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A guide to realizing if your child is at-risk, displaying self-destructive behaviors, and needs your help and intervention.
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Your Teen's Friends Peer Influence & Peer Relationships
Positive Peer Pressure - Negative Peer Pressure Encourage Positive & Healthy Relationships - When Parents Don't Approve More Information on Peer Relationships
Everyone needs to belong — to feel connected with others and be with others who share attitudes, interests, and circumstances that resemble their own. People choose friends who accept and like them and see them in a favorable light.
Teens want to be with people their own age — their peers. During adolescence, teens spend more time with their peers and without parental supervision. With peers, teens can be both connected and independent, as they break away from their parents' images of them and develop identities of their own.
While many families help teens in feeling proud and confident of their unique traits, backgrounds, and abilities, peers are often more accepting of the feelings, thoughts, and actions associated with the teen's search for self-identity.
The influence of peers — whether positive or negative — is of critical importance in your teen's life. Whether you like it or not, the opinions of your child's peers often carry more weight than yours.
The ability to develop healthy friendships and peer relationships depends on a teen's self-identity, self-esteem, and self-reliance.
At its best, peer pressure can mobilize your teen's energy, motivate for success, and encourage your teen to conform to healthy behavior. Peers can and do act as positive role models. Peers can and do demonstrate appropriate social behaviors. Peers often listen to, accept, and understand the frustrations, challenges, and concerns associated with being a teenager.
The need for acceptance, approval, and belonging is vital during the teen years. Teens who feel isolated or rejected by their peers — or in their family — are more likely to engage in risky behaviors in order to fit in with a group. In such situations, peer pressure can impair good judgment and fuel risk-taking behavior, drawing a teen away from the family and positive influences and luring into dangerous activities.
For example, teens with ADHD, learning differences or disabilities are often rejected due to their age-inappropriate behavior, and thus are more likely to associate with other rejected and/or delinquent peers. Some experts believe that teenage girls frequently enter into sexual relationships when what they are seeking is acceptance, approval, and love.
A powerful negative peer influence can motivate a teen to make choices and engage in behavior that his or her values might otherwise reject. Some teens will risk being grounded, losing their parents' trust, or even facing jail time, just to try and fit in or feel like they have a group of friends they can identify with and who accept them. Sometimes, teens will change the way they dress, their friends, give up their values or create new ones, depending on the people they hang around with.
Some teens harbor secret lives governed by the influence of their peers. Some — including those who appear to be well-behaved, high-achieving teens when they are with adults — engage in negative, even dangerous behavior when with their peers.
Once influenced, teens may continue the slide into problems with the law, substance abuse, school problems, authority defiance, gang involvement, etc.
If your teen associates with people who are using drugs or displaying self-destructive behaviors, then your child is probably doing the same.
Encourage Healthy and Positive Relationships
It is important to encourage friendships among teens. We all want our children to be with persons who will have a positive influence, and stay away from persons who will encourage or engage in harmful, destructive, immoral, or illegal activities.
Parents can support positive peer relationships by giving their teenagers their love, time, boundaries, and encouragement to think for themselves.
Specifically, parents can show support by:
Here are some suggestions:
No matter what kind of peer influence your teen faces, he or she must learn how to balance the value of going along with the crowd (connection) against the importance of making principle-based decisions (independence)
And you must ensure that your teen knows that he or she is loved and valued as an individual at home.
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People Will Talk: The Surprising Science of Reputation by John Whitfield Balancing nature and nurture, Whitfield explores the universal goal of creating — and maintaining — an admirable reputation and gives practical strategies for building trust, credibility, and integrity.
Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential - and Endangered by Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz
More Information on Peer Relationships
Adolescents with High-Risk Sexual Attitudes Attract Peers with Similar Attitude ~ High-risk sexual behavior in adolescents appears to be influenced by the sexual attitudes of peers, and young people select friends whose attitudes about sex are consistent with their own attitudes.
Adolescents and Peer Pressure ~ Teenagers have various peer relationships, and they interact with many peer groups. Some kids give in to peer pressure because they want to be liked, to fit in, or because they worry that other kids 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. The idea that "everyone's doing it" may influence some kids to leave their better judgment, or their common sense, behind. While parents can't protect their children from experiencing peer pressure, there are steps they can take to minimize its effects.
Confusion or Clarity? Youth Culture at the Crossroads ~ If we care about kids, where they are, and where they're headed, we've got to look with them at the signposts that are catching their attention and leading them along in life. They serve as signposts for us as well, pointing the way to a land of crisis that is in desperate need of spiritual relief aid. Here are three troubling signposts -- all getting bigger, increasingly attractive, and more effective by the minute.
Emotional and Social Development Between Ages 15 and 18 ~ In a natural step from childhood to adulthood, teens begin to seek intimate relationships, which become an important part of their identity. Some teens' emotional investment in such relationships is immense, which makes them vulnerable. Parents can help by recognizing when relationships are getting more intense and by talking openly, without judgment, about the possible future effects.
Escaping or connecting? Characteristics of youth who form close online relationships ~ In this study, girls who had high levels of conflict with parents or were highly troubled were more likely to have close online relationships, as were boys who had low levels of communication with parents or were highly troubled.
Friendships, Peer Influence and Peer Pressure During the Teen Years (pdf) ~ Friendships are very much an important aspect of the teen years. Understanding the nature of peer influence can help support youth as they enter into this period and follow the path towards close friendships that are hallmarks of adolescence.
In High School, Groups Provide Identity ~ Cliques and clubs have defined school days for decades, providing a framework for friendships and prom dates and booked weekends. But for parents, such groups have always seemed alien, and counselors worry that the maze allows troubled children to mask loneliness and disaffection.
Influential Friends ~ Advice on assessing peer influence and how to address concerns about friends with your teen.
Is Your Teen on the Fringe? ~ Teens on the fringe feel like they don't fit in. They move away from the comfort of childhood friendships with hopes of joining ranks with a difficult-to-penetrate new circle of friends (e.g., cheerleaders, football team, popular kids). This can leave kids in limbo, lacking significant friendships and feeling a deep sense of loneliness. Those feelings can leave kids vulnerable to high-risk behavior, such as drug use, sexual activity, or petty crime, which they perceive as their ticket to acceptance.
Peer Pressure and Risky Behavior ~ Teens choose their friends, because of similar interests, or to make themselves more popular. Their peers influence issues such as style and activities-the focus is on fitting in. Before deciding to do something, teens often ask themselves, "what will my friends think?" This does not mean their decisions are stupid. It means that there is a trade-off between doing what one knows is right, and being accepted by peers.
The Power of Peers ~ Based on research findings, there are ways for parents and other adults to accentuate the positive roles that peers play in their children's lives, while at the same time remaining vigilant about the harmful effects that some high-risk friends can have.
Teen Peer Pressure: Raising a Peer-Pressure-Proof Child ~ Learn what kinds of peer pressure teens face, who’s most vulnerable, and how to help your son or daughter resist.
Teens More Vulnerable to Peer Influences from Popular, Well-Liked Classmates ~ In this study, researchers found that teens were particularly likely to say they would engage in aggressive and risky behaviors if they believed they were in a chat room with highly popular/liked adolescents who endorsed such behaviors. They also privately internalized the aggressive and risky attitudes of highly popular/liked peers, endorsing these attitudes even when their responses were no longer visible to others.
Teens must resist the lure of a pack instinct ~ In the face of peer pressure, saying no to bullying and other abusive and violent acts demands courage. The opposite of courage is conformity.
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