Many factors and coincidences shape human life. The environment, especially the close ones, for example, the family, decisions made, and various events form a particular path-dependency of one’s life with a corresponding outcome. In the book Wes Moore “The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates,” the author tells the story of two men with the same names but completely different fates. The book’s author is a scientist from Rhodes, a White House employee, and a former army officer. His namesake is a drug dealer, robber, and murderer, sentenced to life and serving time in prison, from which he will be released only after his death. Both Wes Moores grew up in a low-income environment and faced problems related to illegal drugs and violence in their youth. One of the book’s main takeaways is that the author had networks of support and role models that led him to positive decisions, including having an education, while the unsuccessful Moore is a victim of the injustice of chance and history. Thus, the causal connection between the structural capabilities of a person and their life comes to the fore, which is of paramount importance for the formation of a person’s fate: their environment or individual agency and personal responsibility. From this perspective, it is crucial to consider the discussion about the influence of parents on children. The designated question opens up two points of view on this question.
On the one hand, it is argued that parents are fundamental in shaping children’s life chances. On the other hand, there is an opinion that, in reality, parents’ influence on the child’s fate is not so significant. In the future, other factors appear, such as the child’s personal choice, that is, individual agency, or other structural factors, such as secondary socialization and more abstract social barriers. This paper argues that although there are exceptions, in general, parents’ influence in the first stages of life lays the foundation for building the further trajectory of a child’s life.
At present, a large number of studies have been devoted to the problem of child-parental relations, both in domestic and foreign psychology. Many authors, such as Vygotsky, Freud, Erickson, and others, consider the family the most critical factor in developing a child’s personality (Csathó and Birkás). The family is the first social institution in which the child’s needs for safety, love, respect and emotional support are met. Studying the sources, driving forces, and conditions for the development of the psyche and the child’s personality as a whole, we can say that all the child’s mental development is primarily mediated by communication and the peculiarities of interaction with adults, especially with parents. The physical and mental development of a child largely depends on the child’s communication with an adult, and on how this communication proceeds, especially in the context of child-parent relations (Perry). How much the child’s need for interaction with other people is satisfied, how parent-child relationships develop, how harmonious and favorable they are, will depend not only on the development of character traits, personal qualities, self-esteem, the child’s attitude, but also on all their further relationships with other people, and with peers, and with the adults around them.
The child is also highly dependent on the attitude that adults show them, and it is in communication through the mechanism of imitation that the child learns how people interact with each other. Studies have shown that the mental development of a child is determined by their emotional contact and the peculiarities of cooperation with parents. As Csathó and Birkás state, “Early-life experiences not only influence personal life history strategy; they may also sensitize individuals to adversity, influencing how they respond to adversity in later life.” (p.311). Thus, it can be argued that the formation of parent-child relationships is influenced by the type of family, the position taken by adults, the styles of relationships, and the role they assign to the child in the family (Härkönen). At the same time, family relationships can be multifaceted, and an ineffective type of parental relationship leads to anxiety in the child (Härkönen). At present, the family upbringing factors, and above all the family dynamics, are singled out as the “basic” cause of children’s anxiety. It is especially relevant concerning the link between low income and emotional support: “larger social networks and more emotional support from those networks have been linked to higher maternal–child responsiveness and better cognitive stimulation among low‐income families” (Morris et al., p.391).
An adult for a child, especially in older preschool age, is a constant attractive center around which the child’s life is built. This creates a need for children to act in their own way. At the same time, they want to reproduce the individual actions of an adult and imitate all the complex forms of their activity, their actions, their relationships with other people – in a word, the whole way of life of adults (Fay‐Stammbach, Tracey, et al). In addition to the imitation mechanism, in the case of insufficient care and love that the child receives in the family, the child satisfies these manifestations in relations with peers through the compensation mechanism.
Moreover, in addition to the formation of personality traits, parents contribute to the fact that they set social norms for their children’s behavior. In everyday life, adults make specific demands on children, such as accuracy, conscientiousness, organization, compassion, kindness, and more. To fulfill the required norms, children are approved for violation – they are censured or even resort to punishment. Moreover, in the older preschool age, adults’ approval, especially parents, means so much to children that they try to deserve it with their behavior. Thus, in the practice of their daily life, preschoolers develop the required behavioral habits and some generalized meaning of many ethical norms that guide them in what is “good” and what is “bad.” That is, thanks to interaction in the family, where the child first acquires the social experience of interaction, the child themselves selects those rules and norms that are accepted in their social environment (but whether they are true or wrong is a matter of time) and makes them the rules of their own behavior (Perry). For example, in play, a child seeks to embody the behavior taken as a model and then seeks to embody it in real life when interacting with people around them – adults and peers.
Thus, the parent-child relationship is such a component that affects all spheres of the child’s personality: emotional, communicative, cognitive, and many others. The interaction of a child with parents is the first experience of interaction with the outside world, which is consolidated, and as a result, it forms specific patterns of behavior with other people – both with adults and with peers. This leads to the formation of both the qualities (properties) of the child’s personality and the strategies of the child’s interaction with peers. It is essential to know all the directions of the formation of different qualities, personality traits, and forms of interaction to correct them and help the child build adequate ways of interacting with the people around them. The fact that parents play a decisive role in the future of the child is confirmed by two stories of different destinies in the book Moore. Aspirations and patterns of behavior shape future options for children. So, the unsuccessful Moore largely fell into an unfortunate path-dependency for the reason that his father abandoned him and while being a criminal and drug dealer exposed his son to similar patterns. Although his son was trying to achieve a better future, February 7, 2000, was a pivotal moment when the behaviors learned through his father took over and he robbed a jewelry store. Another Wes Moore, the author of the book, also came from a similar social environment, that is, the structural conditions were the same, with a predominance of poverty and criminality. However, he managed to avoid bad luck insofar as he was fortunate enough to have healthy relationships with his parents and, accordingly, desirable role models, as well as support. The most important step taken by his mother was to send him to the military academy and Valley Forge College. Thus, the aspirations of parents and a healthy relationship with them lay the foundation for an exit from a disadvantaged environment.
Works Cited
Csathó, Árpád, and Béla Birkás. “Early-life stressors, personality development, and fast life strategies: An evolutionary perspective on malevolent personality features.” Frontiers in psychology 9 (2018): 305-321.
Fay‐Stammbach, Tracey, et al. “Parenting influences on executive function in early childhood: A review.” Child development perspectives 8.4 (2014): 258-264.
Härkönen, Juho, et al. “Family dynamics and child outcomes: An overview of research and open questions.” European Journal of Population 33.2 (2017): 163-184.
Moore, Wes. The Other Wes Moore: One name, two fates. Spiegel & Grau, 2011.
Morris, Amanda Sheffield, et al. “Targeting parenting in early childhood: A public health approach to improve outcomes for children living in poverty.” Child development 88.2 (2017): 388-397.
Perry, Nicole B., et al. “Maternal socialization of child emotion and adolescent adjustment: Indirect effects through emotion regulation.” Developmental psychology 56.3 (2020): 541-557.