Peer pressure is one of the many things that could change your life forever. Take it from someone who knows from personal experiences. It could affect you if other people easily influence you, like if you are a people pleaser. You just can’t say no to your friends, because if you do you might be worried your friends will get upset with you. That’s when you know they aren’t your real friends.
Your peers might come up to you and ask you to try something, or do something that you shouldn’t be doing. For example, skipping class, drinking under age, doing drugs, going somewhere that you shouldn’t be going, etc. In your heart you know that it’s the wrong thing to do, but like I said before, you don’t want your friends to get mad at you if you do say no to them.
If you give in to peer pressure you might end up where you never thought you would. Say if you break the law somehow, and it is more serious then you thought, you could end up going to juvie. That’s a place where no kid wants to go in their life. You need to live your life to the fullest, not live like a prisoner.
In junior high and high school, you are at that stage where you care about what people think of you. I’m not saying everyone is like this, but some people have really bad self-confidence issues. Some of the people that get influenced have no idea how peer pressure can affect you and your way of life. If you keep giving into peer pressure, you will lose more friends than you will gain. Your real friends will try and help you out with this issue, but once you do something completely wrong, it might set something off in their mind saying, “What am I doing? She/he is not the kind of person I want to hang out with. I need to find different friends.” Do you really want that to happen to you? I sure don’t.
What do you usually do when you find out one of your best friends is having a problem with peer pressure? Do you just leave it be and hope it fixes itself? Or do you jump in and help him/her out with it? I’ll tell you what I’d do. I would try my best to help my friend out; I don’t want their life to go down the drain because of stupid peer pressure.
Let me tell you something. This year, recently actually, I gave into peer pressure and it didn’t end up like I wanted. But in the end, I realized that peer pressure is the worst thing possible to get influenced by. It never is a good thing. Well, negative peer pressure that is.
Positive peer pressure is another thing. You can influence someone that gives into negative peer pressure with positive peer pressure. Say if someone wasn’t attending their classes... Something I would do is go up to them, and tell them to go to class. I’d bug them enough that they would get annoyed and they would finally agree to come to class! So all peer pressure isn’t bad. But just remember, negative peer pressure will get you into trouble… Positive peer pressure won’t.
