Parents may eventually become an embarrassment to young adolescents.
Early adolescents struggle with the conflict inherent in the need to depend on parents for support as they move toward independence. The seventh grader who occasionally ask her parents for assistance in doing homework may request that her father drop her off a block from school to ensure that he not embarrass her in front of her friends. At the end of the day, when the father returns to the same intersection to pick his daughter up, she might chastise him for not driving right up to the school building. – Brown & Knowles (2007)

I did the same thing in middle school too, asking my mother to drop me off and pick me up one or two blocks away from the school. This happened to my older sister too, while I didn’t understand that time when I was much younger. The cause of this behavior was the same on both of us which was peer pressure or peer recognition. Our family was middle-class which owned domestic brand cars, such as Ford or Toyota. However, most of our friends’ family drove luxury brand cars, such as Mercedes Benz or BMW, being nicknamed as Double-B. Therefore, we were questioned and laughed by peers that “what kind of car your family drove?”
My older sister encountered lots of similar issues because she went to a gifted private middle school which required entrance exam benchmark to enroll, which I failed to enter… As a result, most of students in this school were affluent and smart, which were typical preps. They were adolescents who were in developmental stage and lacked of sympathy to other kind of livings. My sister had a hard time to stay in this school because she was never “fit in.” Eventually, she withdrawal the school and transferred to a local average public school. Then, my mom came back to park her car near the school entrance.
There is another sentence in another reading this week grabbing my eyes,

“Race, ethnicity, and family backgrounds are all characteristics that have not chosen, however, and they come loaded with meanings” (Cushman, K., & Rogers, L. (2008)

. OMG, this speaks for everyone. I remembered my mom’s misunderstanding on my request of parking the car with certain distance. And, one day, I just got over it and didn’t care it anymore. However, this is really important for teachers to pay attention on students’ family difference, which may be the huge factor manipulating peer pressure and how much they could fit in the environment. How do I cultivate students’ harmony of academic and social interaction without bias when my students come from all different in social, economic or ethnic backgrounds? However, it’s a huge issue not only for adolescents but also among adults too, for example, the hottest icon, Donald Trump. A school is a miniscule society which teachers not only teach content knowledge but also contemplations.

Reference

Brown, D., & Knowles, T. (2007). Who am I? The social, emotional, and identity trials of young adolescence. In What every middle school teacher should know. (2nd Ed., pp. 37-66). New Hampshire: Heinemann Press.
Cushman, K., & Rogers, L. (2008). Everything is off balance. In Fires in the middle school bathroom: Advice for teachers from middle school students (pp. 14-38). New York: The New Press.