In my psychology class, we’re currently learning about development and how your life experiences can shape who you are as a person. Recently we talked about how vital your experiences as a baby and child are to molding your future personality and traits. Although you’re born with a specific temperament, that doesn’t define your personality or who you are as a person. Your temperament is just one puzzle piece that makes up your part of your personality. Instead your experiences, most importantly when you’re young, complete the puzzle that makes up your personality. I thought that this was very interesting because it really represents one of the big ideas of psychology, the nature-nurture argument. This is just a debate about whether your genetics or life experiences influence your behavior more. Most of the time though it seems that it’s a combination of genetics and life experiences that mold you into who you are. Like how you’re naturally born with your temperament, but that combines with your life experiences to mold your personality.
We also learned that your parents play a huge role in your development. For instance, they help shape what your future personality and traits will look like. Parenting styles can have various results for their children later on in life, for better or for worse. For example, if your parents have an authoritative parenting style you may have strong emotional regulation and the best chance to develop high self-esteem. On the other hand, if your parents are permissive you may be more likely to have poor time management and to be prone to delinquency. The type of parent you have doesn’t guarantee these results, it’s just a correlation, but I still think that it’s really interesting how certain life experiences outside of your control can have so much influence over your life.
Overall I thought that it was really interesting how most of what molds our personality and behavior is truly out of our hands and that such little experiences as a child can have a huge impact on you later on in life.
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I also find this really interesting when we learned about it in class. I did not realize how much the home environment and the parenting style that our parents used affected our behaviors. I find it kind of upsetting that the factors that shape out development and behaviors as children are out of our controls. I think this helps with the nurture side of the nature - nurture debate because the parenting style that raised is going to have influences on us. We aren't just born with certain behaviors.
ReplyDeleteI found this interesting in class too. I think its very intriguing that the rest of our lives will be influenced by the way we were parented as children. Its interesting how we are children for such a short amount of time, but that short amount of time has a ton of influence on the rest of our lives.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with the idea that your experiences influence your personality. Over quarantine, I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn which is a novel about a young girl growing up in Brooklyn and all of her life experiences and it made me realize just how important making mistakes and doing different things can be. After reading this book, I began noticing in my own life how my personality changed after certain situations which was really interesting.
ReplyDeleteI was just thinking about this over the weekend! (I can't remember why...)
ReplyDeleteWriting suggestion: connect what you're saying to a personal experience or your own life in some way; it's more interesting for readers to hear stories than just information!