Question: Can attachment to friends cause healthier behaviour?

Kirsty Miller answered on 13 Jun 2017:

Hi 🙂
Yes! It definitely can!
In general (and with adults!), feeling attached to a group of friends usually causes healthier behaviour! This is because if we have people who care about us then we are more likely to care about ourselves and look after our health! As well as this, having friends who are healthy is more likely to make us healthy too because we are more likely to behave like them!
However, it is sometimes different with teenagers (as you can probably guess!) because teenagers are more likely to take part in unhealthy behaviours (like smoking, drinking, taking drugs etc) than adults are. This is why feeling attached to friends often encourages unhealthier behaviour in young people – young people tend to do things that are worse for their health!
Of course, this doesn’t mean that all young people smoke or take drugs, or behave unhealthily! Some are very healthy, and exercise, eat well etc. In these cases, if you are friends with people like this then you are more likely to be healthy too!
So it’s definitely not the case that attachment to friends will always make you unhealthy, it’s just in a teenage group, they are more likely to encourage you to do unhealthy things too!
Hope this helps but let me know if you have any more questions!
Kirsty 🙂