Teaching Your Child to Resist Peer Pressure
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For a child, the pressure to fit in can be quite overwhelming. Especially as they go through lots of change and try to figure out who they really are. Peer pressure can often influence children to participate in unsafe behaviour that they would usually not. To share advice on how you can teach your child to resist peer pressure, we have teamed up with a girls prep school in Surrey.
Identifying a Negative Influence
It’s not always easy for a child to identify peer pressure and negative influences. To equip your child to better identify situations, get them to think about 3 questions. 1) Is this something that I could get in trouble for? 2) Does this seem unsafe? 3) Do I not want to do this? If your child answers yes to any of these questions, advise that this is peer pressured. No friend would make another do anything that is unsafe or that they don’t want to do.
Teach Self Love
The most effective way of teaching your child to resist peer pressure is to teach self-love and develop their confidence. A confident child is one that knows their worth and will not seek validation from others. This will make it harder for others to pressurise them as they will not need to seek anyone’s approval to fit in.
Saying No
Going back to the first point, children need to be able to recognise peer pressure as it’s happening. As another approach, you might want to role-play different situations with your child to demonstrate how others may try to persuade them into doing things like smoking or skipping school. In doing so get your child to practice saying no and how to avoid conflict by recommending alternative activities to do.
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