Peer Programs Hold Promise for Prevention
by Bonnie Benard

Western Regional Center for Drug-Free Schools and Communities, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory.

A year ago I wrote an article for the Illinois Prevention Resource Centers Prevention Forum newsletter which addressed the critical need for the prevention and education fields to change the framework from which they often view youth to see children and youth not as problems which need to be fixed but as resources who can contribute to their families, schools, and communities. In that article I discussed a powerful strategy for providing youth the opportunity to be useful contributing members of their communities--youth service.

I still believe youth service programs at the middle, junior, and high school level can play a major role in reducing the alienation many youth feel from their families, schools, and communities, a disconnectedness that often manifests in the social problems of alcohol/drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and dropping out of school. However, what has become increasingly clear to me this last year is the need for children to experience themselves as resources from early childhood on. This means youth service must be a concept we infuse throughout our schools from the preschool level forward; youth service should not be another program or course tacked on to an already over-full curriculum. The chances that a semester of youth service will instill in an already alienated adolescent a sense of personal worth and value--after experiencing years of treatment as a problem--are slim.

What I am advocating in stating that the concept of youth service must be infused throughout our schools is none other than the adoption of a peer resource model of education in which schools and classrooms are restructured so that youth--from early childhood through late adolescence--are provided ongoing, continuous opportunities to be resources to each other. I use the term "peer resource" to refer to any program that uses children and youth to work with and/or help other children and youth. Included in this definition are programs such as youth service, cooperative learning, peer tutoring, cross-age tutoring, peer helping (replaces the term "peer counseling"), peer mediation, peer leadership, and youth involvement.

The rationale for a peer resource model of education is multifaceted and grounded in research from many disciplines, and there search evidence for the effectiveness of peer resource programs on a youth's academic and social development is very compelling. Researchers have found that peer relationships contribute to a child's cognitive development and socialization in a variety of ways. In the arena of peer interactions, children learn attitudes, values, and skills through peer modeling and reinforcement. Peers are critical in the development and internalization of moral standards. Through reciprocal peer interactions children learn to share, to help, to comfort, and to empathize with others. They learn social skills, such as impulse control, communication, creative and critical thinking, and relationship or friendship skills. In fact, the failure to develop social and relationship skills is a powerful, well-proven early indicator of later substance abuse, delinquency, and mental health problems.

Developing peer programming throughout the life cycle--self-help groups, mutual aid groups, for neighbor natural helpers, inter generational programs, etc.--should be a major focus of prevention policy and programming. We all know the negative power of cultural norms promoting alcohol use; imagine the positive power of a school-community, let alone society, that promoted and systematically infused the value of caring for others!

EDITOR'S NOTE: For a complete research-based discussion of peer relations and peer resource programs, Bonnie Benard's paper, The Case for Peers, is available from the Western Center's Resource Center.[From Western Center News, December 1990, Vol.4, No.1]