The Role of Family in Child Development

We aren’t born knowing how to behave in society; we learn many behaviors from our environment as we grow up, starting with our family at home.

Learning comes in many forms. Sometimes, children learn by being told something directly. However, they mostly learn by observing everyday life. Their family influences a child’s learning and socialization since it is their primary social group.

Your child rapidly develops physically, emotionally, socially, and intellectually during this time. If you were constructing a large building, you’d need a solid foundation for it to stand tall and strong for years. The building will struggle to stand independently without a strong foundation. Similarly, if our foundations aren’t solid, we find it harder to succeed in our relationships, work, health, and personal lives. Families are crucial to child development.

Ultimately, the family shapes a child and influences their values, skills, socialization, and security during childhood development.

Values

Values mean understanding right and wrong. Society has public norms and values alongside personal ones. To understand what a society values, look at whom it respects. People show more respect to individuals and things they value. If you treat people with disrespect, your child will notice. Children are sponges that soak up everything; we often forget they’re watching us.

Many of us agree and want to share the values of respect, compassion, fairness, and responsibility with our children. Discussing healthy and unhealthy values is an excellent way to teach your child values. Even when your child is little, giving them responsibilities, like cleaning the table or cheering up a sick friend or sibling, will teach them the importance of these values. Explaining the importance of values will also help your child understand the consequences.

In today’s media-driven world, blocking some media from your child may be appropriate. For example, a 4-year-old may not learn the best values from R-rated movies. Adults can more easily separate right from wrong, whereas little children are still figuring it out.

As a family, you must teach your children guiding values. This requires a lot of work because you have to teach these values through explanations and tasks directly, and kids will look to you to model these values. Your child will notice if you behave as expected. They watch your behaviors to gauge their own. When something goes awry, a level-headed response is essential.

Skills

Once your child is born, they start learning motor, language, cognitive, and emotional skills, mainly taught by the family. Even if your child is in daycare, parents’ work at home is more effective than the few hours under someone else’s care.

Your child will learn to sit up, walk, run, climb, hold a spoon, and more. These skills seem natural to us, but they must be fine-tuned at a young age, reinforcing your child’s independence, which is essential for their development.

A Family’s language skills are essential in child development. If you don’t speak to your child and teach them your language, they won’t learn. An infamous example of this was Genie, a child who was locked in a dark room with minimal contact until she was rescued at age 13. She never fully developed her language skills because they weren’t taught to her. So, teaching language skills from a young age is essential to child development.

Another important skill for child development is emotion. Emotional skills are vital throughout your child’s life as they teach sympathy and compassion for others and how to deal with life’s highs and lows. Without proper emotional skills, your child won’t handle bad outcomes and could make destructive choices when older.

To help develop your child’s emotional skills, teach them to smile and wave as babies and to share when they’re older. In a large family, a single person can be very helpful in developing a child’s skills because the work is shared.

Focus on basic emotions while your child is very young. Naming and describing emotions help your child understand their feelings. Once this foundation is set, children can learn to respond and move forward from their feelings.

Socialization

When you bring your child home for the first time, your family will become their social group. Parents are the first teachers. Your child will learn how to treat others from your interactions. Through family socialization, they’ll learn to trust, seek friendships, and find comfort with others.

We must learn to make and sustain relationships, starting with the family. Giving your child the tools for interpersonal development before introducing technology is vital, as it can help them avoid common negative effects.

Learning face-to-face interaction is critical in a child’s development. They require immediate responses, facial expressions, cues, and tones of voice that we don’t receive through texting or online messaging. This is what your child is looking to you for. Ensuring family members put away their smartphones and spend some time “off the grid” will ensure an interpersonal connection is happening with your child. Simply talking to them during dinner about their day helps reinforce person-to-person skills.

Security

Your child gets their primary sense of security from their family. They rely on you to meet their basic needs, like shelter, food, and clothing. There’s also an emotional security at home that your child won’t find elsewhere. Once they go to school, they’ll learn public and social skills, but your child learns to be themselves and express themselves fully at home. Creating a safe, open environment is vital for their growth.

As a parent, you can help your child feel secure by providing consistency and structure through schedules. Your child will know that every day at a certain time, they will eat, bathe, sleep, etc. A schedule will comfort them, knowing their needs will be met, allowing them to focus on developing new skills.

Security within your child is a lifelong positive attribute. Building trust between you and your child occurs in this way as well. When your child feels they can trust others, they will be more comfortable being themselves. Trust happens through secure attachment when a child’s basic and emotional needs are met.

Imagine growing up without trust, attachment, or security. To prevent that future, focus on key qualities ensuring your child’s safety, such as dependability, consistency, respectfulness, and responsiveness.

As a parent, it is essential to recognize your child’s needs and how they express them. Everyone expresses themselves differently, and children are no exception.

Final Thoughts

Raising children can be challenging but rewarding. Remember to teach your child and model the behavior you expect. Strive to be your best in child development. No one and no family is perfect.

However, it is crucial to know how vital the role of family is in children’s development. As parents, you are your child’s first teacher. More than daycare or other caregivers, most of your child’s learning happens at home with their family. Creating an environment where your child can learn the appropriate skills and values, as well as learn how to socialize and be secure, creates a solid foundation upon which they can grow.