SOCIALIZATION

I.                    Becoming Human: Socialization Goals and Functions of Socialization

II.                  Agents of Socialization

A.       The Family

B.      The School

C.      Peer Groups

D.     The Mass Media

E.      Other Agents

III.                Gender Socialization

A.      The Linkage of Sex Roles and Gender Roles

B.      Early  Socialization

C.      Socialization in the Teenage Years

D.     Gender Inequality

IV.                Socialization Through the Life Course

A.      Childhood

B.      Adolescence

C.      Adulthood

D.     Old Age

Socialization is the process that teaches individuals to become functioning human beings who must fit into a number groups and be productive members of a society.

Through socialization, a helpless infant is gradually transformed into a more or less knowledgeable, more or less cooperative member of society.

Goals and Functions of Socialization

From the point of society, socialization has specific goals.  First, it teaches the basics of life in society.  Second, it transmits skills important to survival in the society.  Third, it instills in its new members a desire to work toward goals that the society considers important.  Fourth, it teaches members how to fulfill social roles, for only if a majority of people do os can the social system continue to exist. 

The process of socialization is not limited to infants and children.  It continues throughout an individual’s lifetime, as there are always new rolesto be learned and new circumstances to which to adjust.  But socialization is different for children and for adults.  Children must learn how to regulate their biological drives in socially acceptable ways.

Socialization occurs on both a conscious and an unconscious level.  Children are deliberately  taught certain behaviors, attitudes, and values, but others are picked up unconsciously, from overheard conversations or observed adult actions.

Agents of Socialization

      Agents of socialization are specific people, groups, and organizations who are chiefly responsible for transforming an individual into a functioning human being; knowledgeable in the ways of society, and possesses enough skills to survive.

      Agents of socialization may be the family, the school, peer group, one’s religion, one’s place of work and many others.

The Family. The most important agency of socialization for most human beings is undoubtedly the family.  The very sensitive and malleable early years of life, when we are defenseless and dependent, have traditionally been spent almost exclusively within the family context.  It is there that we first learn about intimacy, emotions, power, and other elements of human relationships.  It is there also, that we begin to learn the components of culture and social structure, including language, norms and values. 

The School.  School is a primary agent of socialization in industrial societies, and schooling begins very early for some children.  The manifest function of formal education is to transmit the skills and values thought appropriate for earning a living and for being a “good citizen”.  Accordingly, schools teach reading, writing, arithmetic, and so on.

      Manifest function means intended purpose.

      Latent function means unintended consequences.

      Hidden curriculum refers to values that, though not explicitly taught, form an inherent part of the school’s “message”.

Schools also have latent functions that help the social system. First, by placing children under the control of teachers-people who are not their friends, neighbors or relatives-schooling exposes them to new attitudes, values and ways of lloking at the world.  Secnd, as children move beyond a world in which they may have been the most exclusive focus of doting parents, they learn to be part of a large group of people of similar age.  Third, children learn universality-that the same rules and the same sanctions apply to everyone, regardless of who their parents are or how special they may be at home.  Fourth, children gradually come to realize that their behavior is recorded in permanent, official records that will have important and lasting consequences.  Such latent functions help prepare the child to take a role in the world beyond the family.

The Peer Group. The agency of socialization that is probably second in importance to the family is the peer group.  Example of peer groups are friends, clubs, gangs and “kids” in the neighborhood.”

The family is a hierarchical group, with parents in a position of authority and dominance over the children.  In a peer group, however, children find more egalitarian relationships because no one child in the group is normally dominant in all respects.  There is therefore more give-and-take, which gives children the opportunity to learn how to relate to others in a cooperative framework.

The peer group helps substantially in the transition that is required.

Peer groups offer young people an identity that supports some independence from their families.  This offer is especially important in industrial societies where young people are typically isolated from the statuses and rewards of the adult world.  The peer group offers an alternative status and reward system.

Mass Media are the various forms of communication that reach a large audience without any personal contact between the senders and the receivers of the messages.

The Mass Media.  The mass media as an agent of socialization may be newspapers, magazines, books, television, radio, movies and videos.  These agents of socialization introduce the individual to an extraordinarily diverse array of people who are “known” only indirectly sports figures, historic personages, politicians, authors, columnists, announcers, disc-jockeys, talk-show hosts, newscasters, musicians, and even ordinary people interviewed in eyewitness news report.

The media provide instant coverage of social events and social changes, ranging from news and opinions to fads and fashions.  They offer role models, viewpoints and glimpses of lifestyles that people might otherwise never have access to.

Other agents.  The may be influenced by many other agents of socialization – religious groups, youth organizations, and later in life, such agents as corporations or other employers and voluntary associations like clubs, political movements, and retirement homes.

Socialization into Gender

People have long been preoccupied with what it means to be male or female.  In all cultures, being a man or a woman is not limited to one’s biological sex.  Being a man means that one is likely to be “masculine”, and being a woman means that one is likely to be “feminine”.  Thus not only do we have a gender or sex (male or female), we also have a gender role (masculine or feminine).  Emotions and occupations tend to be characterized as masculine or feminine.

