Sometimes phrases are overused and lose their impact. Yet, the idea or concept thrives like an antibody. Conversations that pertain to ‘peer pressure’ so often negate power attributed to parent or teacher. To be concerned about a young person and their goings on is so apt. So, how do we help them have concern for their own circumstances effectively.
To see through the eyes of a child and seek to understand their lives is a task in and of itself. The next step is helping them be motivated. Their needs are on every level of reality, to determine what is best is a complex issue with which to deal.
Interpersonal
I’ve heard that peer pressure is not necessarily direct convincing. Friends don’t say “we should do wrong” but the tone of the communities they form, supports this idea. As a parent, be the better friend. Scrutinize and choose environments, friendship circles and activities that keep your child above the circumstance. Address topics (and people) who have influence (and authority) over your child (and their decisions)?
Impacting your family so that your children look to you for advice, is a challenge. It is not an impossible feat. It is a series of small decisions. So, if you don’t feel you’ve done a perfect job, thus far, start now. Make a few small positive efforts, not out of concern, but shared responsibility. Are they being challenged in school academically? Have they strategies to seek peaceful dynamics? Have they hobbies that are good for them?
Intrapersonal
What kinds of dialog go on inside our heads that influence decision making? Do we scrutinize who we seek approval from? Do we have any idea how to look for discernment?
If we actually thought on a daily basis that each day and each decision is of MAJOR impact to our future, and our future can be an ideal image of what WE want….fully satisfying with all the trimmings. Maybe we would be alerted by negative decisions that chip away at our dream with things like strife, mischief, and pain…
Lingual
What you say defines you: it hides you, if forms ideas of you, it pronounces your needs. How we go after dialog is interesting, the motive for exchanges. When do you feel you under talk, over talk, or chit chat away? When should you be care free in conversations? When should you watch what you say? Are there conversation risks to take or dialogs you inadvertently avoid?
When you consider all we know and can do it is amazing that we do not take conversations more seriously. Thinking about advisement is a particularly crucial step to thinking through. Are there some people you dismiss that you should rather heed.
Spatial
Spatially arranging your “stuff” may give you the opportunity to contend with less comfortable emotions. In other words, take hurt feeling to diagrams, and planning and cutting paper. If feelings of betrayal are left unacknowledged, they may just find a place in your value system. The feelings, now values, now rebellion will wish to be subsided by your own misbehavior. Maybe your life plan will incur the damage. A good think through may be coupled with rearranging, clearing, designing.
Visual
Depicting what we are dealing with visually is: soothing, interesting, and is the ‘good kind’ of communicative. We are in need of expressing ourselves on so many levels. Those that feel misunderstood do wonders with art: there are countless mediums.
Gallery visiting is an interesting hobby. Taking an objective view of other people’s art is a great way to deepen conversation. Different vantages are like stepping stones to insight.
Kinesthetic
Dance, yoga, and exercise are so useful. Growing in a discipline that is kinesthetic is a good way to avoid peer pressure that lead to promiscuity. Instruction with specific goals and performance recitals are something everyone can celebrate.
‘Being involved’ is a family’s responsibility. A young person should never be left to their own devices. What fun to share in their development.
Musical
Kids turn to music. It explicates feelings, it circumscribes the soul, it blesses our minds. Rhythm, rhyme, timing, vocals…all depict relationships that keep us curiously engaged. Music invites the inarticulate.
Music is known for it’s healing properties. The idea of sharing in music: whether concerts, lessons or appreciation therein…is worth the time. Sharing a print out of lyrics is interesting, investigative, and insightful.
Logical
A teen ruminating: “I need to reason though life. Someone else’s logic may not benefit me. Sometimes it is the loudest, not the most logical that gets the attention.”
Sometimes it is the least righteous that gets the control. How do they remain logical and cool? What pulls on our characters may or may not help us persevere through difficulty. It begins subtle.
Existential
I have a soul. Drugs and sex can take it away. Some circumstances seem more benign than they are.
Some people build credit with discredit. Some call insecurities immature. They use that to gain power and pull on us and our decisions. These are the ones that need leadership, not a leadership role. Some may even ‘wage war against your soul’ by introducing you to a life that is a lower level than what you could have attained.
Connecting with your child is imperative. Too many drugs give youngsters the opportunity to explore what is “out there” by being wooed into out-of-control environments that are in the wrong people‘s control. At-risk situations created by peer pressure maybe shouldn’t be conceptually and verbally acknowledged potentially attacking developing youngsters with logic and reasoning, rather superseded by time with you.
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