Life's all about gambles, but we can all agree with me that even gambles are influenced by certain factors.
Right from time immemorial, life has got a way of of mixing traits in unpredictable ways. I think I remember one of my teachers who believes that, "You can only identify bad because you've tasted good". And when you go deeper in that saying, you'll also believe that it's true.
When you don't get to taste the other side of the coin, you can't explicitly say what it looks like.
No one has a monopoly of doing good or bad because even the worst of persons have people they treat with so much kindness she good to, so doesn't that make you question the fact that everyone knows what they are doing?
In as much as I'll always love to believe that people are the product of their environment, there's still a greater part of me that believes everyone knows what they are doing.
That's to say that in essence whether your child turns out to be a good person or a bad person, he or she knows what he or she is doing
Nonetheless, that's never to dispute the role the environment play in childhood upbringing. A child who is constantly shown love, treated with respect and like a human being naturally should be of good character because where did he learn the wickedness from when he never experienced one?
On the flip side, another child is in an environment that constantly flourish in wickedness, an environment where the elders literally don't even talk to themselves, he gradually grew up to think that life is all about how toxic , hard and cold you are.
Still, environment on its own isn't the only factor to consider. Human behavior is shaped by a web of genetic, environmental, social, and psychological factors, none of which alone determine the outcome but we can only try and hope for the best rather than leaving everything entirely to chance.
So what exactly brings out the character we see in people? The good or bad they portray and why do we sometimes see “bad” people come from good homes and “good” people rise from dysfunctional backgrounds?
There's no permutation that I haven't ran through my head since seeing this prompt yesterday, but, I just can't get an answer. It just can't be explained even in a set of twins raised under the same environmental condition, under same roof, sharing some if not all genes, can turn out to be completely different people.
Children still learn greatly by what they see, so when you constantly display acts of compassion, honesty and love around them, they subconsciously learn about them. But even that doesn't cancel out the effect of peers. And that's what makes this such an enduring questions in philosophy, psychology, and parenting at large because of the uncertainty of what the future holds.
To be sincere, I don't think there's any blueprint in as much as there are efforts we can try but it still doesn't guarantee anything.
May we be lucky to have children that will go the right path; the path of goodness...
Thanks for reading and have a good day ahead 👍