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Rarely do schools acknowledge the power of peer culture in defining standards, and rarely do they take advantage of this power as an engine for quality. When students themselves are in charge of projects that they care about, peer pressure can become a powerful force for high standards.
R. BERGER, Harvard Education Letter
When people get immersed in a culture with strong new memes, it tends to be a sink-or-swim proposition. Either you change your mind, succumbing to peer pressure and adopting the new memes as your own, or you struggle with the extremely uncomfortable feeling of being surrounded by people who think you're crazy or inadequate. The fact that you probably think the same about them is little consolation.
RICHARD BRODIE, Virus of the Mind
Peer pressure is not a monolithic force that presses adolescents into the same mold. . . . Adolescents generally choose friend whose values, attitudes, tastes, and families are similar to their own. In short, good kids rarely go bad because of their friends.
LAURENCE STEINBERG, You and Your Adolescent
Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the “wrong crowd” read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren’t planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.
MARY KAY BLAKELY, American Mom
How you handle peer pressure -- the pressure your children feel as well as the pressure you feel -- in the early years will play a significant role in how your children handle peer pressure when they become adolescents.
KEVIN LEMAN, Adolescence Isn't Terminal
The ugly reality is that peer pressure reaches its greatest intensity at just the age when kids tend to be most insensitive and cruel.
WALT MUELLER, Understanding Today's Youth Culture
No child is immune to peer pressure.
KATHI HUDSON, Raising Kids God's Way
The stress of resisting unhealthy peer pressure can be buffered by good family relationships and a high self-esteem, and it is often those adolescents with neither who succomb to unhealthy pressure from their peers.
L. EUGENE ARNOLD, Childhood Stress
There's one advantage to being 102. There's no peer pressure.
DENNIS WOLFBERG, Humorous Quotes for All Occasions
Of course, peer pressure has a strong positive component. It provides the social cohesion that allows the very development of communal affiliation. But peer power as an extrinsic force is a lot like radiation: a little goes a long way.
CHARLES D. HAYES, The Rapture of Maturity
The people in the popular group say there is no peer pressure because they are at the top of the food chain. Really what they are doing is just eating away at everybody else.
LAUREN GREENFIELD, Girl Culture
Kids ... can get to the point where they feel peer pressure that isn't even there simply because of how they see themselves.
WALT MUELLER, Understanding Today's Youth Culture
The main consequence of saying no to negative peer pressure is not just withstanding "the heat of the moment," as most adults think. Rather, it is coping with a sense of exclusion as others engage in the behavior and leave the adolescent increasingly alone. It is the loss of the shared experience. Further, the sense of exclusion remains whenever the group later recounts what happened. This feeling of loneliness then becomes pervasive but carries an easy solution -- go along with the crowd.
MICHAEL RIERA, Uncommon Sense for Parents With Teenagers
Talk to your children about peer pressure. Explain what a powerful force it can be, and ... tell them that you will never accept the excuse that "Everyone did it" ... that they will be held responsible for their actions.
Peer pressure has many redeeming qualities. It is the pressure of our peers, after all, that gives us the support to try things we otherwise wouldn't have.
BILL TREASURER, Right Risk
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