There is a belief among experts that everyone is born as a blank slate. We do not know anything about the world and those around us and we spend our childhood years learning, emulating, adjusting, and finally creating our individual personas based on these experiences. Now the main question being asked by the other experts these days is “Does the environment influence people?” The environment has an effect on a person in more ways than one can fare imagine.
My argument is that the environment does influence people, children most specifically, by building character and freethinking. We can also view the influence of the environment on people in terms of scientific and sociological aspects. In more scientific terms, one can say that an environment is based on the physical, geographic, biological, social, cultural, and political conditions that a person has to deal with on a daily basis and learns to equip himself regarding how best to handle those situations. In terms of society links, the environment has a direct bearing on how lives and societies evolve. People, progress, development, and the environment are like an inter-linking chain where all of these varied aspects converge to form a new form of thinking or character in a person.
In terms of childhood development, we can safely say that the environment has the heaviest influence over a child. A child’s environment is not the same as in his home environment where everything is controlled by his parents. Even though parents may raise and rear a child in the best way they know how, that is not the environment that influences him the most because he spends most of his time outside the house. The environment outside the house is where the child begins to develop his character and sense of ones self. Outside the home, a child tries to become part of and to identify himself with a peer group. A child does this by allowing himself to be influenced by the people around him and