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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 and Healthy Relationships - When Parents Don't Approve What Is Your Teen Posting Online? - 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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by John Townsend
More Information on Peer Relationships
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.
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