Before I begin, I want to thank all you visitors from that great blog Free Range Kids. I love that blog; so glad I found it! I appreicate your visiting and hope you will become frequent readers.
In case you didn’t read The Tennessean on line Monday morning, this article appeared on the opinion page:
Thank you, Dwight Lewis for your May 18, column, “Risk-taking access fuels teen drug and alcohol use.” As a retired pediatrician and grandfather of 11 teens and two 20 year olds, I appreciate it. You are so right to point out the importance of friends in teen drug and alcohol use. Having said that, I think we are placing too much emphasis and blame on peer pressure.
Some years ago I asked 16 y/o Michael, how he dealt with peer pressure. His response: Peer pressure is just an excuse to do what you want even when you know you shouldn’t.
Awed, I asked him to explain. His reply again overwhelmed me: You can always find friends who want to do what you want—right or wrong. 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. No one comes up to you and says, ‘Smoke this cigarette or I’ll break your arm,’ or ‘Drink this or I won’t be your friend.’
Michael’s is not the only wise young voice waiting to be heard. In her column, “Fresh Voices,” Lynn Minton quotes 17-year-old Trent Collins as saying, “I hate all that ‘peer pressure’ nonsense. The major reason why I—or any of the people I know—started to do drugs was because we wanted to. Nobody ever talked me into it when I didn’t want to.”
However, not all studies agree with Trent or Michael. A study in the Bronx of 2,500 eleven- and twelve-year-olds indicates that for the younger kids, peer pressure was a significant factor, especially in those kids who had “difficult temperament and poor self-control and deviance-prone attitudes.” I would think these are the very kids who want to use alcohol or drugs.
Another study of 90,000 adolescents from 134 schools across the United States concluded: “Youth both pick friends who do what they want to do, and are influenced by those friends’ behaviors ….This suggests that the associa¬tion may be at least partly due to the influence of friends.” So, be wary of your kids’ friends, if they are doing things you don’t like, it usually means your kids want to do them too; birds of a feather still flock together.
Peer pressure is what a person wants it to be. I see it as an excuse not to be taken seriously. If you want your kids to be better students, better citizens, and become men and women of character don’t fall for peer pressure. In reality it exists only in the minds of those who need it to blame others rather than take responsibility for their own actions.
Think about it, did your friends ever pressure you to do things you really didn’t want to do? Mine didn’t!