Focus Adolescent Services: Your Teen's Friends

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.

Positive Peer Pressure

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.

Negative Peer Pressure

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:

Having a positive relationship with your teen. When parent-teen interactions are characterized by warmth, kindness, consistency, respect, and love, the relationship will flourish, as will the teen's self-esteem, mental health, spirituality, and social skills.
Being genuinely interested in your teen's activities. This allows parents to know their teen's friends and to monitor behavior, which is crucial in keeping teens out of trouble. When misbehavior does occur, parents who have involved their children in setting family rules and consequences can expect less flack from their children as they calmly enforce the rules. Parents who, together with their children, set firm boundaries and high expectations may find that their children's abilities to live up to those expectations grow.
Encouraging independent thought and expression. In this way, teens can develop a healthy sense of self and an enhanced ability to resist peer pressure.

When Parents Don't Approve

You may not be comfortable about your son or daughter's choice of friends or peer group. This may be because of their image, negative attitudes, or serious behaviors (such as alcohol use, drug use, truancy, violence, sexual behaviors).

Here are some suggestions:

Get to know the friends of your teen. Learn their names, invite them into your home so you can talk and listen to them, and introduce yourself to their parents.
Do not attack your child's friends. Remember that criticizing your teen's choice of friends is like a personal attack.
Help your teen understand the difference between image (expressions of youth culture) and identity (who he or she is).
Keep the lines of communication open and find out why these friends are important to your teenager.
Check whether your concerns about their friends are real and important.
If you believe your concerns are serious, talk to your teenager about behavior and choices -- not the friends.
Encourage your teen's independence by supporting decision-making based on principles and not other people.
Let your teen know of your concerns and feelings.
Encourage reflective thinking by helping your teen think about his or her actions in advance and discussing immediate and long-term consequences of risky behavior.
Remember that we all learn valuable lessons from mistakes.

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.

Boundaries with Teens

by John Townsend

Dr. Townsend shows parents how to bring control to an out-of-control family life, how to set limits and still be loving parents, how to define legitimate boundaries for the family, and how to instill in teens a godly character. He gives important keys for establishing healthy boundaries — the bedrock of good relationships, maturity, safety, and growth for teens and the adults in their lives.

How to Really Parent Your Teenager

by Ross Campbell

Dr. Campbell offers a guidebook of positive, proven strategies for real-world problems. Parents will learn how to spot depression and anticipate rebellion, how to discuss sexuality and keep anger in check, and most importantly, how to maintain communication and communicate love.

More Information

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.

Cliques Make Fitting In a Tough Task for Teens in High School ~ The popular clique is the largest, possibly containing overlapping subgroups around a leader and perhaps a best friend. The status of the rest of the group fluctuates. Closed and exclusive, these groups are the cool kids whose leader can cast other members out. Then there are those who hang out around the popular clique, seeking even temporary membership. And finally, there is a small group of true outsiders, isolated kids who eat alone in the lunchroom and risk the lowest self-esteem.

Close Adolescent Friendships May Moderate Suicidal Ideation ~ Relationships with friends play a significant role in whether teenage girls think about attempting suicide but have little impact on suicidal thoughts among boys. both boys and girls were more likely to attempt suicide if they had a friend who attempted suicide.

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.

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.

Friendships play key role in suicidal thoughts of girls ~ Research has found that girls were nearly twice as likely to think about suicide if they had only a few friends and felt isolated from their peers. Girls were also more likely to consider suicide if their friends were not friends with each other.

Illegal Drug Use Patterns are Important to Adolescents When Selecting Friends ~ This study looks at how teens from various ethnic groups differ in their selection of similar friends.

The Importance of Friendship ~ Peers and friends are not the same thing. Friendships normally exist within the larger social structure of peer relationships.

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.

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.

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.

Researchers Link Teen Sex to Early Friendships, Steady Dating ~ The nature of preteen friendships can play a key role in determining whether or not a child will engage in sexual activity early in adolescence. Researchers found that boys who had mostly female friends when they were preteens were more likely to have had sex by age 16 than were other boys. However, the same wasn’t true for girls who as preteens had mostly male friends. Going steady in early adolescence was also linked to having sex as a young teen.

Social Adjustment and Peer Pressures for Gifted Children ~ This article addresses three issues: 1) What research says about gifted children and peer relationships; 2) How much involvement parents should have in influencing their children's peer relationships; and 3) What parents can do when gifted children are in the "wrong" peer group.

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.