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Peer Pressure Management Tips

This guide will help you help your children or teenagers become aware of the potential problems of peer pressure and develop skills to make good decisions. Teens are exposed to Peer Pressure every day in their environment where drugs, violence, sex, and money  is an ever present force. Peer Pressure can affects the decisions your child makes. Giving in to peer pressure can negatively impact your child's behavior, development, education and perception of family and life.

 
Children and teenagers give in to peer pressure because they are insecure, want to be liked or to fit in because they worry that other teens may make fun of them if they don't go along with the group. Others may go along because they are curious to try something new that others are doing. According to Erik Erikson's developmental work, peer relations expand to occupy the central role of young teenager's lives. Peers typically replace the family of origin as the center of the teens socializing model. Teenagers normally have multiple peer relationships which encompass remarkably different norms and value systems.
 
More often than not, peers reinforce family values, but they have the potential to encourage problem behaviors as well. Although the negative peer influence is overemphasized, more can be done to help teenagers experience the family and the peer group as mutually constructive environments.
 
Here are some facts about parent, adolescent and peer relations:
 
1. During adolescence, parents and adolescents become more physically and psychologically distant from each other. This normal distancing is seen in decreases in emotional closeness and warmth, increases in parent-adolescent conflict and disagreement, and an increase in time adolescents spend with peers.Teens in this stage are pulling away from their safety blanket (their parents) to experiment with different cultures. Teens and parents often do not have the skills in place to manage the emotions and separation that occurs at this stage so it often manifests anger, disrespect, abandonment and home isolation in the room. 
 
2. Increases in family strains (economic pressures, divorce, etc.) have prompted teenagers to depend more on peers for emotional support. By the high school years, most teenagers report feeling closer to friends than parents. Stress  Time Management, Working Parents, Marital Dissatisfaction, family break-up custody battles,  Single Parenting, step-family relationships, lower family income/increasing expenses, all produce increased individual and family stress. Alcohol is also a major contributor at this juncture and should never bee used as a coping mechanism because it has ruined many family systems. 
 
3. Parent-adolescent conflict increases between childhood and early adolescence, although in most families, its frequency and intensity remain low. Typically, conflicts are the result of relationship negotiation and continuing attempts by parents to socialize their adolescents, and do not signal the breakdown of parent-adolescent relations. Parents need to include adolescents in decision-making and rule-setting that affects their lives.
 
4. In 10 to 20 percent of families, parents and adolescents are in distressed relationships characterized by emotional coldness and frequent outbursts of anger and conflict. Unresolved conflicts produce discouragement and withdrawal from family life. Adolescents in these families are at high risk for various psychological and behavioral problems.
 
5. Youth gangs, commonly associated with inner-city neighborhoods, are becoming a recognizable peer group among youth in smaller cities, suburbs, and even rural areas. Gangs are particularly visible in communities with a significant portion of economically disadvantaged families and when the parent is conflictual, distant or unavailable.
 
6. Formal dating patterns of two generations ago have been replaced with informal socializing patterns in mixed-sex groups. This may encourage casual sexual relationships that heighten the risk of exposure to AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
 
How to Walk Away From Peer Pressure
 
It is tough to be the only one who says "no" to peer pressure, but your child can do it and when he does you should provide positive reinforcement. Very early on a child should learn a core value system which enables him/her to identify what is right and wrong. This will enable them to make the right decisions and not succumb to Peer Pressure.
 
Your child develops their core value system through the family system. Spending quality time with you child, their teachers, and being emotionally supportive will provide your child with a sense of self-confidence and courage to stand firm, walk away, and resist bad behaviors when he/she knows better. It is also essential to provide a safe, emotionally stable structured environment with healthy boundaries (family rules and family roles)
 
Teach your child is they are faced with peer pressure that there are positive behaviors they can do. Advise them to be true to themselves and simply stay away from peers who pressure him to do risky behaviors they knows are wrong like drug use, alcohol, smoking, or bullying. Teach them and reinforce in them that there is no shame in just telling them "no" and walking away.
Article submitted by:John Browne

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