Compare the influences of parents and friends
Uploaded by rylienguyen on Mar 19, 2017
It is obvious that teenagers are strongly orientated by both family and friends. Parents are considered as role models for children during the formative years of their life and their influence stretch throughout the childhood until adulthood. For peers, friendships at turning points of adolescence play substantial roles in evolvement. Without doubt, each of them has it’s own distinguishing features on the way the exert effects on juveniles.
The first critical aspect differentiating the influence of parents and friends is academic performance. There has been a clear correlation between parent involvement and children’s success in school. Parent involvement such as discussing children’s schoolwork with them and motivating their academic endeavors by withdrawal of privileges for poor grades or granting rewards facilitates children’s learning and ultimately their academic achievement.On the other hand, influence from peers is more complicated. While children can learn a host of skills such as team working, problem solving, and trust building among friends, studies show that children who are rejected by their peers, who experience more loneliness and social isolation, are more likely to become disaffected from academic activities and eventually leave school (Kirk A. Johnson, 2000)
Another major difference between parental and peer influence on teenagers’s development is career choice. Obviously, the career path of the parents greatly influences an adolescent’s decision about his professional future. Teens can the see the benefits and disadvantages of their parents’ career and react accordingly. Moreover, parents initiate trajectories, sometimes trying to steer their child in a preferred developmental path based on either their preferences or their observations of the child’s characteristics and abilities, such as enrolling their child in a class or exposing them to inspiring people and places. While parents usually play the initial leading roles in the value transmission, peers, however, seem to have the greatest role in adaptation of decision making via the approach to sources of information such as books, laboratories, classes, extra curricular activities and social relations. (Arab Naz, 2014). Also, the discussion topics among friends about career, politics, economy are supposed to be of some suggestions to an individual in profession ’s choice.
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