Today I'm going to talk about peer pressure, the good kind and the bad kind.

And one of the things parents should be concerned about is really teaching and preparing their kids

to handle peer pressure, to identify it, know what it is, and prepare them to do the right thing.

We want our kids who will do the right thing, obviously, regardless of pressure from friends to do something

other than the right thing, right? So how do we teach them to do this? Well, first, I suggest we teach them by learning it ourselves. We parents

are not immune to peer pressure. Just think about it. How many times do we feel an urge to do

something or buy something? Because our friends are doing it. Our friends are traveling to Europe.

We should go to Europe. Our friends are building a new house. We should build a new house. Our friends are traveling to Europe. We should go to Europe. Our friends are building a

new house. We should build a new house. Our friends are taking up golf. We should take up golf, et cetera.

Now, these are all neutral issues. It's a free country. Golf, if you want to. That's certainly not my

point. Sometimes you're just taking a good idea from someone else from their

example. It's not peer pressure and it may not even be like a weird kind of copycat. It's just like,

oh, I love the way she decorated her tree for Christmas. I'm going to try to do the same thing. It's a

compliment. It is not

giving way to peer pressure. But there are some issues that are more important than golf or

Christmas tree decoration. And that's what if you do feel pressure from your sweet Christian friends,

from your peers, to homeschool or to enroll your kids in a Christian school.

Both those choices are good choices, and neither one is wicked or evil.

But if you make a weighty choice like that, a choice that's going to affect your kids long-term

without understanding why you're doing it and what it means,

then you're simply following the crowd and responding to peer pressure, thinking, I just want to be

friends with this group, so therefore we will make this very weighty decision based on what they're

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