Personal Development - Adolescents and Peer Pressure -

Overview of Lesson
Last lesson we looked at what personal development is and it’s various stages. We discuss infancy and early personal development as well as early to late childhood development.

This lesson we are going to look at the next stage of personal development: Adolescents more specific peer pressure in adolescence.

What is Adolescence?
Adolescence is a transitional stage of human development that occurs between childhood and adulthood. Teenagers (ages 13-19 years) are usually adolescent, though in some individual, puberty may extent a few years beyond the teenage years, and in some individuals puberty begins in the pre-teen years.

Because adolescents are experiencing various strong cognitive and physical changes, for the first time in their lives they may start to view their friends, their peer group, as more important and influential than their parents. Because of peer pressure, they may sometimes indulge in activities not deemed socially acceptable.

What is Peer Pressure?
Peer pressure is the social pressure from friends or other people to accept certain beliefs or act in certain ways in order to be accepted.

How and why do peers pressure?
Everyone gives into peer pressure at one time or another, but why do people sometimes do things they didn’t want to do? Here are a few reasons. They:
˗ Are afraid of being rejected by others
˗ Want to be like and don’t want to lose a friend
˗ Want to appear grown up
˗ Don’t want to be made fun of

Friends have a big influence on our lives, but sometimes they push us to do things we may not want to do. The first step to standing up to peer pressure is to understand it. The four main types of peer pressure is:
1. Rejection – threatening to end a friendship or relationship. This pressure can be hard to resist as nobody wants to lose friends.
2. Reasoning – telling a person reasons why they should try something or why it would be okay if they did it i.e. “your parents would never find out”
3. Put downs – insulting or calling a person names to make them feel bad i.e. “you’re such a baby”
4. Unspoke pressure – is something you feel without anyone saying anything to you. You feel unspoken pressure if you want to do the same things you see others doing.

Positive and Negative Peer Pressure
The influence of peers is of critical importance in an adolescent’s life.

Peer Pressure in the Classroom
It is important to make sure negative peer pressure doesn’t happen in your classroom. I can make teaching the students a difficult task for example group activities may not work.

A teaching can declare the classroom a “Positive Peer Pressure Zone” and that you will be on the lookout for examples of positive and negative peer pressure. To help implement this system reward the students for their positivity and invite the students at the end of each lesson to identify anyone who encourages positive peer pressure.

Conclusion
To conclude this lesson, can anyone name some information we discussed in today’s lesson?

Are there any questions?