Key Concepts:
Vocabulary: prejudice, stereotype, tolerance, bullying, hazing
Respecting Yourself and Others
Respect for Yourself
Main Idea: Self-respect will strengthen your relationships.
Having self-respect is an important foundation for developing and maintaining healthy relationships. When you respect yourself, you’re more likely to seek out relationships with people who treat you with respect. Self-respect makes you less likely to let other people talk you into taking risks that could harm your health.
The Need for Strong Values
During your teen years, you may be searching for your personal identity-your sense of who you are and where you belong in the world. You may struggle to develop your personal values system. Values, as you have learned, are the beliefs, ideas, and attitudes about what is important that help guide the way you live.
Being unsure of your values can complicate your relationships. If you aren’t clear about your values, it’s much more difficult to communicate them to others. As a result, the people around you may not be able to tell what is important to you. This could increase the chance that you’ll face pressure to participate in unhealthful behaviors.
In contrast, when you are clear about your values, you strengthen your relationships. Other people will know what you believe in and understand what’s important to you. Upholding your values shows that you respect yourself, and communicating your values to others can help them respect you too.
Respect for Others
Main Idea: It’s important to treat people with respect.
You can strengthen your relationships with all the people in your life by treating them with the same respect you’d like them to show you. With strangers and casual acquaintances, you can show respect through common courtesy. You might hold a door open for someone or say “thank you” to the checker at the grocery store. With close friends and family members, you can show respect in more significant ways:
Listen to other people. Be willing to hear and consider their points of view, even if you disagree with them.
Be considerate of others’ feelings. Before you act or speak, consider how it might make the other person feel.
Develop mutual trust. Let others know they can trust you by being honest and dependable. Show that you trust them by believing what they say and confiding in them.
Be realistic in your expectations. For example, you can’t expect friends and family members to always make you their top priority.
Tolerance
Sometimes people treat others with disespect because of prejudice. Prejudice is an unfair opinion or judgment of a particular group of people. For example, a teen might decide he dislikes all cheerleaders because a cheerleader once turned him down for a date. Some forms of prejudice involve stereotypes. A stereotype is an exaggerated or oversimplified belief about people who belong to a certain group. Assuming that all boys like sports is an example of a gender stereotype.
Prejudice is a barrier to healthy relationships. It can keep people from getting to know others as individuals. In contrast, demonstrating tolerance can help you build healthy relationships. Tolerance is the ability to accept others’ differences. People who are tolerant value diversity and can appreciate differences in other people’s cultures, interests, and beliefs.
Disrespectful Behaviors
Has a fellow student ever picked on you for no reason? Perhaps this person called you names, or even threatened you with physical violence. This disrespectful behavior is an example of bullying-deliberately harming or threatening other people who cannot easily defend themselves. Bullies may tease their victims, spread rumors about them, or try to keep them out of a group. They may even attack others physically by pushing, shoving, or hitting them.
Some bullies push other people around because it makes them feel superior. They may also do it as a way to feel they are part of a group or to keep from being bullied themselves. As many as one out of four students in the United States gets bullied on a regular basis. Kids and teens who are bullied at school may stay home out of fear. They may even try to harm themselves because the bullying has seriously damaged their self-esteem. Bullying behavior is also harmful to the bullies themselves. They are more likely to drop out of school and to have problems with alcohol or violence. Hazing, a related problem, means making others perform certain tasks in order to join the group. Hazing activities may be physically or emotionally harmful. Examples include yelling or swearing, forcing new group members to go without sleep, physically beating them, or forcing them to drink alcohol. Severe hazing incidents have been known to result in death. Hazing is often meant to humiliate new members or prove that they are inferior to existing members.
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