The Peer Pressure on Smart Teens
[This post is excerpted from Why Smart Teens Hurt. To learn more, please take a look!]
Nowadays we use the phrase “peer pressure” to stand for a teen’s spider-web of peer interactions. But much more goes on than the phrase “peer pressure” can capture. The world of peers is where experimentation happens, where what you wear and how you look matter, where gossip and sexually transmitted diseases circulate, where bullying is a fact of life, where one measures oneself, tests oneself, and feels the piercing gaze of a thousand eyes. Nothing about peer relationships is straightforward. For some smart teens, there is also nothing about them to recommend them. Martin, a coaching client, explained:
“When I looked around, I couldn’t find a single place to fit in. These were kids my own age, who had grown up in the same city as me and in the same era as me, watching the same things, listening to the same music, and yet they could have been from another planet, as far as I was concerned. I understood their words but not why they were saying them. I understood their interests but not why those things interested them. All day long I was shaking my head internally, going ‘Who are these kids?’ and ‘What’s wrong with me?’ I experienced no peer pressure because these kids weren’t my peers, they were aliens from outer space.”
John, a coaching client, had a very different experience. John explained:
“I was smart but I was also good at baseball. That allowed me to fit in and not get tagged with any egghead labels. I played the role of jock. I was a natural third baseman—good reflexes, a good arm, an instinct for guarding the line—and I was good in the clutch. So, I was pretty much a hero type. The super-huge downside was the whole jock, paramilitary, initiation, cruelty-called-pranks side of team sports. It is extreme to say it, but you could read fascism in the way the coach coached and in the was that players responded. Finally, I rebelled, and that was the end of my ‘good’ high school experience. I went into books—and suddenly I had no friends, just about from one day to the next.”
Nowadays a peer is someone in chemistry class but also someone five thousand miles away with whom a smart teen is flirting. And that faraway ‘peer’ may be a forty-four-year-old man in disguise. No teen can completely avoid this peer tornado, even if he wishes that he could, because he must pass among his peers and interact with his peers daily. That is his world, like it or not.
For parents
Given that you can hardly make sense of your own life and your own relationships, what are you to make of your smart teen’s relationships, most of which are not visible to you? You don’t see them, you don’t hear about them, that whole secret world goes on completely out of view. Yes, you may get a glimpse of your smart teen’s world at the track meet where she’s competing or at the band concert where she’s playing. But that will be a hint only. All the rest would require an archaeological dig.
And your smart teen won’t let you dig there. But you can inquire. What might your opening salvo be? Certainly not, “How’s school?” But maybe some out-of-left-field inquiry like “Anyone bullying you at school?” or “Have you found a nice clique?” or “What’s the difference between a pier and a peer?”? (Possible answer: one you walk on and the other walks on you.) Of course, you wouldn’t expect your smart teen to stop everything and really answer. But who knows, maybe later that evening she will want to chat. That would be lovely, wouldn’t it?
For teens
You may be a smart teen who has a lot of dynamic interactions with your peers, because you want those interactions, because you’re trying to get along, or because those interactions are forced upon you. Or you may be a smart teen who keeps himself separate from his peers and hardly notices their existence.
In the first instance, you’ll have to deal with the rivalries, the competitive energy, the gossip, the petty cruelties, the romantic entanglements of that busy, closed society. In the second instance, you may find your sense of isolation, alienation, and loneliness exacerbated by your social distancing.
Because of your powerful need to maintain your individuality, because of your natural ability to see through humbug, and because of the other qualities that combine to make you an outsider and a rebel, if you repress all that and try to fit in, you will fit in only at the cost of emotional distress. And if you act on those impulses, the chances are slim that you will be able to fit in or that you will want to fit in.
Is there some possible middle ground? There might be. It might be that you can keep the full universe of your peers at a distance but still have an excellent time with some sub-set of that universe, like the drama club, the chess club, the math club, the French club, or the band. That sub-set could perhaps be your world and those teens your self-selected peers. That has a chance of working!
Peer pressure matters. This is a place to be smart. Your brain knows how to calculate the consequences of actions. What is the downside of hanging with the druggies? What is the downside of using your body to make friends? What is the downside of choosing the popular kids, if they are cruel and take pleasure in humiliation? You are smart enough to see which way is up. Use the freedom that you know you cherish to free yourself from peer relationships that are bankrupt or that harm you.
**
[This post is excerpted from Why Smart Teens Hurt. To learn more, please take a look!]
iStock image
The post The Peer Pressure on Smart Teens appeared first on The Good Men Project.