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| The Power of Teenage Peer Pressure |  One of the main teens’ needs is to conform to peer’s group norms. Such values have often been witnessed by teenager workers as well as parents. When one refers to the "tyranny of teens" one is expressing an awesome appreciation of the powerful energy and pressures generated by this strange social configuration called the peer group.
Dealing with Troubled Teens
Adults criticize their loss of power and dream nostalgically of the family of the past where teens were at their place and the elders ruled supreme. But as you know, it is impossible to return the time to another day when the teenager found his teen peer group among either teens or adults. The reality must be accepted as it is: The peer group has the strongest influence over the values, attitudes, and behavior of most teens.
This influence by a teenage peer might be tolerable if teens were able to be successful at operating their private subculture in a manner that did not create concern among adult people. Unluckily, society is interested not only in the lower-class ghetto delinquents but also in many peer patterns created in the suburbs among teens from apparently favorable backgrounds.
Hardly ever we find a peer group composed of teens with values, maturity, stability, and judgment necessary to lead one another into happy and productive roles in the broader society. All too often it seems more like a case of the blind leading the blind, while the supposedly sighted adult stands powerlessly on the sidelines. A variety of responses of adults in authority to the power of the peer culture merits notice.
Teen Conflict
Perhaps the most universal response is the contest for power. The motto "we'll show them who is boss" makes adults to try to instill in the life of a teen a subjection that belonged to an earlier time. The matter is when controls become restrictive, friction and conflict enlarge. Feel they are losing control, adults often send for reinforcements. Parents address to schools, guidance clinics, and juvenile courts in order to find support.
Teachers call for parents to help monitor the cafeteria and for security guards to watch the hallways. Eventually, adults may succeed in applying enough control to impose conformity, but the problems now have gone underground. It is all too easy for the teenager to appease the adult with superficial compliance while still remaining basically loyal to different values of his peer group. WRA Boarding School for Troubled Teens provides troubled youth with an environment where they can influence each other positively.
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