kengr

*waving inarticulate flail-hands a great interest and appreciation*

There are a LOT of kid cultures. Different regions and ethnic groups have some different customs, which overlap and tie in with the age-differences. Some age difference things between groups of kids are cultural, some are developmental, some are cohort effects. You've correctly identified some very important things that are going on.

Tribal customs and norms are well worth attention to creating and designing... as well as doing the linguist/descriptive anthropologist thing of 'oh, that's an interesting specific functional Thing I observed people regularly doing, looks like it works because of X and Y' and the spec-fic thing of tagging on '... wonder if something like that could fit with Z as well'. Previous generation's efforts at that gave us a lot of organizations 'for' kids and 'about' exposing kids to some concept of healthy kid-culture ... frex, Boy Scouts and Girl Scout, which have evolved into large, rigid, hide-bound institutions that are themselves adult-run and full of problems. Maybe that's partly a problem of scale, but it's also a potential failure mode for anything that's big enough to be impactful at scale.

On a smaller scale, there is a lot of excellent professional development for educators available on activities (that can be adult-initiated but kid-centered and also eventually kid-run) to facilitate community-building and the co-creation of little rituals of respect and social maintenance within a group or a class, but there isn't reliable or sound institutional support for doing the things that that professional development makes obvious are needed (like feeding everyone a real meal, with time to talk and chances to share and to help, with enough time to eat it, for fracks sake).

Like my experience with student-run activity clubs in college (gaming, LARP, fencing, etc) and with trying to find parent volunteers as a teacher, with the main target groups aging in and out so fast, it's hard to have a working structure that's fully populated and harder to have that structure not become a rigid tool with which people bludgeon each other rather than a functional living shared set of norms and customs ... so ... there have to be designated roles within each 'kid tribe' group for mentors, tradition-keepers, and group alums to keep continuity ... but with checks so that people who just like being powerful don't automatically perch themselves in that mentor-role and warp the group around them ... as well as a route for new ideas to change and break up things that no longer work ... and so on ...