Dispatches from Sophomore Island

By Anne Rubin

Early on in my teaching career, a colleague and I came up with a brilliant idea one morning at when we were running copies in the teacher workroom. Our idea was this: we would pitch a reality show called Sophomore Island. Here’s the premise: on September 1, we would drop off an entire class of sophomores on a tropical island in the south Pacific. We make sure there is a steady supply of food ferried to the island regularly, and whomever makes it to June 1 wins and gets to become a junior.

Of course, we were half-joking, but like all humor, our idea was rooted in a kernel of absolute truth: sophomore year is a difficult landscape studded with social and emotional landmines that kids are continually tripping. No matter how you frame it, sophomore year presents singular social and emotional challenges in a student’s high school career. Sandwiched between the fresh enthusiasm of freshman year and the college-driven momentum of junior year, sophomore year is a year of incredible interiority and self-reflection that can be hard for parents to navigate.

The Year of Inner Calibration

What differentiates sophomore year from freshman year is a profound emotional shift inward and an increase of scrutiny towards the self and others. This year of scrutiny is rooted in a new variable: choice. Instead of passively being chaperoned down a route designed by the adults around them, new sophomores have increased opportunity to explore different academic and social paths that will take them far away from their comfort zones. Adult support at school also looks different in the sophomore year: teachers are more likely to opt for a less managerial approach that allows kids to test the organizational skills they have learned in their first year of high school. At some schools, sophomore year is the first opportunity to choose an honors track or an AP class, and the friendships they make during their freshman year can begin to feel ill-fitting. Finally, as sophomores, the collective “grade” identity that they share with classmates becomes less significant to their social identity, which they curate with intention.

In the 1960s, scholar David Elkind was the first to formalize a theory of adolescent egocentrism, which describes the tendency of teenagers to think of themselves as being at the center of their worlds. Two concepts are key to this framework: imagined audiences and the personal fable. Elkind believed that teenagers saw themselves as performing in front of imagined audiences at all times because they believe that the people around them are preoccupied with judging and scrutinizing all of their actions. The personal fable is a mental framework that allows teenagers to believe in their singularity and the uniqueness of their thoughts and feelings. Since the 1960s, generations of scholars have built on this work, and have asked important questions about how race, class, gender and sexuality play into Elkind’s construct of adolescent egocentrism, and deeper and more complex portrait of adolescence has emerged from these intersectional inquiries. However, many of Elkind’s ideas endure. If you’ve ever spent time with a student in the 10th grade, you have seen the imagined audience and the personal fable at play. As such, it is typical for sophomores to feel continually scrutinized by adults and peers, and even the smallest interaction can take on monumental significance. The most inconsequential perceived slight or the most casual amount of praise can reshape relationships in an instant. The roots of this feeling of being at the center of the world is born from a deep consideration of how they fit into the world around them. Further complicating this introspection is the complex intersectionality of a teenager’s identity: their race, class, gender, and sexuality all play a deep role in the population of their perceived audience and the content of their fable.

There are common social and emotional experiences that sophomores share which the adults in their lives can be aware of as they help them navigate through this challenging time in their development. While none of the scenarios I offer below come with quick-fixes to disarm the emotional landmines your sophomore trips, it is helpful to know what they are likely to encounter and how you can coach them to navigate the path forward.

Navigational Struggles

In Dr. Lisa Damour’s excellent book, Untangled: Guiding Teenaged Girls Through the Seven Transitions Into Adulthood, she describes the process of teenage externalization as the act of a kid passing an “emotional hot potato” off to her parents to deal with. She writes, “Externalization is a technical term describing how teenagers sometimes manage their feelings by getting their parents to have their feelings instead. In other words, they toss you an emotional hot potato.” (Damour). This notion of the emotional hot potato perfectly describes the navigational conundrum of sophomores, who find themselves wanting the support of their parents while they become increasingly autonomous. What is particularly hard for parents is that they often do not see emotional crises coming their way.

