How to Help Your Child Handle Peer Pressure
Tips on Helping Your Child to Deal with Peer Pressure
Peer pressure can influence your child’s life in more ways than you may realize. Pressure to conform may have a positive effect if your child’s peers encourage healthy behavior. But it’s the kind of peer pressure that has a negative influence that we worry about, leading your child to make bad judgment calls or to participate in risky activities.
Help your children make their own decisions and not just follow the crowd for the sake of following the crowd. Your children need to learn to do what’s right – for them and their healthy growth, maturity, and safety.
Family Mealtime is Important
How to Get Your Family Back to the Dinner Table for Family Mealtime
It may seem simple, but eating together as a family has been proven to be very beneficial. Studies have found the frequency of family meals to be associated with greater intakes of fruits and vegetables, milk, less fried foods and soft drinks, and higher intakes of several nutrients, including calcium, iron, vitamins, fiber, and less saturated and trans fat intakes.
In addition to the nutritional advantages, family mealtime has been shown to provide opportunities for children to learn vocabulary-building words that help them read well and have been associated with improved school performance. Family mealtime provides an opportunity for families to come together as a group and develop a sense of belonging. Some research even suggests families that eat together have children who experience fewer behavioral problems and reduce the risk that a teen will smoke, drink, or use illegal drugs.