Teaching Development Socialization Process Notes - Socialization Process

 

Socialization Process

 

• Socialization is the process by which one learns the ways of a society or social group so that one can function within it. Socialization includes both the learning and internalizing of appropriate patterns, values, and feelings. The child ideally not only knows what is expected of him and behaves accordingly; he also feels that this is the proper way for him to think and behave. It also means learning the ways of a group such as an immigrant becomes socialized into the life of his new country; a recruit into the life of the Army; a new sales executive into the patterns of his company and his job.

 

•  The entry of a new member into a family, or into any unit, changes the group. It is not just the old group with one added person; it is a new group with new relationships and a new organization.

 

• From the point of view of socialization, the child is not viewed primarily as a possessor of drives and needs which require satisfaction, but rather as someone who is capable of learning the patterns, symbols, expectations, and feelings of the world surrounding him.

 

Perspectives of Society

 

From the perspective of society, the function of socialization is to transmit the culture and motivation to participate in established social relationships in society.

There is the perspective of norms and values. Norms are rules specifying what behaviors are acceptable in society. For example, there are norms about how to speak. How you address your grandfather is probably different from how you talk with your spouse, and this is also different to how you speak to your boss, or your children. Your choice of words, your tone, and your body language are all norm-based. Social norms express preferences and value judgments. They govern the specifications of a role and the standards by which behavior is judged. Therefore, social norms are primarily evaluative, not descriptive. Values concentrate on different areas: some may be general life values, but there are family values, cultural values, and work values too. And as people have values, so do organizations. Today, nearly everybody who has worked for a company is acquainted with the concept of company values.

 

A second perspective is that of status and role. A status is a position in the social structure, and a role is the expected behavior of someone who holds a given status. We can cooperate with others because we know the rights and obligations associated with each status. The taxi driver has the right to ask for your fare and the obligation to drive you to your destination; the doctor has the right to ask about your symptoms and an obligation to try to cure you. Similarly, role behavior expected of the teacher, student, mother, father, daughter, grocery clerk, taxi passenger, and doctor's patient. Each person has many statuses which define his expected behavior in given situations.

A third perspective is that of institutions, each of which focuses about a segment of life and consists of many norms and statuses. One such institution is the school, whose primary function is to transmit, in a more or less formal way, a large share of the intellectual traditions of a society. Within the school there are norms relating to attendance, assignments, behavior, sports, events, courses/ and holiday celebrations; and patterned status relationships among the teachers, students, principal, and other educators.

 

A fourth perspective focuses on social class. Individuals in our society vary m the amount of wealth, prestige, and power they possess, and associated with these are differences in values and ways of life. At one end may be the upper-class individual who is wealthy, has an important position, lives in a luxury, sends his children to elite schools, and is into globetrotting. At the other extreme may be the lower-class individual who works as an unskilled laborer, school dropout, lives in a slum area, and has "crude" table manners. Between these extremes there are other rankings too. It is evident that no single characteristic clearly differentiates class groups and the lines between them are blurred but a stratification system of a kind does exist.

 

AGENCIES OF SOCIALIZATION

 

•  Socialization occurs in many settings and in interaction with many people. For purposes of analysis, it is helpful to distinguish between organized groups, such as the family, school, and peer group, and settings, such as the media of mass communication, that have significant characteristics in common. We speak of both groups and settings as agencies of socialization.

 

• Each agency socializes the child into its own patterns and its own values. The family has certain rituals, the school its rules of order, the child peer group its codes and games, and the media of mass communication their traditional forms and story plots. Moreover, each agency ?and this is more significant for our purposes?helps to socialize the child into the larger world. Parents, teachers, peers, and mass media are surrogates of wider social and cultural orders, and their impact extends beyond their own organizational limits.

 

1.  The Family and Parental Influences

 

Families are different, and the role of the family is changing. Each family is unique in the expectations of the people in various roles, in its patterns of interaction, its history of development, and its relationship with other systems". However, family categories usually fall into three groups:

 

1.The nuclear family consists of a mother, father, and offspring living together.

 

2. When two or more families live together, this is known as an extended family. Within this group are grandparents, uncles, aunts, or other relatives.

 

3.The third family group is that of single parent households.

 

Dimensions of Parental Behavior

 

Researchers believe that acceptance-rejection and control-autonomy are contributing factors that determine a family's attitude toward child rearing. The structure of the family and the personality characteristics of individual parents make a difference in socialization as will be demonstrated in the following examples.

