Peer Pressure in Teenagers Essay Example

As teenagers grow old, they are faced with some challenging decisions. Some do not have a clear right or wrong answer like whether to play basketball or soccer, while on the other hand, other decisions involve serious moral questions like whether to try drugs or even cut class. Making decisions is hard for most people, it is even harder when other people get involved and try to put pressure and influence the decision-making process. Peer pressure is when people who are your age try to influence how you act to get you to do something. It is common among teenagers although adults also get influenced by their peers even if they do not realize it. Teens are prone to peer pressure not because they are incapable of making rational decisions but because they seek social acceptance more than adults do. Peer pressure either be positive or negative based on the influence one peer or a group has on another person. However, peer pressure among teenagers is often a negative influence; this influence is always strong because teenagers are taken from their homes by various activities as well as school, so they spend time with friends than their parents or siblings. As teenagers get independent, their peers naturally tend to play a greater role in their lives. Several factors are always in play, making some teenagers more susceptible to peer pressure than others. Gulati, et al. (2017)

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

First and foremost, during early adolescence, most teenagers get easily drawn to immediate rewards of a particular choice and are less attentive to the potential risks involved. This happens because almost all of these teenagers are still learning to control their impulses hence teenagers who get time to think before making a decision always end up making the right objective decisions in most cases. For those teenagers who have to make decisions in the heat of the moment or even in social situations, the decisions they make are influenced by external factors in their environment such as peers. Hence they tend to take more risks in their choices and are subjective in the decisions that they make.

Secondly, subjective social status influences the rate of the vulnerability of a teenager to peer pressure; this is because how liked and respected a teenager feels in their peer group has a direct effect on the decisions they make. A teenager that feels that he or she has low levels of social status is more easily influenced by their friends than another teen who believes they are more liked by their peers. This is evident for females and males as it is only natural to want to be liked and respected, hence the difference in susceptibility to peer pressure. Normally in a peer group, there is one individual who is considered to be cool, and all the other individuals in the peer group adopt his way of doing things, with the aim of getting the same respect the cool friend gets.

Also, teenagers who feel socially excluded have difficulty in regulating such strong negative emotions, when their peers try to influence their actions and decisions especially on matters related to drugs they easily go with the crowd. They might go with the crowd as a way of coping with distress or as a way of fitting into the drug-using peer group and hence gain social status. This is not the case with those teens who are socially accepted and have friends, because they always get closure from their friends and can efficiently regulate the strong negative emotions making them less susceptible to peer pressure as compared to the other teenager. Bonein, et al. (2015)

Moreover, age differences and development change may make teenagers vary in their resistance to peer pressure. Across all demographic groups, resistance to peer influences always increases linearly from the age of 14 to 18, meaning that as teenager grow old, they develop an ability to stand up for what they believe to be right without fear of going against the choices of their friends. Individually, the heightened significance of peers in the life of an adolescent makes teenagers care more of what their friends think of them hence most teenagers are more likely to go along with the crowd to avoid being rejected. As the teenager grows, this way of perceptions fades thus making adolescent groups susceptibility to peer influence different.

Conclusion

It is evident that teenagers engage in risky behavior when they are together as they are often encouraging themselves either physically or even emotionally to make decisions that are similar regardless of the risks involved. Apart from the desire to fit in and impress others especially their friends, teenagers are also very conscious of others watching them and even evaluating them all the time. Many factors are often in play and hence bringing the variation in the susceptibility of teenagers to pressure from their peers. Teenagers who have healthy self-esteem, reasonable levels of self-confidence and strong relationships with their parents are less susceptible to the influences of peer pressure whether negative or positive because the decision that they make is always objective.

Works Cited

Bonein, Aurelie, and Laurent Denant-Boemont. "Self-control, commitment and peer pressure: a laboratory experiment." Experimental Economics 18.4 (2015): 543-568.

Gulati, Shruti. "Impact of Peer Pressure on Buying Behaviour." Int. J. Res. Granthaalayah 5.6 (2017): 280-291.

Weichold, Karina, et al. "The effectiveness of the life skills program is for the prevention of adolescent tobacco use: The mediating role of yielding to peer pressure." The Journal of Early Adolescence 36.7 (2016): 881-908.