Finding Your People: Why Getting Involved Is the Best Thing Your Kid Can Do This Year

It helps with belonging. It helps with grades. It even helps with college applications. Here's what the research actually says, and how parents can help.

Every year, when my 8th graders sat down to register for their freshman year classes, I told them the same thing, and I told it to 'em straight, "Pick your classes carefully, sure, but pick something outside of class too. A club. A sport. Band. The school play. Anything. Get involved!"

I said it every year for a good chunk of my 25 years, and I never once said it because I was trying to pad a college application. I said it because I watched it happen, over and over, in real time, in real kids. The ones who found a group – any group – showed up differently. They walked more confidently in the hallway. They had somewhere to be at 3:15 that wasn't just the bus line. They had people who'd notice if they were having a bad week.

That's belonging. And it turns out it's not just a nice feeling. It's one of the more quietly powerful things a school year can hand your kid.

It doesn't have to be impressive. It has to be theirs.

What the Research Actually Says

Let's start with the part I always suspected but never had numbers for until I went looking. Researchers call it "school connectedness" or "sense of school belonging," and it's been studied for decades. The definition is simple: it's the extent to which a student feels accepted, respected, supported, and like they matter to the people around them at school.

Multiple meta-analyses (studies that combine the results of many other studies) have found a real, statistically significant relationship between a student's sense of belonging and their academic achievement. It's not a massive effect, and researchers are honest about that. But it's consistent, and it shows up across GPA, standardized test performance, and how engaged a student is in class. The CDC has gone as far as identifying school connectedness as a protective factor for adolescents, tied to better mental health, fewer risk behaviors, and stronger academic outcomes.

Extracurricular involvement specifically tells a similar story. In a study by the National Center for Education Statistics, after following high school seniors, they found participants were three times more likely than non-participants to carry a GPA of 3.0 or better. Another study done by Georgia Southern University, Extracurricular Activities' Influence on High School Students' Academic Achievement, found that students in at least one activity had noticeably higher GPAs than students in none, along with better attendance and stronger plans to pursue education after high school. In a Florida Atlantic University survey of undergraduates titled Outside Obligations: Understanding How Outside Activities Impact Students, they found something similar even at the college level: students involved in organizations or community service reported both higher GPAs and more satisfaction with their academic experience.

None of this means joining the chess club raises your grades by magic. What it likely means is something more human … that kids who feel like they belong somewhere show up more, try harder, and give up less. Connection feeds effort. Effort feeds outcomes.

It's Not Just About Grades — It's About Finding Your People

Here's where I want to be honest about something, because I think families sometimes hear "get involved" and translate it straight to "resume builder," and that's not really the heart of it.

High school is a genuinely disorienting place, especially freshman year. Bigger buildings, more people, less structure than middle school gave you. The students who find their footing fastest are almost always the ones who find their people – the specific group of humans who make the building feel smaller and friendlier than it actually is. That might be a sport. It might be theater kids who eat lunch together in a corner of the auditorium. It might be the robotics team, the marching band, a job at the local coffee shop, or a youth group that has nothing to do with the school at all. It doesn't have to be impressive. It has to be theirs.

And I'll say the quiet part out loud, "Putting yourself out there is hard." It's hard for adults. It's harder for a fourteen-year-old walking into a room of strangers who all seem to already know each other. Nobody enjoys the first day of tryouts or the first club meeting where you don't know a soul. That discomfort is real, and it's also temporary, and it's almost always worth pushing through. I've never once had a former student tell me they regretted trying out for something. I've had plenty tell me they regretted not trying.

Nobody enjoys the first day of tryouts or the first club meeting where you don't know a soul. That discomfort is real, and it's also temporary, and it's almost always worth pushing through.

Yes, This Helps Applications and Scholarships Too

I'd be leaving something out if I didn't mention the practical side, because if college is even a distant thought in your house, this matters there too. Admissions offices have said plainly, over and over, that they're not just reading a transcript. They're trying to understand a person. Sustained involvement in something, especially with any kind of leadership or growth attached to it over time, tells a story that a GPA alone can't tell. It shows initiative. It shows follow-through. It shows a kid can commit to something longer than a semester.

Scholarship committees read the same way. A student who spent four years showing up for something, and got better at it, or took on more responsibility in it, stands out more than a student with a long list of one-semester activities picked up junior year for the sake of the application. And these experiences often land as topics for college admission essays.

But here's my honest opinion, the same one I'd give a family sitting across from me … if the college application is the only reason your kid is doing something, they'll usually quit, or worse, they'll stick with it and resent it. The kids who build the strongest resumes almost always did it backwards – they found something they actually liked, stuck with it because they liked it, and the resume showed up as a side effect. Chase the belonging. Let the resume follow.

What Parents Can Actually Do to Help

You can't force a fourteen-year-old to feel connected to anything, and trying usually backfires. But you're not powerless here either. Here are five things I've seen work, from the parent side of this conversation:

• Help them try things without demanding they commit forever. "Go to one meeting" is a much smaller ask than "join this club for four years," and it's usually all it takes to get a foot in the door.

• Normalize the awkward part. Tell them the first day of anything new feels strange for everyone in the room, not just them. That alone takes some of the pressure off.

• Resist steering them toward what looks good on paper. The theater kid who loves theater will outperform the reluctant kid doing student government because a parent thought it would look better. Interest is the engine here, not strategy.

• Show up yourself. Go to the game, the concert, the meet. Kids notice what their parents think is worth their Tuesday night, and it tells them the thing matters.

• Give it more than one try if the first fit isn't right. Plenty of kids find their people on the second or third attempt, not the first. That's not failure. That's just how finding your people usually goes.

Back when I was talking to my 8th graders about registering for freshman classes, I wasn't thinking about GPAs or scholarship committees. I was thinking about the kid who was about to walk into a much bigger building than the one they were used to, and how much better that year goes when there's a place in it that already feels like theirs. Turns out the research backs up what any teacher could've told you from the hallway. Go find your people. Everything else tends to follow.