Boosting a child’s self-esteem can help scuttle an urge to follow crowd.
Now and again, Michael Gastelle stands and watches his 5-year-old daughter play with the children in their Orlando neighborhood.
He watches and worries.
Worries that Courtney rarely suggests activities but plays any and every game her peers do.
Worries about those steamy weekends when the ice cream truck barnstorms the neighborhood selling cool comfort on a stick. Instead of rushing inside to break her piggy bank, Courtney waits and watches. If her playmates go inside for money, so does she. If they stand pat, she braves the heat.
Her father sees a pattern, and it worries him.
“I’m concerned with her not being more aggressive and acting on her own,” said Gastelle, 42, an account manager with Digital Tools Inc. in Orlando.
Temperamentally, some kids are less assertive and forthright than others, experts say. If a child is happy and well-adjusted, there is nothing developmentally wrong with that.
Even so, a little parental tweaking might be in order to guard against negative peer pressure. Experts say that boosting a child’s self-esteem and encouraging decision-making help scuttle the urge to follow the crowd, especially in the teen years.
“Kids don’t have to necessarily be leaders,” said Angela Pfeiffer, a psychologist at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, but “that doesn’t mean they have to be followers.”
Because American society values assertiveness, parents may panic when their child emerges as less than a trendsetter.
That panic can flow into fear. Each time the child fails to assert himself, each time he follows the crowd, in the minds of the parents this whispered question gains volume: Will he ultimately trail the wrong crowd into unsavory behavior?
Yet progressing from copying fashion trends to swiping cars is not inevitable. Usually morals and values form a buffer.
If your child is a shy, reticent soul, it takes energy and effort to become comfortable enough to assert his or her will, said Mary Ann Shaw, a psychologist at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas.
One way to help this is to foster a child’s sense of pride early on.
Reinforce those things that the child does successfully with comments that reflect his or her achievements.
If your daughter does a fine job with her chores, Shaw suggested saying something like, “Gosh, aren’t you proud that you made your bed today?” If your son stops short of bashing his little brother who swiped his last chunk of gum: “Boy, you held your temper.”
Such comments build pride.
So does providing a child with tools that distinguish him or her from peers. Introduce your child to music, acting, sports or dancing. In those activities, the child may find a niche.
Values, Gastelle figures, are the critical tool in rearing a child who does not just follow the crowd. He talks to Courtney about right and wrong, about manners and respect, things parents should revisit every day.
Sometimes the line between temperament and trouble is as subtle as the transition from late afternoon to dusk.
Things started innocently enough for Brian Schutte.
He wasn’t big on football, but if his pals opted for football, he would endure teeth-rattling tackles.
If it wasn’t football, it was something else. Once, his mother, Debi, who worked as a substitute teacher at his school, was pulled aside by his 5th-grade teacher, who warned that Brian was more interested in showing off, trying to persuade others to like him, than maintaining his high grades.
Soon Debi found herself regularly delivering a sermon to her congregation of one: “You need to make decisions about what you want to do. What do you, Brian, want to do?”
By 8th grade, Brian had slipped into a matching set of baggy clothes and bummy friends. He dumped his old pals. Dorks, he called them.
One of his pals wore a lock of hair streaked red. Brian colored all of his hair–and started sneaking out at night.
“His friends had some kind of magnetism. They just pulled him in,” said Debi, 41. “We just weren’t thinking terrible things.”
Even when a family does everything right, plays the games, nurtures moral courage, Pfeiffer said, there’s no “guarantee that the child is going to be OK.”
In Brian’s 10th-grade year, in 1995, the Schutte family landed in drug treatment. He now lives with a cousin in Port St. Lucie and works at a Jamaican restaurant.
Debi Schutte figures that all she can do for Brian is pray. She can do a lot more for her youngest son, Kevin, 5, but fears that as he gets older he may follow his brother’s example. “I’m watching him,” she said.
