Social and School Pressures

The social and school pressures for adolescents now-a-days are pretty harsh. They come from friends, teachers, even family.

School pressures, especially as a teenager, are absolutely horrible. The pressures from parents and teachers to do well in school and succeed are as high as the sky itself. On top of that, the social pressures to fit in! Ugh! It’s all too much! The pressures to wear the latest trends and have the cool hairstyles pushes us teens very hard; especially the teenagers whose families don’t have the means to support all that spending. But that’s not all; now, female teens have, on top of wearing the right shirt and shoes, the worry of having the right weight. I know from personal experience that being told more than once over a period of time that they way you are, body wise, isn’t good enough and that people would like you better if you lost a couple dozen pounds hurts like heck. It doesn’t make the pressure to lose weight any better by going into any establishes that sells magazines and seeing models the size of toothpicks or seeing all of your most of your female friends being ‘skinny’ and noticing all the attention they grab over yourself.  This is one of the main reasons why teenage girls are anorexic and/or bulimic.  All I can say now is that the pressures that we receive today are exceeding and will probably never go away, but in fact increase.

Peer Pressure

Peer pressure—something everyone knows of and has experienced at least once in their lifetime. Children, teens, even adults go through it.

Peer pressure refers to the influence exerted by a peer group in encouraging a person to change his or her attitudes, values, or behavior in order to conform to group norms, according to the dictionary.

Though it affects everyone,Peer pressure, is at its greatest among adolescents; for the reason that at this point in time teenagers and children are very easy to shape and mold because their minds are still developing. Also because this is the era in our lifetime when one of the things we want most is to fit in, no one like to be an outcast—even the people who purposely consider themselves just that.  Now, one might think that peer pressure is just persuasion with a little extra push, but, the way i see it (opinions may vary),  persuasion is more like the vacuum man coming to your door persuading you to buy his newest vacuum, while peer pressure is a peer that is encouraging, or pressuring, you to buy a vacuum after you already said you didn’t like it—hence peer pressure.

Peer pressure isn’t always exerted by a friend or someone your age—it can be from anyone.  Peer pressure can be as simple as a friend telling you to buy a shirt you don’t want because everyone as has it and it looks ‘rad’, ‘groovy’, or whatever the youngster are saying now-a-days or be as serious as a friend telling you to lie, steal, or do something very extreme that you know is wrong and against your own morals.

Peer pressure can be caused by just wanting friends, being afraid to say no, or just personal insecurities. Peer pressure is wrong; we all know it, yet still today, especially in our society, we are still a victim. Stop peer pressure! Listen to big bubba! (well, just the last line.)