Written by: Prasun Basnet - 27028, Grade VIII
Posted on: 05 July, 2022
A peer is a social or a primary group of people who have similar interest, age, background or social status. These groups are likely to influence the person’s beliefs and behaviours. This happens usually in adolescence/ teenager period. Peers spend most of their time with their friends rather than with their parents.
These peers influence directly and indirectly on an individual, which forces them to change their behaviour and attitude. This influence starts at an early stage of teenage and increases throughout their teenage years. An individual needs to have an honest and healthy relationship with their friends and motivate her or himself to be a successful adult.
There are many positive outcomes having peers to develop new skills, engage in extra-curricular activities as well as in studies. Peers help to boost the confidence of a person. A healthy peer enjoys spending more time with friends, choosing the same clothes, hairstyle, jewellery, listening to the same music, watching the same TV shows, using the same words to talk etc.
But peers can also have negative influences which might encourage each other to cheat, steal, use drugs and alcohol, or even involve in criminal activities, aggression and other anti-social behaviour which might ruin his/her whole life.
In conclusion, peer influence has been found to have both positive and negative impact among teenagers. Hence, for the positive peer influences a child should be motivated to enhance his/her skill. In instance for negative peer influences they should be observed in single work, they should be encouraged to spend more time with good friends, and engage most of the time in extra-curricular activities. Therefore, both parents and teachers have an important role to play in ensuring that teenagers are doing good or bad things as well as spending more time communicating with children.
