Education & Family :: Teens & Preteens |
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The Power Of Peers In Your Teen's Life |
| If peer groups can be guided in the right direction, they will help each other make good decisions. |
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In most cultures, the training of children begins in infancy and continues until adolescence, whereupon the individual enters the adult role. Even in primitive cultures, this pattern is common and often includes and initiation ceremony, a "right of passage," to mark the transition from childhood to adulthood.
In modern society, adult status comes many years after adolescence. While a young person achieves physical maturity and wants social independence, he must remain in a position of dependence. He is compelled to continue in the role of student and is not allowed to compete with adults in the job market. He is out of place in the friendship patterns of adults he has no legitimate outlet for his newly developed drives he is not allowed to do the things that adults do for enjoyment and relaxation.
Seemingly, society has no role for him, for he is not a child nor is he an adult. So while children "resign" from childhood in their early teens. They do not "enlist" in adulthood until they are fully independent, sometimes as much as a decade later. During this entire period, youth are in a cultural limbo, being neither obedient children nor responsible adults.
Out of their need to be something more than children and to achieve some independence, youth have created their own subculture. Complete with its own values, norms, language, and symbols, the subculture has become so well developed and organized that it spans continents and oceans, the unusual styles of dress and grooming, folk heroes, and slang expressions seem more foreign to the parent who lives under the same roof than to another young person thousands of miles away.
Adults continue in attempts to socialize youth but find they have less and less power, while the youth subculture seems to take an increasingly strong hold. As time goes on, the peer group all but replaces the influence of parents and other adults.
The need of adolescents to conform to peer group norms and values has often been witnessed by youth workers as well as parents. When one refers to the "tyranny of adolescents" one is expressing an awesome appreciation of the powerful energy and pressures generated by this strange social configuration called the peer group.
Adults decry their loss of influence and dream nostalgically of the family of the past where children knew their place and the elders ruled supreme. But it is not possible to turn back the clock to another day when the young person found his peer group among either children or adults. The reality must be accepted as it is: The peer group has the strongest influence over the values, attitudes, and behavior of most youth.
This peer influence might be acceptable if young people were able to succeed at operating their private subculture in a manner that did not cause concern among adults. Unfortunately, society is concerned not only with the lower-class ghetto delinquents but also with many peer patterns formed in the suburbs among young people from seemingly favorable backgrounds.
Too seldom we find a peer group composed of young people with values, maturity, stability, and judgment necessary to guide one another into happy and productive roles in the broader society. All too often it seems more like a case of the blind leading the blind, while the supposedly sighted adult stands helplessly on the sidelines. The various responses of &#
97dults in authority to the power of the peer culture merit notice.
Conflict: Perhaps the most universal response is the contest for power. With the motto "we'll show them who is boss," adults attempt to instill in the life of the young an obedience that belonged to an earlier time. As controls become restrictive, friction and conflict increase. Adults who feel they are about to lose control frequently send for reinforcements. Parents turn to schools, guidance clinics, and juvenile courts for support.
Teachers call for parents to help monitor the cafeteria and for security guards to patrol the hallways. In the end, adults may succeed in applying enough control to impose conformity, but the problems now have gone underground. It is all too easy for the young person to appease the adult with superficial compliance while still remaining basically loyal to different values of his peer group.
Liberation: Another response of adults to the peer group is that of liberation. These adults say: "Go ahead and do your own thing....You are old enough to decide for yourselves." Such adults may be enthusiastic supporters of "how wonderful today's young people are"; still they are often troubled by the recurrent feeling that perhaps youth are not yet able to meet all of the challenges of independence.
Surrender: Adults often surrender to the power of the youth subculture. Here the adult experiences feeling of futility. "There's nothing I can do; they won't listen anymore." The young person is left trying to manage his life while the adult ponders just where his approach went wrong. Joining the opposition: Another variation in adult response to the peer subculture is enlistment in the opposition. Perhaps uttering the trite slogan, "If you can't beat them, join them," the adult tries to become like the young person. The adult, struggling valiantly to imitate the youth culture (which never allows grownups as real members), is as completely out of place as he is ineffective.
Enlisting the opposition: This is the response of PPC, which assumes that all of the foregoing styles are inadequate ways of dealing with the peer subculture. Even though the peer group is the most potent influence on youth, adults have much to offer young people. Furthermore, adults should neither become locked in combat with them nor capitulate to them. Therefore, PPC seeks to encompass and win over the peer group.
An analogy comes to mind. The highly developed Japanese are of jujitsu, when mastered, enables even very small persons to deal with powerful adversaries. It is not necessary to be stronger than an opponent, since force need not be met with force. Rather, the adversary's strength and movement are channeled into a different direction to achieve the intended result. In the same way, it is not necessary to overcome the peer group's power; instead, the peer group's action is rechanneled to achieve the intended goal. Here the analogy ends, for our intention is not defeat young people but to bring forth their potentials.
Harry Vorrath developed the Positive Peer Culture (P.P.C.) theory along with Larry Brendto. Learn more about his theory at http://www.teenhelponline.com
His techniques are applied in the WRA Teen Boarding School Program
Article Source: www.activehowto.com
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Posted 2006-11-01 09:43:56 By Harry Vorrath
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