Remember the cool kids that you went to middle school with? You know, the 12-year old girls who plastered their faces with makeup and the boys who thought they were too cool to give you the time of day? Well, a study recently published in a Child Development journal proved to us that a lot of those kids aren’t doing too well today.
Dr. Joseph P. Allen, a professor of psychology at the University Of Virginia, is the lead author of the study that followed the risk-taking “cool kids” for 10 years beginning in middle school. He found that, by the time these kids got to high school, their social status declined and they began to struggle in certain areas of their lives.
The researchers participating in the study spent an entire decade monitoring 84 kids and found that these kids were more likely to grow up committing crimes and even battling drug problems. Dr. Allen’s theory is that the cooler kids in middle school feel the need to engage in risky behaviors like smoking, drinking and having sex in order to impress their peers. This type of “pseudomature” behavior is what sets them up for trouble in the future. The idea is that they constantly feel the need to outdo themselves, ultimately resulting in the majority of these kids going down the wrong path. According to an article written in the New York Times, the kids’ worrisome behavior and desperation to hold on to the things that made them so popular as middle schoolers just didn’t translate well as they grew into young adulthood as there were other priorities at stake.
So, for the late-bloomers out there, there is now definitive proof that it does get better after high school. What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comment section below!