way to make friends.
And if I had just been left to my own devices, at home with my mom, I would have sat in my room reading my entire childhood, and it would’ve been a social disaster for me. That’s what happened to my older sister, and she had a miserable time in middle school and high school.
But I was thrown in with a group of kids at an age so young I don’t remember. I’m guessing I must’ve been around two. My “daycare” (we didn’t call it that, back then) was run out of the home of a feisty Irish-Catholic lady named Mary, who had four red-headed children of her own. She watched a mixed-age group of about a dozen kids at any given time. Though when I say “watched”, take that with a grain of salt. She had a ravine behind her house where we played in the creek and built forts, and an abandoned school at the end of her road where played kickball and hide and seek. We rode bikes and ran around the neighborhood without any adults actually “watching” us. We were just within hearing distance if someone broke a bone and the other kids screamed really loud.
It was fine, no one died.
Here’s what was good about this situation: it’s natural and normal. I absolutely LOVED daycare at Mary’s. She was strict and tolerated no whining, but also loved all the kids. My time at Mary’s exists in my mind as the most golden, halcyon memories. When she died a few years back, there was an outpouring of love from all the now-grown kids she watched over the decades. She was a treasure. And I 100% attribute my having any ability at all to make friends and get along in social situations to going to Mary’s. I would have been an introverted wreck if I had not.
Running around in a pack of kids with minimal adult oversight is also how kids were raised for most of history. Being cloistered at home with a parent and maybe a sibling is not a good thing. Parents naturally tend to coddle their children, worrying far too much about their feelings and favoring them above other kids. But being put in a big group of kids without a parent to intervene, you figure out the social rules real quick. You learn what makes friends and what gets you shunned. You learn the line between being exuberant and being a braggart, between being funny-mean and just mean-mean. You learn not to be AFRAID of other kids, or the opposite sex, because you’re always running around with them, so why would you be? And if your kid is young enough when they start, it’s all seamless.
I’ve noticed a tendency among the very-online, autiste-adjacent crowd to have hated school, and to be motivated to help their children avoid the same pain by sheltering them from the social world. I strongly believe that’s a terrible idea. Figuring out how the social world works is far more painful at age 8 than it is at age 3, and even worse at age 12 or 18. The older you get, the harder it is to just intuit social dynamics. If you throw them in and let them take the hits young, it all comes naturally. I wasn’t afraid of boys at age 12 because I’d been playing with them my whole life. I was a little afraid of mean girls, but I also knew how to handle them.
I distinctly remember the first day of kindergarten because there were two kids who cried in the corner. They had never been away from their moms before, and were scared. This did not go over well with the other kids. Do you want that to be your kid, or do your want your kid to come home from the first day of school crowing happily about all the new friends he’s made??
Social skills are very difficult and cognitively taxing. Knowing both your own mind and everyone else’s is hard work. So while practicing as early and often as possible is good for everyone, it’s crucial for naturally introverted, very cerebral people. The natural extrovert or athlete might not need the extra practice, but the bookish kids really do. They need to practice with peers, and experience triumphs and failures that set down the neural pathways that help form intuitions so that later it just comes naturally, without having to think much about it.
And this is critical for success in the realm of romance. That stuff never used to be a solo endeavor. It happened socially. The situation we have today where some kids have almost no interaction with the opposite sex until they’re almost adults, when they get on an app to navigate it alone, is completely perverse and wrong. You need friends to help you navigate.
Friends are there to act as intermediaries and sounding boards. They soften the blow of rejection. They give you models to emulate, and examples to avoid. They pre-gauge interest for you, so you’re not just going in blind when you ask someone to the dance. They evaluate your successes and failures, to give you feedback. They help you calibrate what certain behaviors mean, and what would be the best response. They’re the ones that you scheme with together, to make sure that the summer party will be EPIC, and that your crush will be there. They’re the ones that INVITE you to the party. They give you a reality check and tell you when it’s hopeless and you’re pining for someone out of your league. And they tell you you’re clueless about the person who obviously likes you but you somehow didn’t notice. They deliver messages and gather intel. And they make it all fun and take the edge off, and give you someone to laugh about your foibles with. Utilizing your friends, and the friends of your love target, was the standard way things used to work.
But kids today are being deprived of this, and that’s a tragedy. If they’re missing this crucial part of normal development, it’s a societal problem that deserves to be fixed. And it’s not a trivial matter.
Because I have seen the results when people miss this crucial developmental stage. They’ll still go through it alright, just when they’re 25 or 30, which is years too late and devastatingly painful at that point. The stakes are too high when you’re an adult. You’re supposed to do your practicing when the stakes are low, and you can easily brush off a failure and find someone new to crush on a week later. Read my diary, I liked a different boy every day. So did all my friends. There were no stakes. Sometimes they didn’t like me back, and it wasn’t the end of the world.
