What is Peer Pressure?
“Peers play an enormous role in children and adolescents’ social and emotional development.”
It is natural, healthy, and essential for children to have and rely on fellow peers through their course of growth and maturity.
Therefore to answer your question, Peer pressure definition is influenced by when you do something because you want to feel accepted and valued by people around you. This natural influence can be positive or negative. Sometimes, peers can help you develop and prosper in the best way and influence you positively. Coping well with peer influence allows you to have the right stability between being yourself and fitting in with your group.
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What are the Effects of Peer Pressure?
Peer pressure can be positive or negative depending upon your fellow classmates and your perception of them. Therefore there can be many different effects of being under peer pressure. Most of the time peer pressure results in negative upbringing and effects.
Kids tend to get pressurized by their own friends or classmates for doing something which their ground values do not suggest moreover they get prone to losing their self-esteem and fall into identity crises as to do stuff like bunking classes and making some serious mischief so that they can fall into what they think is a cool group. adding so they tend to have a fear of what the other person would think of him/her if not taken this step so they get very experimental on themselves in order to match their looks with someone they think is cool like dying their hair.
Other negative effects also include the tendency of teens into depression, making them anxious, and detached from their family and friends.
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A Few Examples of Negative Peer Pressure are:
- Feeling the need to dress or act a particular way.
- Using unfair means at school like cheating in exams and being unnecessarily mean.
- Forbidding new or certain people to enter your social circle.
- Taking dangerous risks while driving.
- Consuming or selling drugs or alcohol.
- Shoplifting and stealing.
- Engaging in bullying or cyberbullying.
“If you associate yourself with peer pressure or complacency, you’re destined for failure.”
~ Kevin Gates
How to Deal with Peer Pressure?
As most of the time, peer pressure suppresses a naive kid’s personality and harms their thought process. Here are some of the ways one can get rid of suppressing, perilous, and discouraging peer pressure by their fellow colleagues.
Prioritize yourself before anyone else:
There always will be people who dislike you, but also the people who think you are special, the way you are. So try not to persuade into someone else’s belief just because you want to be more like them. Build your own personality and stick to it!
‘I am not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine.’ ~Bruce Lee
Talk It Out!
Communicate with the person who is pressuring you, and let them be aware of how it makes you feel in order to discourage the pressure again. STAND UP FOR YOURSELF!
It is okay to say NO!
Build an excuse or make your mother forbid you to go in front of your peer friend. If you really think stepping away from the situation to avoid chaos is truly needed, creating excuses is the best option where you don’t even have to apologize or explain yourself too much. Take a step back and help your mental health.
Get support
Acquire assistance from a trusted adult. It could be your parents, grandparents, or teachers. The help of a trusted adult is necessary when dealing with peer pressure. This is because the adult can suggest to you accurate strategies to tackle the problem specific to your situation.
Have a supporting and permanent friends group
When you have encouraging friends they mostly lead you to the right path. True friends are also the ones who respect your decision and don’t pressurize you in the wrong direction. You can also discuss and share your problem with your trustworthy and loving friend group. Surround yourself with people who lift you higher.
Stay wise and avoid fake crowds!
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