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In most cultures, the training of teens begins in infancy and continues until the teenage years, whereupon the teenager enters the more of an adult role. Even in primitive cultures, this pattern is common and often includes an initiation ceremony, a "right of passage," to mark the transition from childhood to adulthood. In modern society, adult status comes many years after adolescence. While a teenager achieves physical maturity and wants social independences, he must remain in a position of dependence. He is compelled to continue in the role of student and is not allowed to compete with adults in the job market. He is out of place in the friendship patterns of adults; he has no legitimate outlet for his newly developed drives; he is not allowed to do the things that adults do for enjoyment and relaxation. Seemingly, society has no role for him, for he is not a child nor is he an adult. So while a teenager “resigns" from childhood in their early teenage years. They do not "enlist" in adulthood until they are fully independent, sometimes as much as a decade later. During this entire period, teenagers are in a cultural limbo, being neither obedient teens nor responsible adults. Teenagers’ Needs: Out of their need to be something more than teens and to achieve some independence, teens have created their own subculture. Complete with its own values, norms, language, and symbols, the subculture has become so well developed and organized that it spans continents and oceans, the unusual styles of dress and grooming, folk heroes, and slang expressions seem more foreign to the parent who lives under the same roof than to another teenager thousands of miles away. Teenage Peer Pressure: Adults continue in attempts to socialize with teens but find they have less and less power, while the teen subculture seems to take an increasingly strong hold. As time goes on, the peer group all but replaces the influence of parents and other adults. The need of teens to conform to peer group norms and values has often been witnessed by teenager workers as well as parents. When one refers to the "tyranny of teens" one is expressing an awesome appreciation of the powerful energy and pressures generated by this strange social configuration called the peer group. Dealing with Troubled Teens: Adults decry their loss of influence and dream nostalgically of the family of the past where teens knew their place and the elders ruled supreme. But it is not possible to turn back the clock to another day when the teenager found his teen peer group among either teens or adults. The reality must be accepted as it is: The peer group has the strongest influence over the values, attitudes, and behavior of most teens. This influence by a teenage peer might be acceptable if teens were able to succeed at operating their private subculture in a manner that did not cause concern among adults. Unfortunately, society is concerned not only with the lower-class ghetto delinquents but also with many peer patterns formed in the suburbs among teens from seemingly favorable backgrounds. Too seldom we find a peer group composed of teens with values, maturity, stability, and judgment necessary to guide one another into happy and productive roles in the broader society. All too often it seems more like a case of the blind leading the blind, while the supposedly sighted adult stands helplessly on the sidelines. The various responses of adults in authority to the power of the peer culture merit notice. Teen Conflict: Perhaps the most universal response is the contest for power. With the motto "we'll show them who is boss," adults attempt to instill in the life of a teen an obedience that belonged to an earlier time. As controls become restrictive, friction and conflict increase. Adults who feel they are about to lose control frequently send for reinforcements. Parents turn to schools, guidance clinics, and juvenile courts for support. Teachers call for parents to help monitor the cafeteria and for security guards to patrol the hallways. In the end, adults may succeed in applying enough control to impose conformity, but the problems now have gone underground. It is all too easy for the teenager to appease the adult with superficial compliance while still remaining basically loyal to different values of his peer group. WRA Boarding School for Troubled Teens provides troubled youth with an environment where they can influence each other positively. Liberation of Troubled Teens: Another response of adults to the teens peer group is that of liberation. They may often be influenced by teenage pressure and succumb to it. These adults say: "Go ahead and do your own thing....You are old enough to decide for yourselves." Such adults may be enthusiastic supporters of "how wonderful today's teens are"; still they are often troubled by the recurrent feeling that perhaps teenagers are not yet able to meet all of the challenges of independence. Surrender of the Parent: Adults often surrender to the power of the teen subculture. Here the adult experiences feeling of futility. "There's nothing I can do; they won't listen anymore." The teenager is left trying to manage his life while the adult ponders just where his approach went wrong. Joining the opposition: Another variation in adult response to the teens peer subculture is enlistment in the opposition. Perhaps uttering the trite slogan, "If you can't beat them, join them," the adult tries to become like the teenager. The adult, struggling valiantly to imitate the teen culture (which never allows grownups as real members), is as completely out of place as he is ineffective. Enlisting Teen Pressure: This is the response of Positive Peer Culture, which assumes that all of the foregoing styles are inadequate ways of dealing with the peer pressure subculture. Even though the peer group is the most potent influence on teens, adults have much to offer teenagers. Furthermore, adults should neither become locked in combat with them nor capitulate to them. Therefore, Positive Peer Culture seeks to encompass and win over the peer group. An analogy comes to mind. The highly developed Japanese are of jujitsu, when mastered, enables even very small persons to deal with powerful adversaries. It is not necessary to be stronger than an opponent, since force need not be met with force. Rather, the adversary's strength and movement are channeled into a different direction to achieve the intended result. In the same way, it is not necessary to overcome the peer group's power; instead, the peer group's action is rechanneled to achieve the intended goal. Here the analogy ends, for at Teen Help Online our intention is not to defeat teens but to bring forth their potential.
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