Guidence Is Needed.....

By Kerwin De Matas

We start another week, and do I have something to talk about! Always, most of what I have to talk about is normally from conversations that I have with my friends. Now we were talking about why is it that most youngsters go about ruining their lives, doing shit that they don´t have to do in the first place. Well, I am not going to try explaining behavioural habits of wayward kids that I don´t know anyway. But what I could do, is talk about myself and my friends a little bit.

Should Peer Pressure Be Blamed?

Professionals say that peer pressure is the cause for most people ( in most cases kids ), doing things that they shouldn´t have done, because of pressure from their peers. Are kids with low self esteem, more vulnerable to peer pressure? If I suffered from low self esteem when I was kid, don´t know, because I never really gave my self an examination to define that, but I think I was a little timid. Now the school I went to was government run, and I would say, putting everything apart, that the school was pretty decent. But to have what we called ' ranks ', one had to prove themselves from the first day, or that person would be one of the runts. Now a kid´s supposed friends would sometimes pick fights on his behalf ( thank you very much! ), to see what that kid was made of. Not wanting to sound like I was a tough kid, but I was fairly strong for a kid of my age, and could have stood my ground in a dog fight. But as I said before, I was a little timid...So in the end, my so called friends needed me when we had to group up, and I needed them to get into their circles of the well dressed and popular. So there you had it!

Perfect Example!!

We did things while I was at school that now when I think about it, I really feel embarrassed. Ambushes to take the sneakers of another rival group, puncturing the car tires of teachers or people outside of school that did us bad, cutting school to go to the rivers or community pools with girls from our group or from other schools, and the list of our stupidities goes on. It should not be a big mystery then as to why delinquent kids do things that is simply out of bounds. My mother was not a bad mother, but being a police officer and the only bread winner in our small family, the attention that was necessary, especially for an adolescent, was just not there. How many times I got suspended from school, until my mother just got fed up of bailing me out, and my uncles had to continue from there on my mother´s behalf. You see, my problem was just wanting to belong, it didn´t matter what nonsense my friends and I did, for me it was hip, and I was totally aware and responsible for everything I did.

Adolescent Gangs...

I wouldn´t blame anyone for anything I did, but myself. Now I was lucky...yeh, only because of the fair performance in my studies and me getting better if I wanted to, did some of my teachers actually stuck with me as well as my neighborhood catholic priest. Man, if it weren´t for these people, I guess it wouldn´t have been hard to figure where my life would have led to. What´s the summary then? Adolescent kids in trouble, almost always have issues, they don´t just turn bad one day to the next, think about that, bye.