Growing children are like sponges that absorb anything and everything that happens to or around them. Aping the actions of adult members of their own family or other adults with whom they are in close proximity is the primary learning method that they adopt early on in life. The society that they live in, the neighborhood in which they grow up and the education that they receive both through experience as well as the formal one, all determine the kind of individual the child grows up to be.
As children grow, the intensity that these social interactions have on their general outlook gradually diminish. After a certain age children tend to focus more on the behavior of their peers and try to imbibe those characteristics which they think would be ideal for them. Although most parents don’t realize it, their children can be influenced greatly by other children of the same age or even adults in the neighborhood. Children living in the same neighborhood have many things in common, which might include sharing the same playing space, going to the same school or being part of a car pool.
Peer pressure is also another factor that might influence your child’s outlook. If one of the older kids in the neighborhood suggests smoking as cool behavior, there is a chance that your child would choose to believe it is so at the risk of disagreeing with you. Most parents often fall prey to complacency in dealing with these things, resulting in their children understanding and interpreting things around them very differently from how they actually are.
