Adolescent Growth and Peer Group Membership

Source: Carl Pickhardt

Most young people seem to understand that adolescence is no time to go it alone. Such social isolation can breed loneliness (“I don’t have friends to keep me company”) and ignorance (“No one tells me anything!”).

Sometimes, parents worry or even take offense when, compared to childhood, their teenager is more preoccupied with peers and less interested in being with them. However, becoming socially nested with friends is an important stepping stone to social independence.

Such membership can anchor social growth during a changing time. It can provide a welcome sense of belonging, stability, identity, and support, whether one is in a peer group or is in a social clique.

The difference between these two designations can be an experiential one. A rough distinction might be this. While a peer group can feel more inclusive, tolerant, and relaxing (“They give me social company”), a clique can feel more exclusive, conforming, and demanding (“I have to keep up with them to belong”). Both can provide an anchoring, second social family experience.

Differing worlds

While parents can love you, and it’s important they do, these adults don’t usually "get" (understand) more of what matters to you as adolescence unfolds. A cultural generation gap helps widen the growing social separation between the more traditional parent and the more contemporary teenager. To keep this widening cultural gap from becoming estranging, parents can do a couple of things.

First, they can bridge differences with interest. They can express honest ignorance in what calls to their teenager who now has a lot to teach them about growing diversity. They express a desire to be taught: “Can you help me appreciate the music you love listening to now?” And, second, they can welcome teenager friends. Familiarize these companions and you will better understand your teenager’s world: “It turns out that her new friend, who some days looks like an urban outlaw, is really a sweet person underneath.” This adult welcoming can also benefit your teenager: “We like hanging out at your place.”

Groups and growth

Membership in peer groups plays a functional role in furthering the two major goals of adolescent development.

First, they provide a relationship where one can detach from childhood and family and become more independent. Affiliation with a peer group increases growing social separation from childhood and parents: “I want to spend more time with friends and less with my family.”

And, second, they provide a place where one can differentiate from childhood and family and become more individual. Adopting communal tastes and identifying with popular icons increases the growing contrast with childhood and parents: “I’m less like my parents and more like my friends.”

In both cases, hanging with age mates allows redefinition of oneself in older terms. In the larger picture, the social growth progression seems to be

• In childhood, you depend on and define yourself with parents;
• In adolescence, you depend on and define yourself more with peers;
• In young adulthood, you depend on and define yourself on your own terms.

In this progression, peer-group membership plays an essential preparatory role. In adolescence, you are no longer a child and not yet an adult, letting go of the former and preparing for the latter. Peer groups provide much education, company, and support as one engages with the demands of this transitional change.

Benefits of peers

Parents often fear the trouble a peer group can get their child into, risking with others what they wouldn’t try alone. This can be true. However, in many cases of adolescent risk-taking, friends watch over each other. In peer groups, fellow members can also be protective: “I could have been hurt if it wasn’t for my friends.” Peers can look out after each other.

There is also the benefit of vicarious learning from hearing about other people’s experience: “I know what that’s like from what my friends told me, so I don’t have to do it.” In peer groups, a lot of experience is shared not just by doing together but also by just talking together, learning about life from each other’s lives. What to do, how to do, what to watch out for, what not to do are all discussed. There are lots of topics a young person likes to talk about with peers that she or he would be far less inclined to talk about with parents. Peers can educate each other.

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Of course, there is the problem of peer misinformation: what a young person is told by a trusted youth informant that isn’t always so. Thus, parents do need to keep an ear out for misguiding hearsay: “You can’t be charged for that if you’re under 18.” “A drug can’t hurt you if you take it in very small amounts.” “You can’t get pregnant if you do it the first week after your period.” This is why parents do need to speak to basic safety issues around common dangers like legal standing, substance use, and sexual behavior.

Peer group pressure

Peer groups are not without influence, even though less commandingly so than cliques. When group-think in the moment takes over (most everyone is excited about some appealing possibility) it can feel hard to resist immediately going along. For example, out goes the restless cry: “It’s boring having nothing to do, so let’s try this!” What now?

First, the adolescent can play for delay. They can ask some questions to create a discussion. If they don’t want to do it, it’s likely some others also feel unsure or the same. Discussion can create doubt. They can suggest something else. Or maybe they can take a bathroom break to create time to think, and when they’re away, the group impulse to act may have passed. Sometimes parents can offer absentee help for these pressing moments. “If you ever get in a social situation where you don’t want to do what others are suggesting, but it’s really hard to refuse, you can always blame us an excuse: ‘If I went along with this and my parents found out, they would ground me forever! So, for me, it’s not worth doing.’”

While they can be complicated, I believe it’s better to grow up in a peer group of friends than without one.