The “six-seven” shrug—tapped as the 2025 Word of the Year by Dictionary.com—is the latest of the unending stream of jokes, rituals, and competitions that spread like wildfire among students in classes and on social media, according to an Education Week article.
While often bewildering and annoying to teachers and parents, experts say they are mostly a normal and valuable part of children’s social development. These collective activities help students to relieve stress, develop a sense of generational identity and push back against the things in the adult world that they find strange and bewildering.
“Students are always constructing their stories, their spaces … and calling out adult inconsistencies,” says Lisa Rathje, the executive director of Local Learning: The National Network for Folk Arts in Education. “Right now potentially the absurdity of our moment is showing up in student games and rituals. … There’s all this concern about what is true, what is authentic. In some ways it makes sense that they would lean into a joke that doesn’t mean anything.”
Childlore is a distinctive genre that includes all the games, rituals, stories, and other activities passed from child to child in playgrounds, classrooms, and now, in the 21st century, via social media. This child culture is about “power and language and shared practice,” says Rebekah Willett, a professor of childhood and media studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
When adults respond to a new student catchphrase or song with confusion, “kids are getting exactly what they want from it,” Willett says. “It gives them pleasure and power because adults don’t know what it means.”
Annoying adults protects against adult interference, the reasoning goes.
“Part of this is children’s search for privacy,” says Anna Beresin, a folklorist and author of Recess Battles: Playing, Fighting, and Storytelling. “They have so little of it that they’re trying to make a safe space to have hidden knowledge away from grown-ups.”
Children develop important social skills through navigating the unspoken rules and rituals of other children, above and beyond that learned through formal social-emotional education in school, Willett notes. Historically, that has happened during free and unstructured time—a dwindling resource for many students, she says. Restricting children’s ability to shape their own cultural practices can make it harder for them to develop social-emotional skills.
While educators should stop student challenges that can be dangerous, experts say cracking down on harmless-but-annoying trends can do more harm than good.
“So much of the conversation [on student fads] is around deficits and troublemakers,” Rathje says. “When you see these rituals emerge and sometimes fade as quickly as they come, they’re all feeding that same [student] need—to believe that they are participating in something greater than themselves.”
For teachers trying to stay patient with more annoying childlore, Beresin says they should reminisce a bit. When working with teachers, she often asks them for their own childlore. “And then all of these memories come flooding back.”
Education Week
