Adjustment

Psychologists and educators have long been concerned about the fact that some children do not fit into their classroom peer groups as well as do others. Beginning in the 1930s, it was proposed that children who had difficulty fitting into their classroom peer groups were more likely to display adjustment problems (e.g., Koch, 1933). Now, nearly 80 years later, it appears that these concerns were well founded. A substantial corpus of evidence, gathered across multiple decades, reveals that poor relations with one’s classmates are one of the best predictors of multiple forms of dysfunction (e.g., psychological, scholastic, and interpersonal difficulties), not only in childhood but also in adolescence and adulthood (see Ladd, 2005)