A teen ager once told me, “Peer pressure is just an excuse to do what you know you shouldn’t.” Then he added, “There is really no such thing as peer pressure.” I wasn’t sure if I believed him. But he continued, “It’s like this: If you want to smoke or do something dumb like that, are you going to hang out with people who don’t smoke and have them listen to you cough and tell you how dumb you are? No, you’re going to find an idiot like yourself who smokes and you’ll hang around with him and talk about how cool you all are. No one comes up to you and says, ‘Smoke this cigarette or I’ll break your arm.’ They usually don’t even say, ‘Smoke this or I won’t be your friend.’ Most of the time people don’t care about you, or what you do. They only care about themselves. You can always find friends who want to do what you want—right or wrong.”
Since then, I have talked to many kids and adults about peer pressure. After they have had a minute to think about it they agree with that teen. The thing you want to do comes first, then you find someone who wants to do it, too. That togetherness makes it more comfortable and you know that society has already given “peer pressure” a pass as an excuse. If you don’t want to do the thing, you will find friends who don’t want to do it either. You’ll end up flocking with birds like yourself.
It’s much the same with positive peer pressure. Here again, you know what you should do but don’t want to do it. For example, if your peers are good students you will try to be a good student, too. And if your peers are poor students who don’t study, you may not study, but remember, you didn’t want to study in the first place, so again, the teen was right.
Now, there are some things that kids don’t really think are important, things that are neither right or wrong. Kids don’t care if they want to do them or not. Things like color of clothes, the way they wear their hair, or sandals or flip-flops, for instance. If their friends are all wearing shorts to a snowball fight, they will most likely wear shorts too. But that’s not something important enough for them to have a “pre-snowball fight” opinion on.
So, the lesson is: Make sure your kids know what is right, what is wrong, and what doesn’t make any difference. Then neither you nor they will have to worry about peer pressure.
Who said parenting wasn’t easy?
Taken from Messengers in denim chapter 8