Jake has been with his father on four completely different starships (including the ill-fated Saratoga) and has lived on at least two alien planets before this, his father's latest assignment. He's sharp and alert, Jake is, but still more than a bit unsure of himself, not only because of his youth but because of the transient quality of life to date. This had led him to devise and adopt his own surefire social survival skills when arriving in any new territory. He knows, by instinct at this point, how to find a place to fit in and who he can relate to. He's even managed to do this, remarkably enough, in the dark and winding corridors of Deep Space Nine.
It may be hard to believe, especially for his straight laced father Benjamin, but Jake has become fast friends with a Ferengi, Nog, the teenaged son of the crafty Quark's dimwitted brother Rom. Sometimes their activities together are harmless, like watching females arrive at the docking bay or the Promenade. But as might be imagined, they've also managed to get into trouble a few times, like the instance in which they afflicted some diners on the Promenade with a harmless but annoying alien organism which causes its victims' skin to change into a wide variety of rainbow hues in a matter of a few seconds. (Needless to say, Odo was not amused.)
Sometimes their friendship leads to awkward moments: Jake's loyalty, one of his best qualities really, leads him at one point to support Nog's absurd schoolroom lie that his homework was stolen by Vulcans! For this and other reasons, his father has frowned on Jake's association with Nog, even going so far as to ban their friendship outright. But Benjamin Sisko relaxed this attitude somewhat after discovering that Jake was secretly helping Nog learn to read after his father Rom denied the Ferengi boy permission to attend Keiko O'Brien's new school on the station because the Nagus frowned on such relations between Ferengi and aliens.
Still, Jake is really a lonely boy. It doesn't help much that his mother was killed during the battle with the Borg that destroyed his father's ship, the Saratoga. This colors his perceptions of everything in his short life. Secretly, he doesn't care much for this spacefaring life, for he undoubtedly realizes that his mother would in all likelihood still be alive if their family had stayed on Earth.
Jake has made friends with someone else--a young Dabo girl who works for Quark. Jake is tutoring her and when he confesses that he's interested in her, Commander Sisko is not exactly an understanding father. Ben is a bit more forgiving, though, when Jake confesses that he's not interested in joining Starfleet when he gets older, although he hasn't yet decided just what it is he wants to do. Whatever it is, he doubts that it will have anything to do with Klingon opera in spite of his father's insistence that learning it as his teacher insists could prove beneficial to him some day.
Despite that natural father/son conflict, Benjamin and Jake Sisko are actually very close, sharing an interest in baseball and other Earth matters. Even though Benjamin Sisko can be strict and foreboding, Jake knows that he can turn to him at times of trouble; the core of their relationship is a very real honesty, and the bond forged by their shared loss of Jennifer Sisko, Jake's mother.
Raised primarily in the field as the son of a Starfleet officer, young Jake Sisko may have been born on Earth--but he has no memory of that planet whatsoever, beyong that derived from holodeck simulations. At a mere fourteen years of age, he's been around the galaxy, and then some, long before he arrived with his father, Commander Benjamin Sisko, at the space station designated by Starfleet as Deep Space Nine.
Father and Son Together
Almost obsessed with the planet of his origin, he thrives in holodeck recreations of Earth settings, like the riverside pier that he and his father were relaxing on when the Starfleet ship carrying them arrived at Deep Space Nine. These holodeck fantasies are his only link to the past that he dreams of, and the future he hopes for, on Earth. There's not much else for him to do, except go to school and study; the other children that his father promised would be living on the station are few and far between, with Nog turning out to be his only real friend so far. And even after the tutoring incident, Benjamin Sisko still sees the Ferengi boy as a bad influence--far from the way the faithful Jake perceives this important friendship.