 

Tom, a father of two young children, believes that spending time each day with his children is vital to developing strong family ties. During this time, the children talk about their day, engage in some type of physical activity, such as going for a walk, playing with their pet, or enjoying simple games. Hugging his children, telling them how important they are in Tom's life is a part of each day. In return, his children feel accepted in this warm environment. His friends often comment, "Your children show such responsibility and self-control. What are you doing to make them so responsible?" When children feel this level of acceptance, they want to please and parents become their best role model. Next, let's look at Aastha, a mother of a six-year-old. At the end of a long workday, Aastha is tired. Instead of giving her daughter a few minutes of quality time when she is back home, she quickly starts working on the domestic chores. "Every time I want to talk to my mother, she is too busy, too tired, or says 'wait we will chat later," remarks her daughter. Later never seems to come. Parents who use rejection in their behavior may have children who develop hostility and aggressive attitude toward others.

 

4. Then there is a home of six youngsters where the children were extremely well behaved. One of the sons remarked, "On occasion, my father had to watch us while our mother ran to the grocery store. He made each one of us sit on the couch and dared us to move. A large paddle stood nearby. We were scared to death of him." Restrictive parents who use strict control usually have children who are well behaved. However, these children may be highly dependent on the parents.

 

5. On the other hand, parents and teachers that are highly permissive allow children to make the rules. In these settings, the child is clearly the "boss." Take for example, Samy and her three year-old son. "Whenever my friends visit, my son interrupts constantly, jumps on the furniture, and is loud and noisy," says Samy. "Often I have to count to three several times. Nothing seems to help." Children who see freedom and autonomy as a form of parental behavior may be sociable and assertive youngsters who are aggressive.

 

6. Achieving a balance between these dimensions of parental behavior seems to be the ideal, yet it is difficult to accomplish.

 

The Effects of Punishment and Discipline

 

•  The approach to punishment and discipline is another developmental task of learning. When children misbehave, teachers or parents may use some form of discipline. This approach may be in the form of spanking, scolding, shouting, embarrassing, or making the child feel inferior or unloved. Often a combination of these is involved. These negative approaches may produce undesirable results.

 

• Parents and teachers that rely on a positive approach to discipline teach the child the appropriate behaviour and reinforce that behaviour, which makes it less likely to recur in the future. For example, if a child turns over their milk at the table, have them clean up the spill instead of punishing.

 

• Consistency is vital in guiding children to a higher level of socialization. Often parents or teachers scold or punish a child for a behaviour one day, and the next day, they appear to ignore the same behaviour because of their mood swings. Consistency in discipline allows the child to know what is acceptable and what is not. Parents and teachers can assist children in socialization by building a sense of trust and a feeling they can have some control over their life.

 

• Children who are disruptive and seek attention may draw attention to self through silly behaviors, immature or regressive actions, loud talking, and making inappropriate noises or gestures. Educators suggest that parents terminate disruptive attention-seeking behaviors and increase cooperative, pro-social interactions.

 

Empathy

 

Parents' sensitive responding to child distress can facilitate children's empathic capacity. Empathy and sympathy are other-oriented emotional responses to the distress or need state of another and are important motivators of pro-social action. Parents who respond with sensitivity to their children's distress model empathy and compassion, which children are likely to emulate later when interacting with others. Responsive reactions to children's negative emotions also facilitate their ability to accurately read others' emotions which can promote empathy.

 

Deficits in empathic capacity may make anti-social behaviour more likely. Individuals who cannot reflect on and identify with other persons' feelings and mental states will not experience guilt or discomfort as a consequence of hurting others. Indeed, Bowlby's first empirical paper, which focused on the etiology of juvenile delinquency, drew linkages between early experiences of lack of a consistent, supportive caregiver and the development of an "affectionless" personality and delinquent behaviour.

 

Trust in the Parent

 

Children whose parents are typically available and supportive in times of need should be more likely to perceive parental prescriptions and prohibitions as manifestations of caring and goodwill than as malevolent and coercive. As a result they would be more likely to comply and cooperate with their parents (and subsequently with others with whom they establish a secure relationship), and to accept parental values as appropriate and just. For adolescents, the impact of parental responsiveness to distress might be particularly great with respect to health-threatening activities such as alcohol and drug use. Protection is also important for the ability to openly seek help when in need and is thus likely linked to the ability to accept and cooperate with such help once it is offered.

 

Sibling Relationships as Contexts for Socialization

 

Three characteristics of sibling relationships in childhood and adolescence stand out from systematic research?

 

1. The first is the emotional quality of the relationship; between siblings, both intense positive and negative feelings are frequently and uninhibitedly expressed from infancy through adolescence. For many young siblings, the relationship is one in which mixed feelings are evident?both positive and negative feelings freely expressed.

 

2. The second feature of sibling relationships that heightens their potential for influence on socialization is the familiarity and intimacy of the relationship. From the preschool years through middle childhood siblings spend more time together and in interaction with each other than they do with parents or peers They know each other very well, and this intimacy means that they can provide effective support or that they can tease and undermine each other.

