As teenagers grow into adolescence, they face a number of challenges including peer pressure, school, social cliques, school, drama, and many other things that come with the process of growing up. But wait, what are cliques and why do we have them?
Social cliques are a natural thing in all high schools. It’s simply human nature to want to hang out with a group of friends separate from other people. Although you see cliques occur most often with girls in movies, it is not that unusual in real life either. In real life, cliques happen equally between girls and guys. Male cliques usually draw less attention to themselves and that’s most likely why we don’t notice them much. Girls, on the other hand, draw more attention to themselves with gossiping and sharing personal thoughts and whatnot.
A clique usually consists of about five to six people in groups. The structure of a clique consists of the “leader”, the “sidekick”, and the group members. The “leader” is like the queen-bee or the king of the group. In most scenarios, he/she leads the group, makes the decisions, and usually rules by popularity, looks, and money. The “sidekick” backs up the leader and agrees with all of his/her decisions.
However, cliques can also have effects on the people in and around them. The “in crowd” might make generalizations that aren’t true and that can emotionally hurt people. Maybe the people pressurize you to do things you wouldn’t usually do or make you feel inferior to them or they exclude you from a group making you feel like you’re not good enough. It’s our natural desire to want to fit in with the “in crowd”.
Fellow Pitman students share their thoughts on social cliques in schools. Julia Ngo, a sophomore, says, “I think social cliques are what cause the separation and judgmental comments people say to each other.” Sydney Morris, a freshman here at Pitman, commented, “Social cliques are stupid and good because then it keeps things balanced.” Mickey Chan, also a sophomore, says that, “There are many social cliques, but I don’t regard anyone to be ‘cooler’ or ‘more popular’ than anyone else.”
Why do we have cliques? We have the ability to make larger groups of friends with a never-ending variety of different combinations of personalities, looks, lifestyles, etc. Instead, we make smaller and more secluded groups of friends, and the only way you could get into that certain group is if you had the right looks, personality, style, academic performance, etc. We feel the need to have these groups because it makes us feel secure if we were around the people with which we have things in common with. Also, we have the idea of an “in-group” and an “out-group”. The “in-group” is made up of the people who feel like they’re better than others and the “out-group” is apparently made up of all other people that aren’t in the “in-group”.
Social cliques are part of human nature and can’t be stopped if they’re going to happen naturally. But everyone felt secure about themselves as individuals, I suppose there wouldn’t be any “in-group” or “out-group” cliques.