(1) family environment
The family is the main place where people are influenced by the environment, and the growth of individual personality and the mastery of social skills are mainly completed in the family. Different parenting styles have extremely different effects on children's psychological development, which has been confirmed by psychologists in many fields. Even in the same family, children are treated differently. As Adler thought when analyzing the birth order, parents treat children in different order in different ways, which leads to the difference of children's sense of dependence and achievement behavior.
Based on this idea, psychologists nowadays can no longer regard the family as a place that has the same influence on every child when studying the influence of the family. In fact, in the process of growing up, children often face two kinds of family influences: common influence and non-common influence. The former refers to the environment that all children in the family face together, such as social class, education level and parenting concept. The latter refers to the way parents treat different children differently within the family. Plumming and Daniels pointed out that the latter has a greater impact on children's growth. For example, even if adopted children face the same family environment as other children in the family, their personality development is different from other children because of the different ways parents treat their children. Therefore, within the family, the biggest influence on children's development is the special environment they face rather than the general family factors. Perhaps it is for this reason that McCombey proposed that the direction of family research should shift from inter-family variables to intra-family variables.
(2) Cultural environment
Another important aspect of environmental impact behavior is culture. Like biological evolution, culture also has the problem of evolution. Cultural evolution refers to the process of transferring cultural characteristics from the previous generation to the next generation, which is often expressed in the form of cultural and social norms. According to the viewpoint of cultural evolution, human growth can not be separated from social and cultural environment. Culture not only provides goals and contents for individual development, but also socialization itself is a process in which culture influences individuals.
Different from biological evolution, cultural evolution has its own characteristics. First, in terms of speed, compared with biological evolution, the speed of cultural evolution is much faster. Biological evolution generally takes thousands of years, while cultural evolution can be completed in one or several generations. The foundation of cultural evolution is the transmission of knowledge from generation to generation. Secondly, from the results, biological evolution makes people or animals have some characteristics, and cultural evolution determines how they use these genetic abilities.
The different effects of cultural differences on people's behavior can explain the role of culture. Morelj 1992) found that, unlike the general society, the local custom is that fathers take care of children, so the influence of father-son relationship is more important to the growth of children. In other societies, the relationship between mother and baby plays such a role. By studying the causes of sexual maturity of boys and girls in some tribes in Kenya, Ember found that the concern of parents is the root cause of female precocity. In the early stage of growth, if boys are given the same attention, there will be no gender difference in maturity.