Page 5 - My FlipBook

be friends, classmates, boyfriend, girlfriend, project partners,
and more.
Your relationship with adults or people of very different
ages, such as your teachers, parents, mentors, or little sister are
not peer relationships.
If you’re like most kids, relationships just exist. Your teach-
ers happen to you. Your relatives are just around, doing what
they do. You get to pick your friends and significant others, but
you may not have thought critically about your interactions.
However, in this book, you’ll take a step back to examine
relationships with a critical eye. What does that mean?
When you’re sick, a doctor looks critically at your symp-

toms. She’ll use doctor tools and ask you a bunch of questions
until she figures out what’s wrong with you. Maybe there’s
no problem at all, but at least the doctor can confirm that
nothing is going on. After all, if there was a medical problem,
not getting it examined would have made your life worse.
We’ll talk about relationships and look critically at them in
the same way. Hopefully, all of your relationships are healthy.
However, if you don’t examine it, an unhealthy relationship
can cause a lot of damage, kind of like a terrible stomachache
that you don’t take care of.
The lessons in this chapter will be very handy for recog-
nizing signs of abuse and taking action.
Most of chapter 1 will focus on peer relationships. Chap-
ter 1 has no sexual or violent content. For some of you, this chap-

ter may be all you’re prepared to read for now, and that’s okay.
The lessons in this chapter can be applied to many situations.
For those who do feel ready to move on, this chapter serves
as a very important stepping-stone into the next chapters,

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