On a surface level, a student’s day is divided into navigating between two worlds: home and school. At school, they move from class to class, deftly adapting to new social situations in each classroom they enter. They experience extreme highs and lows throughout the day: in the morning, they may be distraught by a bad quiz grade, but by noon, an invitation to a party on the weekend can change their mood completely...until they notice that a friend didn’t say hello to them in the hallway. Worst of all, to a sophomore, they are at the very center of what they perceive as a public spectacle. Despite operating under consistent social threats, they move with extreme flexibility as they not only deal with their own emotions, but also as they try to support friends who experience similar highs and lows.

For the most part, sophomores seem nimble as they navigate the school day, although their coping mechanisms are still very much under construction. For an adult trying to support a sophomore, it can feel hard to keep up with the emotional rollercoaster of a normal school day. It is not unusual for a kid to experience an extreme emotional low and quickly text a parent that triggers alarm on the part of the adult. This externalization---of the throwing of the “hot potato” is a common coping mechanism that allows a student to continue their day, having outsourced their stress to a caring adult. Subsequently, a student then likely quietly continues their day despite having just issued an emotional hand grenade to a parent who then begins to panic with worry for the emotional well-being of their child.

It can be a challenge to not immediately react to the strong feelings teenagers bring home. In fact, some social scientists believe that we are hardwired to reflect the emotions of others. Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, David Goleman writes, “When someone dumps their toxic feelings on us---explored in anger or threats, shows disgust or contempt---they activate in us circuitry for those very same distressing emotions. Their act as potent neurological consequences: emotions are contagious.” These emotional stakes are doubled when the person dumping these “toxic feelings” happens to be your own child.

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Right-Sized Response to Crisis

Outsized and undersized feelings are typical during the teenage years, but sophomore year can be a time when feelings are especially out of proportion. Here’s why: sophomores lack the benefit of experience and typically have not yet crafted a strong narrative about their own resilience and self-efficacy. Feelings are often too big or too small because sophomores can’t see what’s on the other side of the crisis that is presenting itself, and therefore emotionally under or over-prepare for the consequences ahead. That is why adult responses to crisis is so crucial to helping kids appropriately size their feelings.

If Goleman’s theory of mirroring is correct, then parents and teachers have the opportunity flip the script by modelling calm control in the face of adversity. If we respond to inappropriately-sized emotional upset by mirroring even more distress, we risk affirming that behavior and will see it repeated. To effectively help them, parents must rethink the roles they play for the teenagers in our lives and evolve to consider themselves to be leaders and historians, not managers or best friends. As historians, parents are the record keepers who help kids write the story of their resilience and self-efficacy, recalling the times when they have failed and have moved forward, and we know the trajectory that they have taken through the world. Our job is to remind them that struggle is temporary.

That thoughtfulness is important especially as parents, teachers, and administrators collaborate with one another to support kids to develop healthy coping strategies. Given the fact that parents can often be blindsided by a kid’s emotional upset, it can be very challenging to communicate in even-tempered ways that are productive and solution-based. However, kids have more agency and flexibility when the adults in their lives approach hard conversations holding as loosely as possible to the outcome. When the adults dig in too deeply, they risk creating an unproductive triangulation for kids who need to feel safe with all the adults around the table. Finally, whenever possible, it is never too early to invite a high school student to the table as a team works together to find solutions to whatever challenge is presenting itself. It is essential for teenagers see how mature adults work together to advocate and solve problems collaboratively.

