Clearly culture and lifestyle affect a person's behavior. For confirmation you only have to recognize. In the extreme, the behavior shown by spoiled brats, like Paris Hilton, who have been raised in a wealthy lifestyle in which there were servants and children were never encouraged to work or to value real accomplishment.

At the other extreme some children have been raised in a family that was short of money in which everyone had to chip in to get work done and perhaps economize if growing vegetables or making clothes as a matter of necessity. Those individuals recognize work and its contribution to their welfare throughout their lives.

These are gross examples but they do confirm the connection between the way people are reared and their later behavior.

The connection also applies in a host of other areas especially for children's culture during their learning years, from two to six.

Children raised in an atmosphere of music, especially classical music, will enjoy music throughout their lives. They may not play an instrument but the themes and the construction of a piece of music will be second nature to their ears.

If children are raised in a literate family that values reading and writing and would rather read that be entertained' by television, then those children inherit those preferences for life. Their behavior will reflect those preferences.

Now, on the other hand, disadvantaged children, whose father might boast to his wife of the proceeds from a robbery, will absorb his culture of easy money.' Easy Money' becomes a norm in their culture. There is a very direct connection.

Indeed, it would be rare indeed if a person's behavior and values differed from those in which he or she has been raised. A rare person is sometimes honored for having been able to raise himself or herself above his beginnings. Curiously, no spoiled brat' is often honored for having become more culturally rounded than his upbringing would have predicted. Perhaps it is more difficult to make that change.

In my own case, I was raised to value singing, reading, mathematics, raising animals and producing vegetables within a wartime environment. Those are the virtues I value today and within which I expect to raise my children.

Learn more about this author, John Graham.
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