With various scholarly contributions to answering the philosophical question, what influences decision-making in youth?, and the myriads of suggestions that attempt to astound the question: family, environment, or self? This content has decided to reveal the ace it has up its sleeves about the topic. This it does by starting with the ageless quote below:
“Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.” — C.S. Lewis
Moving forward, making a decision that will define the direction of one’s life either as an adult or a youth with various available options staring in the face is a step of fortitude in itself. Decision sometimes is the hardest stone to turn, especially when the subject is overly informed and the circumstance is insistent.
On the other hand, cognitive bias is attributively a common trade of the youth whose selfish emotions are running high, and also, who probably does not have any outside challenge to oppose current lifestyle.
Growing up with a certain stature of one-way knowledge influences some sort of pseudo-stability in the process that involves decision-making in a child’s life. At least, it is easy for him since there’s no other way or counterculture.
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In addition to the foregoing, we can agree to say that a certain family has a certain norm, regardless of whether it is merely a unit in the larger context called society. And, a society, as we know it, is a composite of many sets of norms as identified with many units or families. Therefore when a youth grows and stays nurtured by one of such sets of values, there is a well-stemmed, uncompromising aura of cheap loyalty that will stand to last forever!
But, immediately a question is asked or is flashing in, like a waking dream, by virtue of movement, contact of new or foreign experiences, and conflict of values, a dawn of counterarguments begins to unfold; hence, the necessitation of counterarguments which at the end of the day may leave the youth to make decisions based on their cognitive biases or objective considerations of possible consequences as accumulated from those external experiences.
However, above all insistences of the influence of family and environment, the fact still holds out that the youth must take responsibility for whatever decision they make and consequently the attending brunt of it.
With gathered efforts in the argument above, the conclusion is that the decision-making process is eternally a conscious one, except that it is obvious in the case of a child deprived of access to counterculture or external influences.
