Peer pressure is the influence given from another to do something. This topic is about smoking and how peer pressure falls into this category.
One of the reasons Youth smoke nowadays is because of peer pressure from friends. Youth are easily influence by friends and role models. Youth come up with reasons such as not wanting to lose friends, trying to be cool, to lose weight and to be independent. About 1 in 5 middle school students begins smoking everyday. The smoking rate among kids who have three or more friends who smoke is 10 times higher than the rate among kids who report that none of their friends smoke. This fact gives support to the fact that peer pressure is a huge factor in influencing youth to smoke. The worse thing when using tobacco at a young age is that youth are more prone to become addicted to tobacco usage.
There needs to be more concern about this topic to help these prevent these students from falling into tobacco influence from negative peer pressure. Programs and schools should implement more activities or programs to help prevent negative peer pressure from happening. There are many things that we can do as a society to prevent these things from happening, but this needs to be looked upon because peer pressure is very dangerous and can affect our future generations.
Peer pressure is not the only factor to a developing youth society of smoking it is all in the act of psychological matters. During the teen years of a youth life they develop the act of anarchistic feelings towards their peers. Stress and the feeling of fitting in become part of that youth’s life. They find it difficult to choose who they follow and who they listen too. Youth are going through a multitude of problems that consist of trying to lose weight, being independent, or trying to find their place. Smoking tends to be they way to relieve all that stress a youth faces through day in and day out. But there are healthier ways of developing a consensus to this problem.
These are many ways that we as a society can change the ways these youth think and how they act as peers towards each other. Though youth are rebellious they are always open to become more empowered because they are still young and curious. If there are programs to teach these youth to correctly decide what is wrong and what is correct than in no doubt they will be more aware of the choices they make. We cannot stop all the things that happen to the youth be we can take small steps to empower and teach them to embrace their lives more than puffing a cigarette.
References:
Nearly 20% of American youth addicted to smoking. And this is really a big ratio of increase in smokers.
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