Page 48 - SB-Collard Green Garden

For most of us, dealing with Negative Peer Pressure and Negative Personal Pressure is a life long battle.
Negative Peer Pressure, is defined as: other people trying to influence you to do something, which is harmful to others, society or yourself.
Understanding this and dealing effectively with it is an obvious problem for most children. This fable illustrates different types of negative peer pressure with the characters, the Rabbit, the Owl and the Bull. You are able to observe this process in your home, the classroom and on the playground. Your child can become aware of this type of manipulation and can be helped to counteract it using some of the coping skills being taught in this program.
Of even more importance, particularly as your children grow older, is internal version of this process called Negative Personal Pressure. This is when these “negative characters,” have become negative mental self-messages messages. When we no longer need another person to negatively manipulate our behavior because we are doing it to ourselves.
The chronic underachiever has an “Owl” belief system about himself or herself. They tell themselves the same type of messages that the owl character told the girl in the story and as a consequence they avoid new, novel or difficult situations. The overly shy child has a “Bull” belief system and catastrophizes every situation. They see disaster at every turn and believe that this danger should be avoided at all costs.
Most children have a combination of these irrational beliefs, which comprises their negative personal pressure. In some situations it is the Bull, in others the Owl, in still others the Rabbit.
You realize that it is this negative belief system at work, when the child is doing or not doing something when the opposite is obviously better or easier and in their best self-interest. On those occasions, when you can’t understand why a child behaves in a manner that is contrary to common sense, realize that it is their Negative Person Pressure. You may have no access to negative self-talk and they may have very limited awareness of it.
Use your opportunities to reinforce cognitions and behaviors that address both external and internal negative pressures. The external is easier to address,
the internal is more important to address. Since you will have less access
to these internal pressures (beliefs), focus on the external situations and model appropriate thinking with the hope that it may generalize into a more appropriate rational belief system for them.
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