This is your brain on peer pressure

The one thing that unites parents from the 1980s and those trying to raise today's digital natives, it's a deep-rooted fear of what the kids get up to when there are no grownups around.

If pop culture is the mechanism through which a society works out its generalized socio-political anxieties, the public service announcement, or PSA, is the vehicle through which grownups work out their anxieties over parenting on their children. 

I have two children in elementary school, and it is the rare week that they don’t come home and tell us about some guest speaker or assembly or video they were shown, designed to raise their awareness about one social issue or another – such as bullying, homo- and transphobia, or socioeconomic privilege. Combine that with the steady procession of coloured shirt days and other special recognition events and holidays, sometimes it seems like the curriculum is just one big PSA.

For the most part, I don’t have much of a problem with this. The campaign against bullying in particular, which started to gather steam in the mid-2000s, strikes me as an entirely welcome and long, long overdue recognition by the school system that their job is to create a safe and secure environment for learning, not to enable a Lord-of-the-Flies style culture of torment disguised as character building. 

But it is interesting to compare the current smorgasbord of causes and concerns with the single-minded focus of my own elementary school experience, which went hard against the scourge of peer pressure. From my earliest memories, it was made clear that peer pressure was to be avoided and resisted at all costs; there was no crime worse than doing something just because one of your friends suggested it might be a good idea. Smoking, drinking, drugs, minor theft or vandalism – these were all things you might be inclined to do because of peer pressure, and it was up to each and everyone one of us to push back against it. 

When I was growing up in Ottawa in the late seventies and eighties, there was a local francophone theatre troupe called the Théàtre des Lutins.  Thanks to an ingenious approach to minimalist staging that let them perform in small school gyms, they had cornered the market on in-school presentations. Their pain et beurre was a rotating repertoire of morality plays, almost all of which were designed, in one way or another, to warn us of the dangers of peer pressure and of the desire to be seen as “cool”. A typical example was a play where a gang of slightly older youth, led by a proto street tough named Joe, would target younger kids for membership in the gang. 

“Veux-tu être membre du gang de Joe?” Joe and his friends would ask the kids. “Oui bien sûr!” they would reply. “Ok si tu veux être cool et membre du gang de Joe, alors tu dois fumer cette cigarette!”.  Then the targeted kid would smoke a cigarette, get violently ill, and then go home and tell their disappointed parents what had happened. Or in another episode, prospective membres du gang de Joe would be invited to drink a beer, or steal a chocolate bar, with similar negative results.  The message, obviously, was that you shouldn’t want to be cool, and you certainly shouldn’t do stupid things in order to be so perceived. 

We loved these plays, of course. Daring one another to do mildly stupid things, in order to join the mythical “gang de Joe,” became a staple of the schoolyard for a few years. 

As we moved into high school, the messaging around peer pressure became more insistent, and more narrowly focused on the dangers of drugs. To a large extent, it was a consequence of the Reagan-era war on drugs in the United States bleeding into Canada, with the anti-peer pressure aspect being pushed through the Nancy Reagan-fronted “Just Say No” campaign. This was a massively well-funded PSA program that even served as a plot device for episodes of Diff'rent Strokes and Punky Brewster (though some older members of Gen X will better remember the “gimme drugs” episode of Welcome Back, Kotter, when Arnold Horshack got hooked by some drug dealers, and was mocked for it by Barbarino).

The interesting thing about this hypertrophied emphasis on the dangers of peer pressure was that it was clearly an expression of profound adult anxiety over what kids would get up to when there were no grownups around. This makes sense in the context of the seventies and eighties, when you had the combination of a number of factors that included spiking divorce rates as well as greatly increased participation by women in the workforce. This gave rise to the well-memed phenomenon of Gen X as the “latchkey” generation, which saw large numbers of kids left on their own outside of school hours for extended periods of time. Add in the growing concern over drug use, and the PSAs pretty much write themselves. These included the much-loved “This is your brain on drugs” series of ads, the anti-drug spot shot by the cast of Saved By The Bell, and the surreal anti-crack PSA featuring Pee Wee Herman. 

By the mid-1990s things had started to calm down on this front (though Rachael Lee Cook’s very popular “this is your brain on drugs” ad came out in 1998). Partly this had to do with a decline in a lot of the factors that had given rise to the original moral panic around peer pressure. Divorce rates were dropping steadily from their early 1980s high points, as were a whole lot of other indicators of social breakdown, including arrests for robbery, assault, forcible rape, and motor vehicle theft. 

But there was also a new threat to kids looming, also from a place where the reach and oversight of adults was severely limited – namely, cyberspace. It took a while for the awareness of the various threats to catch on, largely because of the limitations of connectivity in the Web 1.0 world (though it is interesting that the Théàtre des Lutins was doing a computer safety morality play in the early 1990s). By the mid- to late 2000s though, online safety had almost completely supplanted IRL peer pressure as the dominant anxiety for parents. Sexual predation and grooming has been the overwhelming concern, though cyberbullying and its various offshoots was a huge issue as well. 

But in recent years, the greatest amount of alarm has been raised over the old nemesis, peer pressure, but transposed into a virtual key. Three or four times a year, my kids’ school board sends out a message to parents warning of the latest viral video or Tik Tok trend that is supposedly sweeping through the schools, almost all of which are essentially dares: the blackout challenge, the nutmeg challenge, the milk crate challenge, and on it goes. This freaks us out of course, but more often than not my kids say they haven’t really heard of it, or if they have, it’s all second or third hand, and they don’t really know of anyone actually doing this sort of stuff. But for parents, it is the stuff of nightmares, and it is compounded by the essentially global character of these things. All it takes is one or two stories of kids getting hurt or even dying, whether it’s in Canada, the US, Europe or elsewhere, to convince you that there is no such thing as a safe space online. 

This is the context, I think, in which it is important to understand the growing backlash against phones in schools. Sure, a lot of it has to do with the kind of things Jonathan Haidt is talking about in his new book The Anxious Generation – primarily mental health and anxiety. But there is also a profound sense by parents that what kids get up to online is not in their ability to control or even oversee. The paradox is that even as some parents insist their kids have phones in the name of safety, it is increasingly clear that the kids aren’t being handed a lifeline, they are being given a hand grenade. 

There is a lot more to it, of course, and the discussion around phones in schools has a lot more room to run. But what is fascinating to me here is how quaint the old 1980s-style fears about peer pressure seem in comparison to what is going on now. At least back then parents had a pretty good sense of who your kids’ peers actually were – they were largely kids like them, from broadly the same socioeconomic background, and they lived more or less in your community. The online world in which our kids are now spending much of their time and attention is a much different beast; it is global, purely viral, and largely anonymous, and it is backed by none of the basic community norms and expectations that would have at least tempered much of what we got up to in the 1980s. 

One good thing you could say about the peer pressure to join the gang de Joe, is that at least they were peers.

---

When Morgan Spurlock died last week, I was inclined to write a quick piece about him and the influence of Super Size Me. But then I realised that I hadn’t actually seen the movie since it came out and remembered very little about it. There’s a longer piece I want to write about the activist era of Gen X, starting with the anti-globalization movement and tying together people like Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, and the gang at Adbusters. In the meantime, see you in the comments. ap