\n<\/p>\n
Christian Jovel-Arias can\u2019t wait for the latest kid fad to die.<\/p>\n
The Dallas teacher\u2019s 5th graders started needling him when he uploaded a 67-page chapter book for a recent class assignment.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re like, \u2018Mr. Jovel, how many pages does this have?\u2019\u201d he said with a groan. \u201cI just said, \u2018No. No.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t help. The classroom dissolved into shrieks of \u201cSIX … SEVEN!\u201d <\/p>\n
The \u201csix-seven\u201d shrug\u2014so viral that it has been tapped as the 2025 Word of the Year by Dictionary.com\u2014is the latest of the unending stream of jokes, rituals, and competitions that spread like wildfire among students in classes and on social media.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s social development. <\/p>\n
These collective activities help students to relieve stress, develop a sense of generational identity\u2014how many teachers still remember vaguely naughty ditties like \u201cJingle Bells, Batman Smells\u201d?\u2014and push back against the things in the adult world that they find strange and exasperating, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cStudents are always constructing their stories, their spaces … and calling out adult inconsistencies,\u201d 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. \u201cRight now potentially the absurdity of our moment is showing up in student games and rituals. … There\u2019s 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\u2019t mean anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Civil War-era hand-clapping songs (\u201cMiss Susie had a steamboat,\u201d etc.), Gen-Xers\u2019 graffiti-filled notebooks, and yes, six-seven shrugs in 2025 all fall into a part of children\u2019s culture known as childlore. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
This child culture is about \u201cpower and language and shared practice,\u201d said Rebekah Willett, a professor of childhood and media studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. <\/p>\n
When adults respond to a new student catchphrase or song with confusion, \u201ckids are getting exactly what they want from it,\u201d Willett said. \u201cIt gives them pleasure and power because adults don\u2019t know what it means.\u201d<\/p>\n
Annoying adults protects against adult interference, the reasoning goes. <\/p>\n
\u201cPart of this is children\u2019s search for privacy,\u201d said Anna Beresin, a folklorist and author of Recess Battles: Playing, Fighting, and Storytelling, an study of how child culture has evolved in schools. \u201cThey have so little of it that they\u2019re trying to make a safe space to have hidden knowledge away from grown-ups.\u201d <\/p>\n
Childlore\u2019s 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\u2014and under adult eyes. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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\u2014a dwindling resource for many students, she said. Restricting children\u2019s ability to shape their own cultural practices can make it harder for them to develop social-emotional skills.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo there\u2019s less discussion about what your board looks like … the bounds and the rules of that,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
Getting disciplined for pen-tapping didn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo much of the conversation [on student fads] is around deficits and troublemakers,\u201d Rathje said. \u201cWhen you see these rituals emerge and sometimes fade as quickly as they come, they\u2019re all feeding that same [student] need\u2014to believe that they are participating in something greater than themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cAnd 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,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s really valuable, not so much in dialogue with children, but as a way to foster their own compassion through nostalgia.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emily Box, a dance instructor at Mountain Valley Middle School near San Antonio, commiserates with Jovel-Arias\u2019s dread of the numbers that shall not be named.<\/p>\n
\u201cHaving to count \u20185, 6, 7, 8′ every day is probably what keeps me up at night,\u201d she quipped. <\/p>\n
But Box has decided to embrace the absurdity. She applauds her students\u2019 chants and dances and has made her own six-seven reaction TikTok.<\/p>\n