The Sophomore Friendship Economy

In a teenager’s world, no one has more sway and influence than peers, and no bond is worth more than friendship. At 15 and 16, sophomores have years of relationships with friends behind them, but 10th grade is a new proving ground for relationships with peers. As freshmen, kids more easily gravitate towards one another because they share a temporary identity that school communities define as inherently vulnerable and undeveloped. Those easy associations are tested sophomore year as they seek more definition through new connections that are intentionally curated, as social support becomes increasingly important to one’s survival at school. The “stress buffering” model of social support is built on the premise that social connections serve as a “buffer” or protection against social stress. Social connection offers affirmation, intimacy and community that helps people bounce back from adversity and maintain steady in stressful times. Teenaged relationships have power and influence because they provide a sense of belonging and well-being in a world where teenagers believe that they have little power, and relationships are the ultimate buffer to the waves of stress they experience throughout the day.

However, not any relationship will do. Sophomores curate relationships with incredible intentionality because of a belief in the power of association. Old friendships are vulnerable at this time because these old associations can recall former iterations of a kid’s identity from which they are working to separate themselves. Most new relationships form with caution and care, because new relationships often involve a consideration of risk and liability. When considering making a new connection, it is not abnormal for kids to ask, how does this new person’s attentions reflect on me? How do others see my connection with this person? When friendship is accepted, it is because the support that a new friend offers is greater than any social consequences or perceived judgement. When friendship or connection is declined, it is clear that one party feels like the other represents a social or emotional liability that cannot be extended. In the social and emotional landscape they reside in, kindness can feel like vulnerability, and self-preservation can trump what they know is right.

This way of evaluating friendship flies in the face of the very intentional lessons most of us have taught children since they were very young. From birth to elementary school, parents and teachers work hard to instill a sense of empathy in children, and it can feel very disheartening to see teenagers behave in ways that does not reflect the empathy that we know they possess. As cavalier as some of their behaviors might seem and as hurt as kids can be by rejection, important work is occurring as they experiment with friendships. These lessons arrive right on time, because the most important work of sophomore year is to learn the balance between authenticity and kindness. It is not uncommon for sophomores to prize being real above being kind, and learning how to balance the two is a struggle that takes a long time to sort out. It is only through facing the consequences of hurting others and being hurt that they will understand that authenticity and kindness are not mutually exclusive. Working through the emotional struggles of being on either side of this equation will make each party more empathetic and more saavy in future relationships.

It can be particularly painful for adult to see kids experience rejection by their peers, and there’s nothing that you can do to immediately fix the hurt they feel. There are, however, ways for adults to leverage these difficult moments that can have an important impact in how they move forward in their friendships. In the moments where adults try to intervene to offer perspective, the comfort that we bring is readily dismissed, since we largely accept kids unconditionally, and sophomores are not yet equipped to understand that gift. Here, the mentorship and friendship of an older teenager can be extremely valuable, because their experience with teenaged friendships is more immediately applicable. They can help younger teenagers understand that friendships in the early years of high school are always calibrating, and that it is completely normal to feel isolated at times. This kind of adversity can builds empathy towards others who struggle socially, and these separations create an impetus for them to grow connections outside their social circle. When things are going well, it can be hard to step away from a powerfully connected social circle, even if things do not feel comfortable or if friendships are ill-fitting. Last, it’s always helpful to connect with teachers, advisors and administrators to let them know what is happening so they can observe the student during the school day and so they can find appropriate ways to connect with them. They will not have all the answers, but they can provide families with context and an extra set of eyes during the school day.

It is very rare that a student finishes their sophomore year without having experienced academic, social or emotional challenges that shake their sense of confidence. Similarly, sophomore year presents new hurdles for families to navigate alongside their children, and there are as many moments of frustration and worry as there are of joy and pride in seeing kids grow and evolve. As we work to instill a narrative of resilience, we must remember the long view of a kid’s personal history, and be mindful of how we help teenagers tell the story of their growth. We best punctuate that story when we celebrate when a kid tries something new, develops new friendships, and when we hold loosely to that person they have been in the past. Their growth and the development of their inner fortitude depends on the people that care for them giving them space to evolve into independent, courageous and empathetic adults.

Anne Rubin is dean of the Class of 2019 at Blake School in Minneapolis.