By Julie E 
Photo Credit (Pixabay)
According to a new ten-year study published in the journal Child Development, teens who attempted to project a sense of coolness during their early adolescence were more likely to face a variety of issues in their early adult years than their peers who did not. This is good news for regular kids.
By the way, trying to act older than one’s true age is associated with issues more so than being cool. This is a big difference that we previously knew.
Although cool kids are frequently portrayed as idealized in popular media, from Tina Fey’s Mean Girls to James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause, the study suggests that attempting to appear older than one’s actual age in order to get attention and popularity may not have the desired effects.
From the age of 13, when they were in the seventh and eighth grades, to the age of 23, researchers tracked 184 teenagers, gathering data from the teenagers themselves, as well as from their parents and peers. The teenagers came from a variety of racial and ethnic origins and attended public schools in urban and suburban areas of the Southeast United States.
At the age of 13, teens who were involved in romantic relationships from a young age, participated in delinquent activities, and valued socializing with physically appealing peers were considered popular by their peers. However, this opinion changed over time, and by the age of 22, their friends viewed those once fashionable teenagers as less capable of handling social situations. According to the study, they were also more likely to have engaged in criminal activity and to have had serious issues with drugs and alcohol.
According to Joseph P. Allen, Hugh P. Kelly Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, who led the study, “it seems that while so-called cool teens’ behavior might have been linked to early popularity, over time these teens needed more and more extreme behaviors to try to appear cool, at least to a subgroup of other teens.” As adolescence went on, they engaged in increasingly severe criminal activity as well as drug and alcohol abuse. By the time they reached young adulthood, these once cool teenagers seemed less capable than their less cool contemporaries, both socially and otherwise.