Peer Pressure

Peer Pressure

It all started when I didn’t get A’s in my A-levels. Oh well maybe I can try again, I told my teacher, and then I was waiting for him to give me a pat on my shoulder and encourage me; but all I got was another “word bomb”, ‘you cannot do it, A-levels is not for students like you’.

I am not the only one who receives such scolding, or so called “deserving lecture”.

These types of scenes are common in every house hold. Characters change, but one of them sticks on like a glue and goes to be on the receiving end every time. He is like the hero of a Bollywood romance, always the one who is victimized; this creature is called the student.

Teenage is that delicate age, in which a child’s personality and his mind start to develop and he attains a sense of maturity. It is the age when the youngsters finally start discovering the luxuries of life and they feel grown up, mature enough to take their own decisions. But all these assumptions crash, when a teenager takes a step which he thinks is best for him but his parents oppose it.

Growing up in Pakistan, I have noticed one thing for sure, that whatever decision you want to take (regarding your career specially), your parents think that you are taking the easy way out. So in the end a student gets so stressed out and pressurized that he succumbs to his parent’s decision and then his personality and self belief is totally destroyed.

We can call it a trend or mentality of the Asian (to be precise the parents of Sub-Continent), that they want their children even if they have reached the age of 19 or 20, to listen only to them regarding their core decisions. When parents enforce their decisions on their children, a sort of rebellion takes place in the mind of children and they become frustrated and eventually fail in every aspect of life.

Peer pressure is a word with a vast meaning. Another form of it comes with in our social groups; you have to look cool if you want to enter a specific friends circle in your school or college. You should wear branded clothes, shoes, should have an expensive cell phone and the most common of all must have a Girl Friend or a Boy Friend.

This pressure gives birth to social norms; like smoking, stealing our parent’s money and to stay out of our home late, risking our lives just to prove that we are cool. Under the pressure of being accepted by their social circle, teenagers involve themselves in every sort of wrong act which their peers demand. They lie to their parents fearlessly; steal with pride and cheat, thinking that it is the most fun thing they can do to have a great reputation among their friends. What they don’t understand is that it will only lead them to a worse life where turning back would be impossible.

We live in a biased world. Everywhere around us we see lawlessness, corruption and favoritism. Favoritism is yet another branch of peer pressure. In particularly schools and colleges, there are teachers who favor a student because he is a teacher’s pet. He gets good grades even if he performs ordinarily. Then again there is a bright student who is very good in studies but is not teacher’s pet. He tries way hard but is not rewarded because his teacher his peer wants him to act like a teacher’s pet.

All these factors lead a student in a very difficult situation, he is mentally tortured, pressurized, demoralized, compared and eventually he just becomes a machine who will accept what other wants. Incidentally this cycle goes on to haunt him and he then pressurizes his children, and thus the ‘student’ is again victimized.

By: Yasir Ahmed Qureshi