When I was fresh into first grade of elementary school, our school received a new student. He was a short-haired, small, intelligent kid that I wanted to join  my small friend group. He was always timid around people, even his parents. I never would have imagined this innocent, young, timid kid would change for the worse years later. I believe that strong parenting influences how children develop and grow up and should be even stronger in their adolescent years where experimentation happens.

Years passed , and I moved to Florida for three years. Later, I came back to Boston, Massachusetts, where I originally lived, and entered a very good high school. As I was making new friends again, I met a face I'd felt like I'd seen before, but I was not sure if it was him, so I continued on with my day. Days passed, and he finally remembered me and opened up, and I did as well. Later on, I found out he drank and smoked and became a thug overall. 

Being a cautious person, especially regarding whom I associate with, I decided to move on with my life. A couple hours later, I thought to myself, “How and why do people become like this? He was such a good kid, now he just smokes, drinks, and is a delinquent .” I assumed it was human nature, curiosity killed the cat, everyone knows it. But, on the other hand I blame the parents, because the parents are the ones that should be supervising their children, caring for them, teaching them important morals so they do not turn out to be bad people.

My belief did not only originate from him, but it originated from how an environment can change and manipulate the way people perceive things and change their thoughts and ideas. Additionally, how a person can be stripped of their morals and innocence by the crowd. This belief goes for a lot of people I have known since a very young age, they begin as a timid child, and then grow up to be a very serious person or a thug. Their change in behavior starts to change around the time they become teenagers,at this time it's normal to see kids start to rebel against their parents and ignore their advice. During this time period of growth and development, it's the parents job to be on their game to protect the child's innocence and to preserve their morals through the child’s adolescence and into adulthood.

When I started practicing my belief, I started to become less tempered. I would listen to my parents more, and I got much closer to them. By doing this for sometime, I have come to a realization; people will look down upon you for trying to be either “different” or to try to be a better person by either separating yourself from them or trying to still be their friends but bettering yourself in their presence. The reason you might be looked down upon by this is because they think you’re trying to be better than them, it makes them seem like you have more superiority than them, making them see you in a different, more envy-type of way.

To sum everything up, my core belief is that parents should be more stronger during parenting to enforce good morals into their kids which mitigates the risk of losing their innocence at a much younger age. Stronger parenting is a necessity during the adolescent age because of the experimentation and curiosity present during that development period which causes negligence, omission, transgression, oversight and the descent into the use of weed, vapes, alcohol, and potentially drugs. Neglecting a child at a young age would be used as encouragement for this behavior and can be almost do irreversible damage to the child, as well as other people.