What Is the Peer Pressure Influence on Teenagers?

During adolescence, youth are aiming to figure out who they are, assert their independence and determine where and with whom they fit in. Peer pressure encourages youngsters to engage in activities they wouldn't otherwise, for better or for worse. Most often, peer pressure is blamed for for pushing teens toward bad behaviors.

  1. Negative

    • Negative peer pressures on teens worry parents throughout their children's teenage years. These pressures can result in teens partaking in activities that either hadn't occurred to them, or that they don't really want to do, because of some desire to fit in with other peers involved in the act. Common examples include fashion, music, slang and teasing, along with more serious activities like ditching school, trying drugs, cheating, having sex or dieting excessively.

    Positive

    • Peers might also push one another to pursue positive endeavors that had seemed intimidating or that they simply hadn't thought to pursue on their own. A student who has a good rapport with his classmates and great ideas for school improvements might share those ideas with his buddies, for example, but not move beyond that. Yet if once someone in his peer group suggests those same ideas, he might see peer approval and runs for class president. Positive peer pressure may also involve friends preventing one another from getting involved in activities they shouldn't do. For instance, one member of the track team might catch a teammate about to drink alcohol and remind him that the team is counting on him to keep his body healthy for the upcoming meet.

    Prominence

    • A Nickelodeon and Time magazine survey of 951 students in 2000 found that 48 percent felt pressure to cheat on tests and schoolwork, while 36 percent felt pressure to smoke marijuana and 40 percent felt pressure to have sex.

      A 2005 national survey of 46,000 13- to 18-year-olds, conducted by the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, found that 37 percent reported fitting in as their most stressful source of pressure -- which included skipping school, relationships, violence and other common concerns.

    Resistance

    • A 2011 study by researchers at University of California Davis, University of California Los Angeles and the University of Oregon found that during the teen period of heightened peer pressure, regions of the brain adapt in a way that bolsters teens' resistance to risky activities. By analyzing self-reports on peer pressure resistance and participation in delinquent behavior, along with MRI scans of pre-teen subjects' brains as they aged from 10 to 13, the researchers discovered increased activity in the ventral striatum and ventral median areas of the prefrontal cortex during the course of those three years. One of those areas, the ventral striatum, is associated with reward processing, and its increase in activity was correlated with fewer instances of delinquent behaviors. Therefore, the researchers concluded, it seems that although adolescence is typically regarded as a period of high susceptibility to peer pressure, it is also a period during which the teens' abilities to resist such pressures are becoming stronger.

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