Talking to Your Kids About Peer Pressure

The role of imitation in human behavior is central to the Montessori Method of education as well as mimetic theory. Thinking about peer pressure as a form of imitation turns out to be a helpful way to understand the phenomenon in our children. But more importantly, it makes us aware that peer pressure can be good or bad for us and most certainly doesn’t disappear when we graduate from school. In this video I explain that during the 1890s in Italy, Montessori and her colleagues were captivated by the new discovery of hypnosis. At the same time Carlo Collodi published his satirical stories about Pinocchio, the puppet without strings. It turns out that hypnosis and Pinocchio help us understand peer pressure as the normal result of the ways in which all of us are susceptible to the influence of others.