The Linkage of Sex Roles and Gender Roles

Although the term “sex roles” and “gender roles” are often used interchangeably, there is an important difference between them.  The term “sex roles” has come to mean behaviors determined by biological sex, such as menstruation, erection and seminal ejaculation.  The term “gender roles” has cme to mean entirely socially created expectations of masculine and feminine behavior.  These expectations are initiated and perpetuated by the institutions and values of a paticular society.  Thus, bearing and nursing children may be a feminine sex role, but raising children is a gender role.

Gender Role is a  social role associated with feminine or masculine behavior. 

Sex Roles are behaviors determined by biological sex.

While the sexes are far more similar that different, early research on male and female characteristics tended to concentrate on biological differences between the sexes.  For example, women bear children, and so they have to raise them. Later researches recognized that most differences between the sexes are based on the differential socialization of men and women.  This gender-role model tried to specify the ways in which males and females are socialized to be what is considered masculine or feminine in a particular culture.

Early Socialization into Gender Roles

Parents are the earliest and probably the major influences in the gender-role socialization of young childre.  Parents often have different expectations for the sexes.  In a hospital study of thirty pairs of new parents, fifteen with boys and fifteen with girls, the parents were askes to describe the characteristics oftheir infants.  They tended to describe their children according to the typical sterotypes of the culture.  Boy babies were describes as firmer, larger-featrued, more alert and stronger.  Girls are more described as mre delicate, more fine-featured, softer and smaller.

Parents are also more likely to treat male and female infants and children in ways consistent with how they view the sexes.

As infants become toddlers, parental interaction with them continues to be sex-differentiated.  Both parents characterized their relationship to their daughters as having more warmth and physical closeness.

As children get older, their parents may also attempt to teach them “sex-appropriate” skills.  A father may throw  a ball to his son, and a mother may teach her daughter how to sew or bake cookies.  While some cross-sex behavior may be taught – for example, a boy is taught to cook or a girl to fish- it is unlikely that it is stressed unless the father is looking for a substitute son in his daughter or the mother is looking for a substitute daughter in her son.

Children learn from their parents by seeing what their parents do.

The gender-role messages implied in girls’ and boys’ toys may be further emphasized in the games they play.

Boys and girls also learn to relate in different ways to their playmates.  Girls are more likely to play in smaller groups

Socialization in the Teenage Years

In adolescence, prescriptions for certain kinds of genderrole behaviors may be intensified: for example, boys may be pressured to control their emotions even more rigidly than they did before.  In other instances, prescriptions for gender-role behavior may be modified; for example, a girl who was a tomboy in elementary school may feel pressured to be more “feminine” and may sense an increased emphasis by her peers on being pretty and popular rather than being acive.

In many ways, values for adoloescent boys are simply intensified versions of the values learned in early childhood.  In particular masculine, or “macho,” themes intensify.  A young boy was always expected to be tough and scrappy, now it is absolutely essential for him, to hold his own in fihts and to be physically tough enough to “take it” while participating in sports.  A young boy was ideally expected never to cry or get upset in any but ang angry fashion.  He was always supposed to be good at sports and other activities; now that pressure is increased.  In addition, there are new pressures to be good (but not too good) at activities that will lead to occupational success and to be good at sex and heterosexual relationships.  These pressures are intense and are continuaaly present.  The penalty of not living up to the norms of being tough, being “cool”, and being good is severe: rejection or simply being ignored.

Gender and Inequality

In most societies, there is an apparent social inequality that can be gleaned in society’s social norms and language.  Some early anthropologists such as Lewis Morgan believed that females initially had higher social and political status than males, and then through time that pattern was reversed.

Male dominance – the social situation in which more power and prestige are given to men than to women. 

Sexism – is the ideology that supports gender inequality and justifies male dominance.

Male dominance has become more prevalent in present societies.  Males tend to have inherent cultural advantages.  Males are more likely to be political leaders, economic tycoons and spiritual heads.  In the workplace, men and women receive significantly different economic rewards with more men occupying higher positions.  Even if men and women work in the same fields, men tend to receive better pay.

Even in social life, society gives more latitude to men than women.  They are allowed longer and more late nights than their female counterparts.  They can have a liberated relationship with the opposite sex and be viewed as “macho” but a female who does the same is labelled as “wild”.

Even in language, society tends to favor men than women.  Terms such as chairman, freshman, mankind, policeman to refer to both sexes had been objected as having gender bias or are sexist. Society argues that the use ofthese masculine terms reinforces the idea that humanity is male and women are outsiders.  They suggest that instead of chairman, it should be chairperson, mankind should be persons or humankind policeman as police officers, freshmen should be “freshies” and so forth. The adoption of more neutral ways of expressing gender may lessen gender bias and will also affect gender relations.

V.                  Socialization Through The Life Course

Kubler-Ross five stages of death and dying

The human life course seems at first glance to be purely a matter of biology.  But the sequence of birth, childhood, maturity, old age, and death is also a social one, for its length, stages, challenges, and opportunities depend very much on the society in which one lives.

