Can your family affect who you are as a person and who you will become?
The type of people you grow up around can change a person’s identity drastically.
The way you grow up and who raises you can influence your beliefs, values and self-perception. Different families have different values, norms, cultures and behaviors. Most of the time if you are raised in a tight knit family with really strict parents you will grow up the same way. But if you are raised by easy going and laid back parents, you will be more like them. But this can be different for everyone, some people are not raised by their biological parents but their grandparents or aunts and uncles. This can change perspectives and views on life because it is proven that those who are taken care of by alternative caregivers often will have a different perspective on family dynamics. Linked In states, “Parental guidance is the way that our parents or caregivers guide us through life, by setting expectations, giving advice, modeling behavior, and enforcing discipline. Parental guidance can have a positive or negative impact on our values and identity, depending on how consistent, supportive, and respectful it is.” This further proves that guidance from the people in your family are what set up the things and ideas that make a person who they are.
Some people think that your family does not affect the type of person you will grow up to be. They believe that you can be completely set apart from your family. This is true; this tends to happen in more negative types of households due to resentment and the need to rebel. If a child feels the need to be different from their caregivers on an extreme level then the chances are they will succeed and set themselves up for a different lifestyle compared to their caregivers. But it is more common for people to end up similar to the people who raised them either way simply because they had such an effect on their brain while they were growing up and this will not go away easily.
Allowing your families to have such an impact on the person you become is not necessarily a bad thing. But this is situational; it all depends on the environment that you were raised in and the things you were taught. In order for this to change, caregivers need to stop trying to push their beliefs, problems, and values onto their children and just let them figure the world out for themselves when it comes to certain things.
Your family can have a huge impact on who you become and what you choose to do with your life. Although there is nothing wrong with guidance sometimes in certain situations, guidance can turn into pressure which can be more of a negative than a positive.
