This episode of ‘Blackie, yam-leg, and lefty’ shares stories of teenagers who explained their individual experiences that triggered sadness, depression and self-esteem in their teenage years. It also explores the importance of SDG three which focuses on healthy life and promoting healthy well-being for all ages.
Some of the experiences shared were death of family members, dress style among peers, choosing a career path, suicidal thoughts and the likes.
HOW TEENAGERS CAN OVERCOME NEGATIVE PEER PRESSURE AND BUILD A HEALTHY SELF-ESTEEM
Peer pressure is part of a teenager’s growing up process and experience. In other words, it is one of the phases in their lives, just like the stages of puberty every individual go through. Hence, it is important to sensitize teenagers about peer pressure before their pre-teen years in order to help them withstand peer pressure and build a healthy self-esteem. This sensitization is important so they won’t see peer pressure as abnormal rather, prepare their mind ahead of this stage.
One of the ways to help teenagers build a healthy self-esteem is to sensitize parents, guardians and adults to help them understand the dangers of peer pressure and its negative impact on their self-esteem. Some of the vices caused by peer pressure include drug abuse, cultism, examination malpractice and other forms of vices.
The purpose of early sensitization of teenagers about these vices is to keep them informed about its implication and consequences and how to deal with it appropriately.
This episode of BYL gives insight to role identity; a psycho-socio trait in teenage years. Identity refers to a unique set of characteristics, traits and attributes that can be used to identify an individual as him/herself. In other words, it refers to a person’s sense of self and how they view themselves compared to other people’s evaluation. One of the characteristics that largely form and shapes an individual’s personal identity is his/her values.
Role identity is one of the four identity theories employed by contemporary social psychologists. Other identity theories are personal identity, social identity and collective identity.
Role identity and self-esteem are related concepts that are important to an individual to an individual’s mental health. Furthermore, an issue on role identity of an individual can lead to issue crises in teenage years. This points to the importance of parents and guardians being role models to their children and wards because of their major responsibility they to help their children withstand negative peer pressure among peers. There is a tendency of teenagers facing peer pressure at school, at home and from relatives.
Therefore, there is a need for parents and guardians to intentionally and consistently help their children build a healthy self-esteem during their pre-teen age in order to help them overcome peer pressure and its vices at teenage years.
