Christian Jovel-Arias can’t wait for the latest kid fad to die.
The Dallas teacher’s 5th graders started needling him when he uploaded a 67-page chapter book for a recent class assignment.
“They’re like, ‘Mr. Jovel, how many pages does this have?’” he said with a groan. “I just said, ‘No. No.’”
It didn’t help. The classroom dissolved into shrieks of “SIX … SEVEN!”
The “six-seven” shrug—so viral that it has been 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.
These activities often prove bewildering and annoying to teachers and parents, but experts say for the most part they are a normal and valuable part of children’s social development.
These collective activities help students to relieve stress, develop a sense of generational identity—how many teachers still remember vaguely naughty ditties like “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells”?—and push back against the things in the adult world that they find strange and exasperating, too.
“Students are always constructing their stories, their spaces … and calling out adult inconsistencies,” said Lisa Rathje, the executive director of Local Learning: The National Network for Folk Arts in Education, a nonprofit that works with schools and museums. “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.”
Civil War-era hand-clapping songs (“Miss Susie had a steamboat,” etc.), Gen-Xers’ graffiti-filled notebooks, and yes, six-seven shrugs in 2025 all fall into a part of children’s culture known as childlore.
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,” said 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 said. “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,” said Anna Beresin, a folklorist and author of Recess Battles: Playing, Fighting, and Storytelling, an study of how child culture has evolved in schools. “They have so little of it that they’re trying to make a safe space to have hidden knowledge away from grown-ups.”
Childlore’s spread, once gradual, explodes in the social media era
Childlore’s expansion into online forums and social media challenges has accelerated in recent years, both because the technology has become ubiquitous and because informal play spaces have become more structured and standardized—and under adult eyes.
Ironically, children sharing with each other online has made it that much easier for childlore to be usurped and commodified. Pizza Hut, for instance, offered 67-cent wings on Nov. 6-7 in response to the six-seven trend.
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 noted. Historically, that has happened during free and unstructured time—a dwindling resource for many students, she said. Restricting children’s ability to shape their own cultural practices can make it harder for them to develop social-emotional skills.
For example, hopscotch goes back to ancient Rome and is played in different versions around the world, but most modern playgrounds paint a permanent, standardized board rather than allowing students to draw their own, Rathje noted.
“So there’s less discussion about what your board looks like … the bounds and the rules of that,” she said.
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.
During a 2015 after-school arts project, Beresin and her undergraduate researchers found students in South Philadelphia developed increasingly complex pen-tapping rhythms, all of which were outlawed at school, even during lunch.
Getting disciplined for pen-tapping didn’t stop them from doing it, but Beresin found students became less likely to tap in school once they had more time and avenues for acceptable music-making. The children created their own documentary of their pen-tapping rhythms and their connection to historic folk music in their community. Understanding their activity as part of their culture instead of only a disciplinary problem helped them focus on broader skills, she found.
“So much of the conversation [on student fads] is around deficits and troublemakers,” Rathje said. “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 some of the more annoying childlore, Beresin said it can be helpful to reminisce a little. When working with teachers, she often asks them for their own childlore. “And then all of these memories come flooding back, and the pranks that people did come flooding back, and the stories about their own search for privacy comes flooding back,” she said. “That’s really valuable, not so much in dialogue with children, but as a way to foster their own compassion through nostalgia.”
Emily Box, a dance instructor at Mountain Valley Middle School near San Antonio, commiserates with Jovel-Arias’s dread of the numbers that shall not be named.
“Having to count ‘5, 6, 7, 8′ every day is probably what keeps me up at night,” she quipped.
But Box has decided to embrace the absurdity. She applauds her students’ chants and dances and has made her own six-seven reaction TikTok.
