Your family affects you as a developing individual because of the role it plays in Child Development. A child’s learning and socialization are fully controlled by their family since the family is the child’s primary social group. That’s why we pick up things like religion and culture from our immediate family.

Parents are the ultimate influence since they tend to greatly influence a child’s belief system, from religion to politics to personal values and habits. They socialize them into the world and (hopefully) monitor their involvement with it. Parents are the single largest factor, in my opinion, in determining a child’s success or failure in life.

Child development also happens physically, emotionally, socially, and intellectually during this time as parent’s behavior affects the child’s development. Abusive parents may cause their children to be aggressive and violent, experience learning problems and even become involved in drugs or alcohol. Parents who abuse provide the opposite of what a child needs to grow up healthy. Instead, they destroy the inside and outside world of a child.

However, positive relationships influences children’s learning and enables them to develop security and independence through having a key person to care for them. Children’s learning is helped when they feel safe and secure and when their parents and the people in settings they attend work together to ensure that the child’s needs are met.