Your role as a parent in helping your teen to deal with peer pressure is very important. As the parent, you are the base support for your teen to turn to when faced with all the different types of peer pressures.
It is up to the parent to build the backing that our teens will use as a defense in the battle of peer pressure. The defense you are building is much like the armor that will protect them when those peer pressure darts are coming in.
Let’s start with the chest armor. This is an important piece because it covers the heart. The heart is the basis of your teen’s feelings: how they feel about themselves and about the confidence they have in the love they are given.
This is how this works. A child learns to be secure from the actions of their parents in many ways. A child is more secure as a teen when they have been given consistency. Constant love, rules, consequences and rewards is the basis. This way they know that in their life they have predictability. The teen also knows that no matter what, they are loved.
This means that just as much as we love completely, we also give a firm foundation of structure. This structure is what teaches the teen in the long run that they have moral, good thought patterns, responsibilities and goals.
The next piece of armor that we equip our teens with are the leg pieces. These are what teach our children to walk away. The leg piece is the part of them that can make them walk away using tact and wisdom. We need to teach our teens the statistics, information and knowledge of the different peer pressures. This way they will have good information that will help them get out of bad situations.
For example: Well over 50% of all teens are still virgins after they graduate high school or until age 17.
Now they know that when their friends tell them, “Everybody does it