Sometimes kids get pressured into things they don’t want to do by their peers, it’s part of growing up. Unfortunately, when a youngster is asked to do whatever particular thing their peers want them to do, but they don’t, it can often threaten their friendships and risk social embarrassment. During your adolescent and teenage years, social status means a lot.
A smart father named Bert Fulks created a clever method to get young social status seekers free from those peer pressure situations while saving them an embarrassing moment.
The Dad, a father of 3, serves as a pastor at Empty Stone Ministry. He devotes a session once a week with young adults troubled with substance abuse, and he quizzed the room in one of the past few session.
“How many of you have found yourself in situations where things started happening that you weren’t comfortable with, but you stuck around, mainly because you felt like you didn’t have a way out?”
There wasn’t one person in the room who couldn’t relate. That’s when the minister put together his strategy.
Mr. Fulks recalled on his own online journal, “I still recall my first time drinking beer at a friend’s house in junior high school-I hated it, but I felt cornered. As an adult, that now seems silly, but it was my reality at the time. “Peer pressure” was a frivolous term for an often silent, but very real thing, and I certainly couldn’t call my parents and ask them to rescue me. I wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. ”
As a result of the pastor’s “X-Plan,” youngsters can use a very simple approach to get themselves out of the situation.
He and his own children use the strategy, and the basics of how it works is as follows: If his kid is in a troublesome predicament that they wants to get out of, the child quickly sends a text message “X” to Mom or Dad and after getting it, the parent makes a phone call to the child and explains to them it’s imperative to quickly make their way back home.
It enables the child to leave having a perfect explanation… The Mom or Dad, or both, are the ones to blame! If there is anything that kids can relate to one another about, it’s their parents doing uncool things.
It’s a clever tactic, but what completes the method is that the parents mustn’t be judgemental about the event, no matter what.
We want our children to trust us completely, or as much as humanly possible, so if there is a serious problem that the child wants to escape, they need to know they won’t face an even tougher situation when dealing with the parents when they get home.
So the X-Plan provides our children a way to steer clear of these problematic peer pressure situations and by establishing a trusting relationship that goes both ways, it makes it easier to step in and help.