How can you possibly know?If you’ve known your teen’s set group of friends back from middle school until they are entering high school, then it may be easy for you to notice if they’ve got problems or not. But this may not always be the case. If your teen normally meets up with his or her friends elsewhere, you may really not be able to get a chance to know them or at least have an opportunity to become better acquainted. For some parents, their teenager’s friends are just familiar names to them! In many cases, your teen may not want you to get to know their friends at all. How may you possibly know that your teen is having peer problems then? Observing your Teen’s BehaviorIf you can’t observe his friends, observe your teen. Apparent stress is a clear indicator of a problem. If you don’t find that it is a problem with his or her peer group, your awareness may lead you to discover an entirely different issue that you adolescent may be dealing with. If a teenager is under an intense amount of pressure from his peers, this may surface in his everyday behavior. He may want to avoid certain activities where a certain group frequents. If his basketball buddies enjoy taking a hit of drugs after a game, he or she may be making excuses to be elsewhere or try and make new activities for him self to keep busy. Your teen may even look to you to give them other activities to keep busy. Teenagers may revert to using a parent’s strictness and discipline as an excuse in order to combat peer pressure. This way, they can get their peers off their back for not wanting to do something they are pressured to do without appearing “uncool.” Peer group Problems and School TroublesIf peer group trouble gets serious, you may also find out that your teenager cuts class or skips school often. His playing hooky may get worse and worse as the situation aggravates. He could either be avoiding school in order to avoid certain pressuring peers or being hounded by their pressure elsewhere. An important move to make would be to go directly to your adolescent’s school to check out what knowledge the school may have of his situation. Frequently missing his curfew is another sign of possible trouble with the peers. If he or she isn’t having problems with his peers, they may be up to trouble together! |
