Topic: Do you agree or disagree with the following statement:
Children are influenced more by their family than by their friends.
Please help to correct my essay! Thanks in advance!
In today’s world, children are experiencing an environment where they can interact with both their friends and family members equally. It is not like in the past when children often spent most of their time at home doing things under their parents’ instructions, children, nowadays, spend more time at school socializing and hanging out with friends. However, if I have to choose which one between family members and friends are more influential in forming children’s characteristics, ways of thinking, and career orientation, I would choose family members.
To begin with, family forms children’s personality and characteristics. Everybody might know that as our parents’ children, most of us have been living with them all of our life time, from the moment our beloved mother gave birth to us until today when we are students in a high school, or even doctors in a hospital or managers in a company. Generally speaking, under the view of our venerable parents, we, somewhat, are still a child, even though we might not perceive that way. Parents teach us how to speak, how to write, and how to behave kindly and correctly towards others, brothers and sisters being our companions share with us their innermost feelings and listen to what we want to pour out but cannot with parents , gradually forming in us a unique characteristics and personality.
Intellectually, family creates in children the way of thinking. Parents create an environment where children build their learning hobbies, create their learning schedule, and follow their learning discipline. Furthermore, what kind of books they should read, what religious belief system they should follow, or what schools or teachers they should pursue, in some extent, are given and chosen by their parents. All of these factors would convince us to believe that family is very important to children in shaping their ability to think and perceive other things surrounding them.
Professionally, family is the main source of information from which children can find out a career they should follow. Sometimes, family culture plays an important role in forming children’s professional life. Children whose parents are art-oriented people might choose art-related major to study when they attend a college. Similarly, children whose parents are running a business would get a sense of doing business and would choose business-related major later in life to pursue and follow up their family’s business after their parents retire. Moreover, being a little child who is not mature enough to choose the most suitable way of life to follow, he or she might rely mostly on his or her parents’ decision in choosing, leading, and orienting his or her career.
In short, though friends can have a strong influence on a young person, it is finally the family which provides the more powerful backdrop in a young person’s life. The family’s influence is permanent, unforgettable and inescapable.
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