Denise Goodfellow says: 'Young people in towns are drawn into the agressive web by their peer groups. And once the habit is established, it is difficult to break.'

~Baby Dreaming Newsletter 2006~

My good friend, Denise, of course, is talking about peer pressure. In this case, she is referring to the peer pressure that she observes in Aboriginal young people of Australia's Northern Territory.

But peer pressure, as the term is generally used, is both highly over-rated and misleading in my opinion. It allows us as a society, or, indeed, any society, to avoid looking at the real reasons why young people behave self-destructively. By focusing externally on some ill-defined pressure from without, we fail to discern some very real pressures from within.

Anomie in the human experience comes from such things as the lack of early and consistent adult direction and guidance; the lack of positive support and positive reinforcement for ourselves as a person from within the family; the lack of warm, fun, interesting, and enriching interpersonal life experiences from early on; the lack of hope that things will be different any time soon; the lack of positive and mature role models; the lack of progressive skill development from non-enriching environments; the lack of a wholesome and trusting sense of 'community' -- and the list goes on.

Until we start examining these deeper, familial causes, an adequate solution will not be forthcoming.

'Peer pressure' works only on the above kind of individual. Those individuals have nothing to loose, so they bow to this pressure. There is no light at the end of their tunnel, and 'so what if they throw their life away', they say to themselves. 'It is worth it in the short-run to have at least some semblance of connectedness in my otherwise dreary life.' These kids have no where else to go. In the larger urban centers they join gangs for camaraderie. In other places they enter into early sexual entanglements in an effort to rush to adulthood as a way to escape their childhood. Or, they simply wander aimlessly, adrift, not unlike the fluff of a dandelion that casts about at the mercy of an aimless wind.

A mature youth who is well-nurtured from early on, whose basic needs are constantly being met, who engages in substantial dialogue within the family from early on, who is in close nurturing physical contact with important people from early on, who are inspired to be curious and imaginative from early on, whose efforts to become self-sufficient and self-directed are reinforced from early on, who are taught to 'think out loud' about their priorities in life from early on, who continually absorb a strong sense of personal ethics from the people around them from early on-- these young people stay the course, they do not jump ship and self-destruct simply because their peers are doing it.

It is obvious that some communities are so devastated by the political or physical or cultural environments in which they reside that they have long lost any sense of 'community.' This can be seen multigenerationally across all cultural and racial groups.

This can be seen especially clearly in subcultures that produce the terrorist mentality. These subcultures are and have long been embedded in the most devastating of circumstances, usually for endless generations: they are characterized by severe poverty, malnutrition, familial disorganization, chaotic and inhumane dictatorial politics, a total lack of opportunity for self-determinism, a lack of educational opportunity, woeful gender bias, and suffocatingly rigid religious ideology -- PLUS -- a sense of being locked indefinitely into such a base existence. For them, tomorrow does not spring eternal.

The smarter and physically stronger of the lot tend to rise up with anger and, when given a chance, flee into the world to wreck havoc with their entrenched and venomous anger that craves release. The Middle East, for one, harbors huge pockets of such subcultures and we have felt their effects globally for many years.

However, families in much more advantaged parts of the world are also producing a prevailing sense of anomie in children whose basic emotional needs are not met consistently and with mindful vigor. The fact is, large numbers of families everywhere are failing us, even here in the United States which is one of the richest countries in the world. We, too, suffer from a pervasive kind of emotional poverty that invades and infects even the financially richest.

In America, our schools are not teaching our children how to think, they are teaching them what to think. Does that not sound familiar? They are stuffing inconsequential facts and figures into students' short-term memory strata without the slightest sense of awareness of the consequences of this, which is that the memorized minutia shortly dissipates. Long-term memory acquisition requires meaning, personal application of the information at hand, and it requires an on-going dialogue and an active, engaged learning process in classrooms as well as in homes. Learning must be a hands-on experience for it to take hold. And yet this kind of learning is not going to happen when young people are barely hanging on emotionally.

Learning takes time, time that many societies today simply don't think that they have.

But real learning can't be hurried. Young people will learn when the time is right, and when their emotional environments also lend support to it. It is simple as that, and as complex as that.

The solutions are timeless: love, honor, tender touch, humor, self-determinism, a healthy curiosity, a fearlessness about exploring the world, a healthy body, a strong sense of personal ethics, and a sense that somebody truly cares about us.

These are the things that count, and that make us strong.