Your child merely has to walk into a clothing store or look through a magazine to be drawn to the clothes that will make him acceptable to his peers. He hears the newest vocabulary on television or picks it up from billboards and other advertising mediums. Everybody is saying it. My first impulse was to blame their friends or to wonder what their friends' parents were doing with their children. After I started listening for the peer talk, I realized I did not need to go out of my own home in order for my children to be exposed to negative values.
Symbols can include hair and clothing styles, jewelry, or any number of gestures.
Negative attitudes are expressed about everything and everyone that does not fit into the peer pattern. Conformity to the peer group is absolutely necessary, and that means not conforming to adult expectations. Be award of those things that your child should avoid so that he will not be identified with the wrong crowd, while at the same time don't shelter him so much that he is needlessly labeled as weird. Several defensive strategies can be employed to encourage proper attitudes about peer pressure. For example, one of the main reasons a child seeks peer approval is a lack of b affirmation by his father.