What Being ‘Cool’ in Middle School May Mean for Your Future

And you can chalk it all up to pseudomature behavior. (Photo: Getty Images)

Remember the popular kids in middle school? They had swishy hair, snuck cigarettes, owned the floor at school dances, and oozed coolness while the rest of us fumbled around awkwardly and just tried to keep food out of our braces.

What ever happened to them? A new study published in the journal Child Development found out.

In the study, researchers followed 184 people for a decade — from age 13 to 23 — and discovered that those who were popular in early adolescence were more likely to have issues later in life.

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Kids that were popular as early teens often saw their social status plummet in high school, and they experienced a range of problems that lasted well beyond middle school. As adults, they were 45 percent more likely to develop problems from marijuana and alcohol abuse and had a 22 percent greater rate of criminal behavior.

Researchers blame the popular kids’ “pseudomature behavior” (i.e. acting older than they are or acting how they think they should act) for their later issues. Those behaviors include experimenting with cigarettes and alcohol at an early age, sneaking into movies, picking friends based on their appearance, and having relationships with the opposite sex that they might not be emotionally ready for.

Because of their early pseudomature behavior and desire to keep their popular status, cool kids may never learn to adapt socially as they get older, researchers discovered. Instead, they revert back to old behaviors that made them likeable in middle school, making them less popular as they age and their peers mature at a normal rate.

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Formerly cool kids often then ramp up their early teenage behaviors — including more deviant ones like stealing and drinking — in order to stay relevant.

Scientists found that the popular status (and subsequent obsession with it) even messes with their relationships later in life. The study notes that many formerly cool kids blamed their lack of popularity as the reason their significant others broke up with them vs. more normal reasons that typically cause a relationship to end in a person’s late teens and early 20s.

The findings aren’t shocking to John Mayer, PhD, a clinical psychologist who works with teens and their families. He tells Yahoo Health that competition is also a problem for these kids. Essentially, the cool kids get years to hone their popularity but, as they age and go to high school, they get thrown into a social group where they’re no longer the super stars.

“Because being cool was their only identity, they crash,” he says. “They have nothing to fall back on.” As a result of that crash, they can turn to negative behaviors (drugs, alcohol, and acting out) in an effort to cope.

“I see and treat this all the time,” says Mayer. “When you look at the history of why they turned in their life, it is because of that dramatic shift from being cool to uncool.”

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Of course, all kids who are cool at a young age aren’t doomed to live a relationship-less life of drug addiction and alcohol abuse. Mayer says those that are exposed to a variety of life skills (meaning, not just the skill of acing middle school popularity) are more likely to turn out just fine.

Why? They can’t be the best at everything, and learning to cope and be social in a situation where they aren’t top dog will help them form valuable social skills for the future.

So, despite what your middle school self might have dreamed, there’s something to be said for not ruling the school at 13 after all.