Children tend to learn anything fast, They also imitate what adults behavior particularly during their crucial year of growth. Although children have not been able to speak, they can imitate what others were doing, either from their words or behavior. Children start to imitate their surrounding mainly adults when they are about one year of age. Psychologists found that personal character formed and more affected by the environment surrounding for about 75%, the rest 25% is the basic personal character of inborn, therefore person's personality will match for what he/she obtained from their surroundings especially parents that they had met since the beginning of his/her life. Parents and family nearby dominated the develop children’s character personality.
Basically imitating and copying are children’s cognitive abilities which always growing and usually they first learn to imitate or copying from language. That's why the first imitated by children are usually the language or words. At first, children will emulate from the closest people such as parents or somebody who often he/she faces. After their social environment wider and got older, the role model imitated also changing; it could be a friend or teacher. In addition, children will also imitate from the figures he saw on TV. For example, superhero likes Superman or Batman.
The way children learn from their environment influences could also called Incidental Learning. Through incidental learning, children will develop the basic things in how they can face their life before entering formal education, the process of incidental learning itself will take in whole of their life, for example children which are new born to five years old have habit of aping the grown-ups. They talk in tongue and gesture like those they meet often. However, they don’t know any languages from birth and after about 3 years copying and listening to other people they can talk and understand automatically, the incidental learning not only occurs in range of several years while they are still children, but it will last into adulthood.
There is no doubt about the perception for children learn what is needed in life by observing the behavior of adults and copying it, this process of copying or imitating will know as natural habit and happens in every people . However both positive and negative will be applied by the children and this will requires the involvement of the adults to guide them as role model.