Most of us try to live our lives with morals and values, I know there are many people who don’t, but the vast majority of us do.

And whether we get our values from our family or our friends, we will try to be good people, because that is what we have been taught by the people that tried to steer us in the right moral direction.

But who does influence our values more? Is it our family? Or our friends?

Family

They say you can’t choose your family, and every family can be trying at times, but family are the people that give us our first experience of values and morals, they shape us as we grow.

The years when we spend the most amount of time with our families are also the years when we at our most impressionable. We are starting out in the world and we need moral guidance and examples to look up to and aspire to.

Whether we are aware of it or not, our families will help to shape our values and our morals through their actions. We learn what is right and wrong and we learn what is acceptable from them, and we absorb these ideas which stay with us for a very long time.

But unfortunately, it does not always go the right way, families do not always lead their children on the path towards good values, some will lead their children far away from that path into a life where values and morals mean nothing.

If a child grows up in a house where they are told lying is wrong and they should help people less fortunate than them, then this is what the child will learn.

But conversely, a child that has been brought up in a house where the family are liars and cheats and the child is encouraged to hurt people for their own gain, this is what the child will learn.

But as we get older, we are more capable of forming our own ideas and we may get a different set of values, and even though our family will try to teach us their values, we may not listen, simply because they are our family and children/teenagers will very often ignore the family because they or their friends know better.

Friends

Even from an early age, our friends will have a very strong influence over us. Whether we are aware of it or not, they take part in shaping who we are.

And when we make the transition into adulthood, we look more to our friends for guidance and values than our family, but why do we suddenly turn to our friends instead of our family? Is it because our friends know us better? Because we cannot turn to our family for fear they will be angry with us for questioning their values?

Whatever the reason, our friends play a huge part in shaping the people we become. They are in similar circumstances to us, they are of a similar age, so we feel we can relate more closely to them.

But very often we simply adopt our friends’ values when we are with them so that we will be more accepted. And when we our on our own, we will resort to the values our family taught us all those years ago, those values we didn’t even know were there because we were never told them, we learned them.