I’ve had some conservative traditionalist types chastise me and say that all the current chaos in sex-relations is because no one involves their parents anymore, or listens to their advice. I’m sorry, but no. Parents have always given terrible advice on this topic. Their social sense is either calibrated for the adult world, or based on their half-memories of a completely different time. Teenagers have not been listening to their parents’ advice on matters of love for at least a century. I’m astonished that any grown adult with children could have such amnesia about being young that they’ve deluded themselves into thinking that parents should be a primary source of guidance on such matters. They should not. That’s absurd. Give your children basic principles and values, and be there for them if they’re in danger, but don’t try to help them land a date for God’s sake.
What kids need is friends, and free time to hang out with them and get into a little trouble. Which ultimately serves a wholesome purpose in the long-run, because it teaches them how to get into romantic relationships. And gives them good stories. And good stories help you get even more friends. It’s a virtuous cycle.
Do you want your daughter to have so little ease with boys that when she gets to college she just resorts to getting black-out drunk to quell her terror, and ends up going home with whatever boy has morals low enough to take the easy-pickings? Do you want your son to have such anxiety about girls that he just sits in his room playing video games every weekend, stewing about why he’s such a hopeless loser?
If not, then do whatever you can to get them into normal, natural situations where they’re surrounded by peers – ideally mixed-age peers so that there’s an element of mentorship from the older to the younger kids. Summer camp is great if you can afford it, but anywhere will do. Offer your home as the place for group hang outs. Organize a community group of parents dedicated to trading-off hang out time at their places, without helicoptering or interfering. Whatever it takes. Just don’t let your kid grow up to be the one with no good stories.
>> Do you want your son to have such anxiety about girls that he just sits in his room playing video games every weekend, stewing about why he’s such a hopeless loser?
That was basically me in elementary school.
My parents didn't send me to daycare or kindergarten (my mother was - and still is - a lazy depressed NEET), and provided me no opportunity to socialize with any kids - no friends with kids that would come over, no playdates, no birthdays, no kids in the neighborhood (there were some but we didn't know them), no cousins or siblings (my only brother was born when I was 6). Then I went to school and I had to start figuring out all of my social skills at the age of 7. It was a HORROR.
The only people I've really interacted with up to that point were adults. Thus, I would talk like an adult, and do things that pleased adults: show off that I know stuff, learned stuff or can do stuff, like reading or maths. My parents have always told me I was very smart. Then, other kids made me realize that in fact, I was an idiot. The cognitive dissonance was huge. Eventually, I felt like my parents lied to me.
>> Parents have always given terrible advice on this topic.
My parents' advice was along the lines of "other kids are stupid" and "don't care what other kids say". Which was exactly the opposite of what I needed to understand: that social norms and customs exist and I need to learn about them and conform. Fit in.
The advice in this post is also in the lines of "be a nonconformist". That's a strategy I eventually employed by middle school, and it was somewhat effective in terms of pushing me from being the worst to low-middle status - being a class clown only gets you so far.
I believe this only works if you a) have already figured out the basics of social skills (I have by middle school, but I haven't yet in elementary school) and/or b) you are an attractive young girl, which gives enormous social credit and also room for error - you can mess up and be actually cringe, but no one cares because you're still young and hot.
As a parent, I persisted to send my daughter to daycare and kindergarten as soon as possible. I also try to double down on playdates, meeting and inviting friends with kids over and family meetings with her cousins. We often visit our in-laws who live in a rural area which allows my daughter and her cousins to play and run freely all day. I also tried to replicate this environment by moving away from the city and building a house in the countryside.
Sometimes, my wife tells me we should spend more time on doing exercises from a book or trying to teach our daughter to draw, read or speak a foreign language. I always reply that my priority is to make her happy, and I believe that we should just allow her to spend as much time playing with other kids as possible - provide her the opportunities my parents failed to provide me when I needed them the most.
Not disagreeing with the general message, but there are statistics showing that kids that went through daycare are doing significantly worse on many metrics than kids that did not.
Modern daycare does not sound like your daycare, but I imagine that spending half of the day in a room with a lot of other same-age kids (as retarded as the individual kid…) that are non related to you and an adult that is probably too fragile is bad for the development for most young kids.
You also have some stats where kids that are homeschooled or went in charter schools are not really doing quite ok or better.
I think what truly matters is that they have enough social interactions with other kids to not be scared of it. Ideally it is a relatively small, mixed-age group and the activity is done outside. There is no need to force social interactions much more beyond that.