a) Education; b) Community; c) Family life; d) National sporting achievements; e) Moral and political beliefs; f) Festivals; g) Strong traditions; h) The media. Substantiate your answer.
Family: There are strong reasons to think that families, and their economic circumstances in particular, influence both parents’ and children’s emotions and behaviors. Researchers have described three primary models for thinking about how economic factors influence families: the family stress model, the investment model, and the interactionist model. When parents become depressed, angry, and sullen with one another and have increased conflict, the result is often harsh and inconsistent parenting or withdrawal. For adolescents, that can mean increases in risky behavior and less development of the sorts of competencies that protect them from those risks. Many social risk factors increase the likelihood that adolescents will engage in risk behaviors as well as to disrupt parenting and family processes. Thus, parenting and family processes are the most common targets of interventions for families experiencing adversity, such as economic hardship; parental divorce, death, or mental illness; or parental criminal activity.
COMMUNITY: The communities in which young people live can also have important influences on their development, for good or ill. The words “community” and “neighborhood” can be used interchangeably in the discussions of influence and that the definition is not a very precise one. The neighborhood is an important context, because it is the place where a wide array of peer and other social interactions take place and where adolescents have access to institutional resources. The structural characteristics of a neighborhood, including its economic status, housing quality, and the availability of resources, are important. So, too, are the social processes that occur in the neighborhood context, as well as the interactions between community characteristics and other influences, such as peers, family, and schools. There is significant evidence for a connection between socioeconomic status and risk behavior. Living in an affluent neighborhood where the residents are college-educated professionals is associated with advantages for adolescents’ academic achievement, although more so for adolescent boys than for girls. Living in a neighborhood with low socioeconomic status confers risks to adolescents in terms of a host of behavioral, social, and emotional problems. Living in a poor neighborhood also places adolescents at risk for early childbearing and related sexual risk behaviors. In short, there is something about living in a poor neighborhood that places adolescents at risk for engaging in a wide range of risk behaviors.
MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY: Among the environmental influences that affect teenagers’ development, perhaps the most difficult to study is the wide, fast-evolving array of media and technologies that are part of their lives. Any list of the sorts of devices and programming to which young people may have access is likely to be at least somewhat outdated within months, but researchers have begun actively exploring both the effects of media on adolescent behavior and ways of structuring both their interactions with it and interventions designed to address media-related problems. Media—that is, modes of electronic communication and entertainment—are portable, ubiquitous, and integrated into virtually all aspects of adolescents’ lives. On average, 8- to 18-year-olds use media actively for 6 hours and 21 minutes of every day, often using multiple media at the same time. Because nearly a quarter of teenagers use two or more media at the same time, they may be cumulatively exposed to more than 8.5 hours of content per day. Media use as so pervasive as to be both a public health and environmental health issue. “It is like the air they breathe, the water they drink, the food they eat. They are neutral. They are not malignant. They are not bad. But they are very powerful. They can be used to do great good or, used thoughtlessly, they can harm,”. Media can influence an individual’s self-concept through provision of educational sources such as, promoting enrolment on academic courses and information on current situation happening in our society. A further reason that can influence an individual’s self-concept is displaying of images of models or celebrities being underweight. For example, pictures of Victoria Beckham and Nicole Richie.
Appearance: Appearance can affect an individual’s self-concept both constructively and harmfully. For example, appearance constructive influence will be pictures displayed by sports encouraging individual’s to keep up a healthy lifestyle. Further to point, appearance can have a negative influence on a person’s life through advertising photos of underweight models and this can influence young women to try to seem very thin.
Culture: Culture is a belief that you have or self values. This can influence our self concept if we do not endorse other individual’s culture. Cultural diversity can have a positive influence if we embrace the differences of others, but if differences are used to discriminate against others, its harmful. Example req. Also, this can be the way you were brought up by your parents or a guardian.
Education: Receiving additional support from the school could help to develop your self concept. Being compared to other pupils or siblings can affect your views on yourself. This may also affect your relationships and employment prospects.
