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adults, too). Sometimes the easiest way to begin is by saying “Hi.” Typically, students begin arriving at school fifteen to thirty minutes before the opening bell. In the early days of the school year, your child will naturally be looking for a familiar face; encourage your child to say “Hi,” or just smile in the direction of a few new people along the way. She’ll have another chance to share a smile, a quick “Hi,” or a “What’s up?” while walking through the halls between classes. Having made a few friendly gestures during the morning hours, your child is primed for the lunch break—where short conversations can develop into budding friendships.
    â€œMy best advice to new students is to smile and say ‘Hi’ to everyone they see here on the school campus.”
    â€”
Veronica Rogers, junior high principal, Goleta, CA
    2. Find a group. The lunch area is teeming with potential friends. Encourage your child to look for a table full of kids that includes a familiar face from one of his morning classes and join them. In shared conversation over lunch, kids often identify common interests. With these connections, kids begin to form new circles of friends.
    3. Get involved. Before the school year begins, many schools send out information about all of the extracurricular activities that will be available in the coming year. Taking part in these activities is one of the best ways to meet new friends, so be sure to talk about the options with your child and decide on a few to try (we’ll talk more about how to make these extracurricular choices in chapter 4 ). With a slate of activities in place, your child will be able to ask other kids about the activities they plan to join—giving him one more way to build a new group of buddies.
Out with the old, in with the new
    Meeting new friends doesn’t mean old friends are forgotten. Maintaining friendships from the elementary school years helps children smooth out their transition into middle school. The sense of familiarity created by seeing well-known faces around campus and in the classroom can soothe the anxiety of being surrounded by new faces. Staying connected with old friends often opens us to meeting new people who may become part of our social circle.
    Most of us have difficulty remembering where we first met the people who are now among our circle of close friends. Spouses aside, we generally can trace the first conversation of a budding friendship only to a range of time (say, sometime during the middleschool years) rather than a specific moment (say, November 1, 1989, at the mall, while sharing a root beer float). Our difficulty in recalling the beginning of friendships is due in part to the many impromptu conversations we have with new arrivals (friends of friends) to our current circle of friends. We meet these friends of friends through a series of continued interactions that eventually lead to identifying common interests. Middle school offers a bevy of similar opportunities for expanding a child’s social circle. Encourage your child to maintain old friendships; they hold the possibility of meeting new friends.
    The process of meeting new friends isn’t always a happy one. As kids sort through their new mix of schoolmates, power struggles may arise. As new social circles form, dominant personalities emerge, and many children experience for the first time the phenomena of bullies and cliques. You can help minimize the unpleasantness of schoolyard ruffians and queen bees seeking social status by equipping your child with a set of proactive skills.
Cliques: a fact of middle school life
    Unpleasant as they may be, cliques are an inevitable part of the middle school social environment. Cliques are a lot like the middle school social groups described earlier, with one important difference: they often refuse to accept new kids into the group, even those who share similar interests. These