Every society imposes its own conception of a life course upon the physical process of growing up and growing old.  Consequently, the period from birth to death is arbitrarily sliced up into a series of stages, each offering distinctive rights and responsibilities to the relevant age group.

Childhood is defined as roughly the first 12 years of an individual’s life.

Childhood. Childhood is defined as roughly the first 12 years of life.  It seems a “natural” part of the life course to us, yet the very concept of childhood is a comparatively recent one: pre-industrial societies typically did not recognize it as a separate stage of life.  Instead the young passed directly from a prolonged infancy into their adult roles.  There was no separate way of life reserved for childhood, with the distinctive songs, toys, privileges, and activities that we take for granted today.

Even in early industrial societies, children continued to perform adult economic roles: in the United States in 1900, a quarter of the boys aged ten to fourteen were in the labor force.  Some countries that are now in the early stages of industrialization still have only a limited concept of childhood and continue to make use od child labor.  In such countries, as Morocco, India, and Colombia, for example, tens of millions of children between the ages of five and thirteen work full time, even in factories and coal mines.

Children are socialized quite differently from adults: they have distinctive forms of dress and their own separate spheres of activity, ranging from children’s TV and games to   kindergartens elementary schools.  They are exempted from playing full economic roles and have miniman social responsibilities.  Adults tend to romanticize childhood as a period of carefree innocence, and they take pains to protect children from poremature knowledge of such taboo subjects as death and sex.

Adoloscence is the stage in the life course that extends roughly from age 13 to age 20.

Adoloscence.  The years between puberty and adolescence were never considered a separate stage of life until societies became industrialized.  However, in simple, pre-industrial societies there were only two main stages of life, immaturity and adulthood.  In such societies the change from one status to another was usually a clear and abrupt one, often marked, in the case of the males, by initiation ceremonies involving great pain and feats of endurace.  As soon as these rituals were completed, the younf person became an adult, with the same rights and responsibilities as other mature members of the society.

In the course of their development, modern industrial societies have added a new stage to the life course: instead of passing directly from prolonged infancy to adulthood, we go through adolescence, the stage in the life course that extends roughly from the puberty to age 20.  This new stage is a modern invention introduced into the life course as a consequence of extended education.

Because it is a relatively new stage of the life course in a rapidly changing society, adolescence is an ambiguous and often confusing period, marked by vaguely defined rights and responsibilities.  The adolescent is said to be in a limbo, neither child nor adult.

Adulthood is the stage in the life course which begins at some point between the late teens and the early thirties depending on social background.

Adulthood.  Adulthood is the period during which most of life’s accomplishments typically occur.  Having amassed considerable learning, people embark on careers and raise families of their own.

Erik Erikson divided  adulthood into three stages: young adulthood, in which the individual must resolve the dilemma of committing to anothger person or remaining self-absorbed; middle age, in which one must decide wheter to establish and guide the future generation or fail to meet the need to be needed; and old age, in which one either maturely accepts how one had lived life or is disillusioned with life and afraid of death.

The years of young adulthood are spent in forming a family, learning parenting, and solidifying career goals. Middle age, after the age of 40, is often marked by crises. Men feel trapped in jobs or careers they never really liked.  Marriages can begin to feel stale.

Old age is defined as beginning at age 65 and is of course, the stage that culminates in death.

Old age.  The experience of growing old, like other stages of life, involves more than biological change, it is also a matter of culture.  In pre-industrial societies, old age typically confers great influence and respect for the elderly.  The aged are respected for their wisdom and hold an honored place in the family and the community.  They have many roles to fill-familial, social, religious, and even economic, for they typically work until advanced old age and control most land and other wealth.  In modern industrialized societies, the situation is quite different.  The knowledge of the elderly may seem obsolete, their authority may be negligible, and they may even be unwanted by their children: often, the best they can do is attempt not to be a “burden”.  There are few useful roles for the aged: they generally retire around age sixty-five, and are left with little or no part to play in economic life.

Life Expectancy is the length of life the average newborn will enjoy.

Life Span is the length of life possible in the species.

The reason for this distinctively modern taboo seems to be that death is the only natural process which remains beyond the control of advanced technology.  Modern medicine, nutrition, and sanitation have all helped to extend the life expectancy – the length of life the average newborn will enjoy.  But they have had little, any effect on the life span – the maximum length of life possible in the species.  The final point of the life course – the annihilation of the self, the ultimate confrontation with the unknown – mocks the claim to human mastery of the world, and people therefore try to deny the mystery and power of death by excluding it from their discussions and thoughts.

Our understanding of death and dying has been greatly increased by the pioneering work of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross who conducted extensive interviews with dying people.  She suggested that there are five stages which a terminally ill person often proceeds after learning the truth.  The first is denial, usually expresed in disbelief – “It can’t be happening to me.” The second stage is anger – “Why me?”  The third stage is bargaining – an implicit agreemen to go willingly if God or fate will just allow the dying person to live a little longer, perhaps until some significant event, such as family birthday or wedding.  The fourth stage is depression, a state of a deep anxiety over the loss of self and the loss of one’s family.  The final stage is acceptance, in which the dying person approaches death with true peace of mind.