The wonders of peer pressure
Thanks to peer pressure, there are a lot of cool dudes walking around who look like they didn’t have enough time to get their britches pulled up when their house caught on fire. Because of peer pressure teenage girls wear clothes reflecting their own personality … and that of their 20 best friends.
Thanks to peer pressure, when I went to pick up kids on wintry days in Northern Indiana I had to do a double and triple take to sort out which of the kids in a dark olive green, hooded jacket wearing a purple hat and black rubber boots was mine.
But in spite of all that, I am all in favor of peer pressure – positive peer pressure that is. With six children, I have seen peer pressure work to improve my children in ways that I could not because I was “just mom” and what did I know.
I encouraged each of my pre-schoolers to develop their manual dexterity with coloring books, drawing pads, scrap paper and a heaping supply of pencils, crayons and markers. But at least one had very little interest – until he went to kindergarten and saw that the other kids knew and could do so much more than he could with those crayons. Suddenly, he began stretching bedtime with the hall light to help him see as he practiced coloring in the shadows of the bottom bunk. He was learning to stay inside the lines and fill up all that space. He colored page after page of pictures until he caught up with his class and then his interest waned again. Even having older brothers did not make as much of an impression on him as sitting in a classroom with a lot of other kids his age and realizing they were doing stuff he was not.
A similar thing happened with another of the boys. After a rather traumatic accident, he was given a list of exercises to do at home to awaken the damaged nerves and muscles. I worked with him faithfully, “walk the beam, play with the ball, ride your trike.” He did it all but the year he went to kindergarten, the teacher had a reading readiness program that included a couple months of reading readiness exercises to increase physical coordination and control: Walk the beam, catch the ball, bounce the ball, jump rope.
Overnight he gained skills and agility that I feared were lost forever. The teacher commented on his great leaps forward in physical coordination. He could see that his skills fell far short of other kids his age. His quest to be like everyone else his size gave him the impetus to acquire the skills he should have regained, but had not been interest in working on by himself at home.
Peer pressure is cited as the reason many begin smoking, but it also goes the other way. I know because a couple times I have heard teen-agers say, “I quit smoking when my friends said they didn’t like it, so I decided not to do it.”
Yeah, Yeah, I know it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes the kid shows up at school, focuses on the ones who are doing everything and anything – except what the teacher wants and stays in trouble forever. But for every kid like that there are also the ones who decide to study, to take the harder subjects, to try a sport or academic subject they would never consider otherwise, just because everyone else is doing it and they don’t want to be left behind.