Lydia and I were 10 years old and writing stories about girls our age a thousand years in the future. We were imagining what the entries in their diaries would say. I had written a couple of entries and was drawing a picture of my character, but mostly spent time talking with Lydia about what would happen in my story when I got around to writing it. Then Lydia came to school one morning having written 40 pages in a single night.

I was impressed; I was envious; I was inspired to get busy. Lydia was taking what we both said we loved and going further with it than I had ever imagined going. Her example made me want to go further, too.

Friends influence each other, no question about it. But for parents of daughters, the idea of peer influence often provokes more anxiety than excitement. Think of the word “peer” and the word “pressure” seems almost inevitably to follow, along with visions of smoking, drinking, early sexual activity, and whatever else seems frightening and not the kind of thing a girl would get into on her own.

But it’s important to remember that the influence of friends can be positive as well as negative. Girls can learn from their friends in ways that help them grow and aspire to more than they thought they were capable of.

How can we tell the difference? Well, one obvious difference is in the behavior itself: it’s negative if a friend inspires a girl to take up smoking and positive if a friend inspires a girl to take up the violin. But even the violin could be negative if it was taken up solely to please or emulate a friend. The way I like to think of the distinction is that with negative peer influence, a girl acts in ways that don’t really feel like herself. She may get drawn into behavior that she doesn’t truly feel comfortable engaging in, or take up an activity that doesn’t truly connect with her sense of herself and what she cares about.

When a girl is influenced by a friend in a positive way, however, she sees a possibility she hadn’t seen before, or tries harder than she would have tried without her friend’s example. She reaches, stretches, grows; she is in an important sense becoming more herself.

Stretching with the help of friends
Eleven-year-old Robin likes to know what songs her friends are learning on the piano. Her mother observes, “I get the impression that she likes to keep up musically with her friends. It means a lot to her to hear what they are playing, and then to try it herself. Several times, other kids have brought on musical growth spurts for Robin.”

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