From the day we were born, or even earlier when we were created in the uterus, we have been constantly influenced by our surroundings, whether they are living things or nonliving objects. Parental genes and nutrition influence the development of human body. Schools, teachers, peers, and TV shows help form our perspectives of the world which we live in. Among so many sources of influence, the influence of parents and the influence of celebrities are two of the most important ones. The influence of parents and the influence of celebrities share similarities in that they influence people’s choices of lifestyle, their effectiveness through imitation, and the qualities of the influence, and contrast each other in that they differ in physical distance, the subject of being influenced by a free will, and the aspects of life that they contribute to. Both parents and celebrities are crucial in influencing our choices of lifestyle. Because we stay with parents almost all the time, our habits and the way we live everyday come mainly from the influence of our parents. They teach us how to talk and walk; they feed us the kinds of food that they like or think are good for us; they tell us when to sleep and wake up. Also, if parents smoke or drink, their children are more likely to choose to smoke or drink because they would regard smoking or drinking as a normalcy and because they have seen it every day.
Just as how parents influence us, celebrities can also influence our choices of lifestyle. Since celebrities are often in the public media, we are able to know a lot of information about them, positive or negative. The influence from parents and the influence from celebrities are both shown through people’s imitation of them. Human beings are talented in mimicking. When we were babies and our parents taught us to say elementary words like “ ma” and “ dad”, we mimicked the pronunciation and the way they moved their lips. We copied their acts, such as brushing teeth, holding a knife, and kicking soccer, when we were young. People mimic what celebrities do. For example, they would imitate the way celebrities dress and style their hair. People could turn into smokers because they would mimic their favorite celebrities who smoke, thinking that is cool. Both the influence from parents and the influence from celebrities can have positive and negative impacts on people. They both are not absolutely good or bad. The qualities of these influences are independent of the person being influenced, but instead, they are contributed solely by parents or celebrities. Parents can have a negative on their children if they tell their children that murdering someone they dislike is fine.
On the other side, celebrities can have positive impacts on people if they are good people and contribute to the community. The first contrast between the influence from parents and the influence from celebrities rests on the subject of physical distance. Parents are so close to us and are almost always around us, while celebrities are often the people we do not know in person. There is a long lasting relationship between parents and us, but there seems to be no direct relationship between celebrities and us. For the influence from parents, we are influenced directly. We mimic and learn from first hand observances because we can see what our parents do and say in real life. However, we are influenced by celebrities through the artificial media in which stories are observed and told by others. The second contrast between the influence from parents and the influence from celebrities is about the free will of being influenced. The influence of parents starts infiltrating our mind even when we are unconscious or unable to make a judgment, while for celebrities, we can choose to be influenced by what we like and ignore what we do not like. As children, we were influenced by parents regardless of whether we like it or not because we were not capable of applying our free wills. However, the influence of celebrities usually comes into our mind by our own choice.
The third contrast between the influence from parents and the influence from celebrities is the aspects of life that they contribute to. The influence from parents largely includes things that occur in daily life, or rather trivial things, while the influence from celebrities often involves dreams and goals that individuals want to achieve. Parents share their experiences of life with their children. Celebrities represent people’s role models that they might want to be in the future. Today we can easily influence each other in our society due to the advance in the media and sciences. Parents and celebrities play significant roles in influencing people. Through discussing the similarities and differences of the influence from the parents and the influence of the celebrities, it is clear that they share similarities in influencing people’s choices of lifestyle, their effectiveness through imitation, and the qualities of the influence, and contrast each other in that they differ in physical distance, the subject of being influenced by free will, and the aspects of life which they contribute to.
