Two Types of Peer Pressure
Peer pressure according to the Cambridge Online Dictionary is the strong influence of a group, especially of children, on members of that group to behave as everyone else does.
I think peer pressure is one of the social issues that everyone just faces inevitably. This is because, we are all affected by it, not just children or teenagers but even including us adults. The issue of peer pressure has been an ever present social problem that we as a society can never get rid of. Maybe because most of us has this deep longing to belong to a certain group or sect, we can never be happy just being ourselves and we always need to connect with other people, and in the process we have a tendency to loose ourselves and act the way they do just to be able to be accepted. Well, this is definitely the most common type of peer pressure. However, I think there is another type of peer pressure that is the total opposite of our tendency to act in certain ways in order to belong. What I mean by this is that I think rebelliousness and fascism is still a type of peer pressure. How is this so? Well, some people act in certain behavior in order to NOT be associated in certain groups. Let me cite an incident with my daughter to give you an example. We recently bought my daughter a pink cell phone which she definitely hates. She insisted on having it replaced because she says the popular cheerleaders in their school all have pink mobile phones and she doesn't want others to think that she is trying to be part of their clique or that she wants to be associated with them. Because of my daughter's dislike to be part of the 'in' society in school, she acts in total opposite way that they do, just in order to be unassociated to them as much as possible.