Can extracurricular activities help your child resist peer pressure?

No

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by Nicholas A. Levack

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If there was a neutral voting option when answering this debate, I would select it. For you see, I am slightly in between, but I will elaborate on both sides.

To be accepted, kids will and have done many inappropriate things. Whether it be doing drugs, having sex, or other such things. Some do it to be accepted into the group, for before they may have been considered outcasts. Others, however, do it to "maintain" that acceptance or being "cool"/"stupid". Frankly, though doing those things can get you "in", it also may be needed to be done to stay "in".

So could an alternative for those outcasts, be to get into these extra-curricular activities? For they do, indeed, help to boost confidence. I know it from personal experience. But can these activities help to usher along the participation of these inappropriate activities? Yes.

This topic is like gun control; there is no right and wrong for the completely general issue. You have to look at the smaller details, and come up with answers for them. And sometimes, everything can have a wrong answer to it. Sometimes, any choice of any matter can lead to doing drugs, or having sex, or eating babies. It depends on the people. Most of my friends at school are stoners. And yet do I do drugs? Hell no. Am I pressured into doing them? Not really. Most of the time, and ironically enough, it is my stoner friends who talk about quitting smoking/doing drugs more than the supposed "cool" students, who do them to keep being cool.

But would that be the same in other schools? Probably not. Just because people are in the same clique, does not mean they think the same way. Take me for example. Like I just said, I am in the mostly "stoner" clique. And how many stoners do you think can write like this, and have these sorts of thoughts?

Anyways, kids with low self-esteem should participate is extra-curricular activities to help their self-esteem. But that is not the only task they must embark upon; the only initiative they must take. For when you are in the spot-light-or at least more noticed-you're actually more likely to be pressured into doing drugs. So they would need the fortitude to resist those pressures. While these activities might give kids the fortitude to resist temptations, outcasts may not need it, for if they have practically no friends and rarely interact with anyone else, then there'd be no one to pressure them into doing drugs, in the first place. But then those "outcasts" might pressure THEMSELVES into doing drugs, to try and get friends, who then might pressure the former outcast into doing more drugs/other inappropriate things.

I feel like I'm going in circles; much is the result of many issues like this. I can never get a straight answer, as there really never is one.

But here is a question: what does it take for a kid to resist the temptation of drugs? Let's summarize.

Extra-curr icular activities? Not necessarily, for then it gives the person participating more people who try to pressure him or her into doing drugs.

Be an outcast? An outcast might do them to be accepted, possibly actually pressuring HIMSELF.

Have some balls? YES!

There is no magical solution to make a kid resist these temptations, nor will any method work for every kid. Kids react in different ways to different situations. I am currently in no clubs, no sports teams, and yet do not do drugs. Fortitude does not have to be brought upon by those things, but simply a belief in one's self. Or finding any hobby in general. Or, simply having a logical outlook on life.

Logically thinking, drugs would shorten my life.

Logically thinking, drugs would cost me money I could spend on other, more beneficial things.

Logically thinking, drugs offer nothing but a somewhat "enjoyable" hallucinatory state, which often might get me into more trouble than they are worth.

So if someone can think that way, then that might be enough to keep that person from doing drugs.

But people should do extra-curricular activities anyways, for they are fun, and help self-esteem. But whether or not that self-esteem will help a kid resist doing drugs depends on that kid's personality.

You know, sports and clubs actually might turn kids into arrogant fools. Those tend to be the "bullies". Jocks whose egos have been too very much inflated by their endeavors. Not ALL jocks are like that, of course. Just many of them. And this example falls into the "depends on the person" category, to determine whether or not that person's ego would be boosted too far by the accomplishments.

Alri ght, I'm tired of talking in circles. It's making me dizzy.

My summary: DEPENDS ON THE PERSON!

(Props to you if you managed to understand everything I said, and understand that things simply are not as simplistic that they can be answered with either "yes" or "no".)

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