'Please Like Me!'

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When I walked into the school playground for the first time, my heart was thudding. It was my five-year-old son’s first day with a new class of children and naturally I hoped the others would accept him, and not leave him out. But, privately, I was also concerned for myself. Would the other parents like me? I was going to be coming and going from this playground for the next six years – would I fit in?

My pumping heart, of course, had catapulted me straight back to my own childhood. For most of my schooldays, I was averagely popular; not one of the ‘cool’ clique of pretty, sophisticated girls, but I had friends. Then at 16, I moved to a new school, where a few kind people took pity on me, but despite my best efforts, I was generally shunned as uncool. It was a miserable experience.

More than 20 years on, and having reconnected on Facebook with old school friends, they too have confessed that they sometimes felt unpopular at school. Most also admit that those feelings linger: that it can still feel like that in the ‘adult playgrounds’ of the workplace, the neighbourhood party, and of course on social media, there are the popular people everyone flocks around, and the unpopular people being ignored on the sidelines.

Playground politics

Yet, even though we are older and wiser, we all confess that these experiences can still trigger the old emotions of loneliness, insecurity and even shame.

A fascinating new book by a professor of psychology and neuroscience has helped me make sense of all this. In Popular: The Power Of Likeability