Show Me Your Friends
Young people take their cues from other young people.
We did the same when we were teenagers and, if we look back, we may recall learning valuable lessons from interacting with our peers and emulating them. We may also remember crossing swords with parents and guardians who questioned our choice of friends and the values we shared with them.
As adults we are aware of the effect peer influence can exert on young people who, in the process of creating their own identities, seek role models amongst their contemporaries. That might be the girl popular with the boys, the boy who clashes with authority or the crowd with the street cred and the designer clothes. It might not be the classmate who wins prizes and gets on famously with parents and teachers.
We can’t choose our children’s friends but parents and guardians can find resources to help young people understand and, if necessary, resist negative peer pressure that can be exerted on them at times by their peers. The Seven Principles of RESPECTisms is one such resource. The consequences of conforming to the tastes and values of age-mates could be as innocuous as a style of dress, but the most well-adjusted and sensible young people can get caught up in antisocial behaviour, by deed or simply by association.
Bullying, defiance of authority, truancy and under-achievement at school are all phenomena that are frequently directly linked to peer pressure. Parents and guardians can address – or even better, prevent – such problems with resources that help to equip young people with a set of insights and skills. Describing the The Seven Principles of RESPECTisms novel as “thoughtful and inspirational”, one reader observed that it is a resource “that explores the pressures of life that face not only young people but adults as well”.
Adolescents are vulnerable in diverse ways to the currents of youth culture (and it is a ‘culture’, even if we don’t always like all of its aspects). Sharing those cultural values satisfies the deep-seated psychological need to belong. To reject them can mean painful personal rejection. To avoid this, young people will often over-ride their personal preferences and allow themselves to be coerced, in order to fit in. Reinforcing a young person’s evolving sense of identity and self-worth is a key way to empower him or her to withstand peer pressure.
The Seven Principles of RESPECTisms engages with youth culture to teach these life skills, in a structured way and so that young people can clearly appreciate the benefits for themselves. The stories in The Seven Principles of RESPECTisms describe the fictional experiences of seven young people. By participating in the very real choices and struggles they face, readers and listeners can relate their dilemmas directly to their own lives.
Do they want to be like Peter, who seeks the acceptance he finds lacking at home within a group of people who get in trouble with the law? Is their schoolwork suffering because, like Eddie, they succumb to pressure to slack off and look cool? Or are they like Sarah, whose shaky sense of self and problems with saying ‘no’ allow others to take advantage of her?
There are limits to how much we can protect our young people from the causes of physical and emotional harm but, by attending to their self-awareness and emotional development and nurturing a greater understanding of their world and people around them, we can help them help themselves. Like Peter, young people can recognise that some peers are actually ‘frienemies’, whose friendship is not worth the consequences.
By Ken Barnes
