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Lunch Table Wars
Helping Your Preteen Survive This Rite of Passage
By Sue Marquette Poremba
It begins innocently enough. A group of girls have a regular table in the cafeteria. They've been sitting together since the beginning of the school year. One day, for no particular reason, one of the girls decides she doesn't want to sit next to another girl, so she puts her books on the chair next to her. "This seat is saved," says the girl, then she turns her back to the other girl. There are no other seats left at the table. The shunned girl is forced to find another place to sit – nearly impossible in the territorial cafeteria.
With feelings hurt, the shunned girl takes out her frustration by inventing and spreading a rumor about the girl who saved the seat. The other girls at the lunch table end up taking sides, and the latest lunch table war erupts. At best, it'll be a typical adolescent spat, and will blow over in a few days. At worst, the argument escalates at school and ends up with detention or even expulsion.
"Lunch seems to be the most concentrated social time at school," says Eleanor Chase* of Bryn Mawr, Pa. "Lunch time seems fairly unstructured."
Anne Rambo, associate professor of family therapy at Nova Southeastern University, says that lunch time is a choice time for inflicting interpersonal pain.
"It's a more dangerous world and a more confusing one, with fewer protections for young girls than in generations past," says Rambo. "One way I have noticed they deal with their own insecurities is to gravitate to a girl who appears strong and tough and without feelings. The dominant girl who appears confident and ruthless gathers other girls around her and gets viewed as 'popular.' But it's not because she's so loveable!"
In middle school, the lunch table groupings are formed early, and while it may not be a clique, it also isn't an open group. Teen movies and television shows get the socialization of the lunch table just right – kids can't sit at any table, with any group of kids.
The lunch table isn't always about friendship. In some ways, it is a networking tool. Sometimes the kids at the lunch table share a common interest. Sometimes kids end up at a lunch table because they want to be seen with a certain group. In general, kids understand the way the social dynamics of the lunch room work, and breaking those social norms – sitting at another table – often happens at the urgings of others, like a parent or other kids making a dare.