Peer Influence & Peer Relationships

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. 

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.

A child who reaches age 21 without

smoking, abusing alcohol or using drugs

is virtually certain never to do so.

- Joseph A. Califano, Jr., Chairman and President,

The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University

Alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence are not only adult problems — they also affect a significant number of adolescents and young adults between the ages of 12 and 20, even though drinking under the age of 21 is illegal.

The average age when youth first try alcohol is 11 years for boys and 13 years for girls.

By age 14, 41 percent of children have had least one drink.

The average age at which Americans begin drinking regularly is 15.9 years old.

Teens who begin drinking before age 15 are five times more likely to develop alcohol dependence than those who begin drinking at age 21.

An early age of drinking onset is also  associated with alcohol-related violence not only among persons under age 21 but among adults as well.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Prevent and Reduce Underage Drinking.  HHS, Office of the Surgeon General, 2007.

While drinking may be a singular problem behavior for some, research suggests that for others it may be an expression of general adolescent turmoil that includes other problem behaviors and that these behaviors are linked to unconventionality, impulsiveness, and sensation-seeking.

Binge drinking, often beginning around age 13, tends to increase during adolescence, peak in young adulthood (ages 18-22), then gradually decrease.  Individuals who increase their binge drinking from age 18 to 24 and those who consistently binge drink at least once a week during this period may have problems attaining the goals typical of the transition from adolescence to young adulthood (e.g., marriage, educational attainment, employment, and financial independence).

Dependence on alcohol and other drugs is also associated with several mental health problems,  such as:

• depression

• anxiety

• oppositional defiant disorder (ODD)

• antisocial personality disorder

Whether anxiety and depression lead to, or are consequences of, alcohol abuse is not known.

Alcohol use among adolescents has also been associated with considering, planning, attempting, and completing suicide.  Research does not indicate whether drinking causes suicidal behavior, only that the two behaviors are correlated.

Parents’ drinking behavior and favorable attitudes about drinking have been positively associated with adolescents’ initiating and continuing drinking.  Children who were warned about alcohol by their parents and children who reported being closer to their parents were less likely to start drinking.

Lack of parental support, monitoring, and communication have been significantly related to frequency of drinking, heavy drinking, and drunkenness among adolescents.  Harsh, inconsistent discipline and hostility or rejection toward children have also been found to significantly predict adolescent drinking and alcohol-related problems.

It has been estimated that over three million teenagers are out-and-out alcoholics.  Several million more have a serious drinking problem that they cannot manage on their own.

Annually, more than 5,000 deaths of people under age 21 are linked to underage drinking.

The three leading causes of death for 15- to 24-year-olds are automobile crashes, homicides and suicides — alcohol is a leading factor in all three.

Peer drinking and peer acceptance of drinking have also been associated with adolescent drinking.

The most common and effective way for an individual to combat his or her addictive behaviors is through a self-help support group, with advice and support from a health care professional.  Treatment should also involve family members because family history often plays a role in the origins of the problem and successful treatment cannot take place in isolation.

The National Drug and Alcohol Treatment Referral Routing Service provides a toll-free telephone number, 1-800-662-HELP (4357), offering various resource information. Through this service you can speak directly to a representative concerning alcohol and other drugs, request printed material on alcohol or other drugs, or obtain local substance abuse treatment referral information in your State.

Information provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Surgeon General and the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information.  To learn more about alcohol and other drugs of abuse, contact NCADI  at 1-800-729-6686.

Young people who don’t complete high school face many more problems in later life than do people who graduate. While national leaders have demanded that schools, communities, and families make a major effort to retain students, the dropout rate remains high. A report from the Educational Testing Service, One-Third of a Nation: Rising Dropout Rates and Declining Opportunities, warns little is being done to stem rising dropout rates and their economic costs. This report also found:

From 1990 to 2000, the high school completion rate declined in all but seven states. In 10 states, it declined by 8 percentage points or more.

In high school completion rates, the United States has now slipped to 10th place in the world.

On average, only one certified counselor is available for each 500 students in all schools, and one counselor to 285 students in high schools. And they have many assignments that leave little time to spend with students at risk of dropping out.

A “bulge” in enrollments in Grade 9 indicates more students nationally are being flunked to repeat Grade 9. This may be reflected in the significant shift toward younger, less educated dropouts than in the past, that face more difficulty in getting jobs.

In 1971, male dropouts, working full time, earned $35,087 (in 2002 dollars), falling to $23,903 in 2002, a decline in earnings of 35 percent. Earnings for female dropouts fell from $19,888 to $17,114.

There has been a shift in the awarding of GED credentials to younger individuals, and the program has been revised to make it more rigorous.

Franklin P. Schargel, Tony Thacker, and John S. Bell, authors of From At Risk to Academic Excellence: What Successful Leaders Do, believe that America’s schools can improve and present examples of excellence — educational leaders who firmly believe that all children can succeed, schools that effectively meet the needs of nontraditional learners, and educational communities that don’t give up on students who are at risk of dropping out. In their book, the authors identify individual risk factors — personal characteristics, habits, and experience; family situations; and peer and community relationships — and then address the factors over which school leaders can more directly influence — school climate and culture, school connectedness, school safety, attendance, and school achievement.

Risk Factors of Dropping Out

Previous School Experience

Absent 20 or more times during the previous school year

Retained in at least one grade

Low grades (Cs and Ds or below)

Disciplinary problems or disruptive behavior

Has attended five or more schools during a lifetime

Personal or Psychological Characteristics

External locus of control (i.e., being in agreement with others’ perceptions — believed or actual — of their individual ability, worth, or value)

Low self-esteem

At least one disability (e.g., ADHD, learning disabilities)

Poor peer support

Depression or other emotional problems

Early sexual activity or promiscuity

Substance abuse

Adult and Family Responsibilities of Student

Has a child

Must work to help support the family

Family Background and Cohesion

Single-parent home

Permissive parenting

Poor parent-child relationships

Family receives public assistance

Neither parent nor guardian is employed

Primary language of the family is not English

A sibling has dropped out of school

Parent(s) did not graduate from high school

Parental discipline, monitoring, concern, encouragement, and consistency have also be linked to academic achievement. Children whose parents consistently set high standards work harder and do better in school. Additionally, an authoritative parenting style, characterized by warmth and concern coupled with boundaries (i.e., clear rules and limits), has been shown to have a positive effect on academic achievement.

School-Caused Risk Factors

Ineffective discipline system

Overburdened school counselors

Negative school climate

Retention and/or suspensions used to control discipline, rather than addressing causes

Disregarding student learning styles

Passive instructional strategies

Lack of relevant curriculum

Low expectations of student achievement

Fear of school violence

Excerpted from From At Risk to Academic Excellence: What Successful Leaders Do by Franklin P. Schargel, Tony Thacker, and John S. Bell.