The perils of peer pressure

Jun 05, 2011 Features / Columnists, My Column

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By Adam Harris

I have known about peer pressure for some time and I know that more often than not the parents’ influence would determine whether a child would bow to peer pressure or do what society perceives is right.
I grew up being taught that I should not steal, but peer pressure led me to mount many a tree in the dead of night to enjoy whatever fruit was in season. Peer pressure led me to avoid stealing my neighbour’s poultry, but for all the teachings my parents instilled I could not resist partaking in the bush cook.
What the teaching did, however, was to prevent me from burgling. I limed with friends who had no such compunction. On one occasion we went to a friend’s home where a blind old man lived. Uncle Vivi saved his coins in a tin and it would seem that some of my friends knew. They also knew that I would not be party to stealing Uncle Vivi’s money so when they did they did not tell me.
I only knew the night when we went to an ice cream parlour and I saw them spending money that I knew they should not have.
Life moves on and so do people. I left to teach at Bartica and came home to Beterverwagting for the April holidays to learn that my friends were in jail. They had broken into another friend’s home, but this time they were caught. In the end two of them went to jail for nine months and I went back to Bartica when school reopened.
I have two sons who yielded to peer pressure at different times, but I was not to know until much later. One smoked marijuana and the other turned to alcohol in a big way.
I now have a grandson and I have to keep talking to him. These days the boyhood pranks are not really pranks; they are serious business. They would target people and rob them; they would enter homes and steal; they would even think nothing of gang rape.
I had my taste at their hands. I work late hours most times so I would ask my grandson to secure the home. But this fellow would yield to peer pressure and let his friends into my home.
The result is I lost colognes—a lot. They broke things in my home and even made off with some prized drinking glasses.
Whenever I asked my grandson to explain the disappearances he would feign ignorance. Neighbours later wised me to the fact that my house became a playground in my absence.
This time around the matter is different. He is being picked on because he is autistic. I always said to him to avoid getting into fights. I would preach to him to report any assault because these days, unlike my youth when boys duked it out, these days the knives appear and people die. Times have surely changed.
I now see him being reluctant to go to school because the friends he thought he had were the people who made our lives miserable. He dumped them. He is caught between getting into fights when situations confront him and walking away. Something in his head tells him to heed the words of his grandfather and his natural instinct tells him to react.
Indeed he reacted on a few occasions and got suspended from school. On one occasion, a girl who is now facing trial for murder actually stabbed him on his hand for no other reason than he happened to be in the same corridor with her and she just felt like stabbing somebody.
I can imagine the plight of those parents who do not pay close attention to their children. Many are single mothers who are too busy with other things. The result is that their sons are allowed to do the things that society would frown on.
Just this past week I learnt about a girl who, at eleven, is sexually active. She is an only child for her mother who works most of the time. The teachers at the school know of the child’s sexual activity, but all they would say is that the mother knows and that she is not prepared to do anything.
There are children who play truants because there is no supervision. Officials would say that they have to counsel the parents, but then again the parents seem not to be able to cope. I suppose that it is not that they are disinterested. Rather, it is that parenting is not high on the agenda because the parents themselves are not keen on education.
This is indeed a worrying situation in the country. Parents fail to appreciate that children become adults and whatever they pick up as children they take into their adult lives.
There was the time when parents paid special attention to their sons because they recognized their importance. These were the children who would be there to provide for them in their later lives. This no longer seems to be the case unless one believes that the parent supports the deeds the son performs to bring in whatever he does. It is perhaps a case of getting whatever there is today and let tomorrow take care of itself.
I checked the statistics and found that a large portion of the prison population comprises very young people. I am certain that peer pressure is to blame.

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