 

3. The great range of individual differences between siblings that research has documented in observational,

   Interview, and experimental studies.

 

Influence of family culture on child development

 

Increasingly, students today have only one or no sibling or live with single parents or homes where both parents work. In such situations, students are likely to be alone or unsupervised much of the time outside school. In addition, separation and divorce are stressful events for all participants, even under the best circumstances. The actual separation of parents may have been preceded by years of conflict at home. During the divorce itself, conflict may increase as property and custody rights are being decided.

 

After the divorce, more changes may disrupt the children's lives. The parent who has custody may have to move to a less expensive home, find new sources of income, go to work for the first time, or work longer hours. For the child, this can mean leaving behind important friendships in the old neighborhood or school, just when support is needed the most. It may mean having just one parent, who has less time than ever to be with the children. In some divorces, there are few conflicts, ample resources, and the continuing support of friends and extended family. But divorce is never easy for anyone.

 

Effects of divorce: The first two years after the divorce seem to be the most difficult period or both boys and girls. During this time, children may have problems in school or just skip school, lose or gain an unusual amount of weight, develop difficulties sleeping, and so on. They may blame themselves for the breakup of their family or hold unrealistic hopes for reconciliation. Long- term adjustment is also affected. Boys tend to show a higher rate of behavioral and interpersonal problems at home and in school than either girls in general or boys from intact families. Girls may have trouble in their dealings with males. However, living with one fairly content, if harried, parent may be better than living in a conflict-filled situation with two unhappy parents. And adjustment to divorce is an individual matter; some children respond with increased responsibility, maturity and coping skills.           

                                             

Access to Resources

 

For socialization to proceed in positive directions, the basic needs of infants and children must be met. These include sufficient nutrition, adequate shelter, protection from dangers, and access to opportunities for socialization. In most parts of the Western world, basic needs such as food and shelter are generally purchased using a family's economic resources.

 

In as much as family financial resources play a central role in providing for the needs of infants, children, and adolescents, wealth and poverty are central issues for research on socialization. When families are impoverished, the difficulties in socialization of infants and children are multiple. Infants and children from low-income families are less likely than those from more affluent families receive adequate nutrition and appropriate health care. Low birth-weights, poor childhood health, stunted growth, and poor nutrition are all more common in impoverished than in affluent families. Similarly, low-income families are less likely than others to have adequate housing. They have greater exposure to toxins like lead-based paint and to environmental harms such as exposure to air pollution, experience of community or family violence, and direct victimization by physical abuse or neglect. Research has consistently shown that parents with low incomes and less- access to resources show poorer socialization practices and less authoritative parenting styles, compared to more financially well off parents. Parents with fewer economic resources have been found to be less confident in their parenting, less warm and engaged with their children, and more verbally and physically punitive than parents with greater financial resources. Children from impoverished families are less likely than those from more affluent homes to have access to enriching opportunities. They are less likely to live in homes that contain many books, less likely to have access to music or to works of art, and less likely to visit libraries and museums. Overall, family economic circumstances are a major determinant of socialization outcomes for infants and children.

 

2.  Social Networks

 

Positive social relationships outside the family are another element of supportive environments for children. The other family members, adult friends, and community members with whom parents have regular contact may support parental socialization efforts. Support can be emotional, bolstering a parent's confidence and providing an outlet for stress, informational, giving useful advice about child rearing, or instrumental, offering practical assistance. Other adults can also act as additional socialization agents for children, through their involvement in child care, provision of social or material resources to children, or status as models of healthy adult social functioning. Supportive social networks benefit both parents and children. Parents with greater social support are less stressed, are more authoritative, and have warmer interactions with their children. Children of parents who maintain more frequent and satisfying contacts with their social networks themselves have more friends and are more socially competent. Access to supportive adults through parents' social networks has also been found to protect children from the adverse effects of risk factors as economic hardship.

 

3.  Peer Relationship

 

Peer relationships play a significant role in healthy personal and social development. There is strong evidence that adults who had close friends as children have higher self-esteem and are more capable of maintaining intimate relationship than adults who had lonely childhoods. The characteristics of friends and the quality of the friendships matter too. Having stable, supportive, relationships with friends who are socially competent and mature enhances social development, especially during difficult times such as parents' divorce or transition to new schools. Adults who were rejected as children tend to have more problems, such as dropping out of school or committing crimes.

 

Problems with Peers

 

Students who are aggressive, withdrawn, and inattentive-hyperactive are more likely to be rejected. But classroom context matters too, especially for aggressive or withdrawn students. In classrooms where the general level of aggression is high, being aggressive is less likely to lead to the rejection by peers. And in classrooms where solitary play and work are more common, being withdrawn is not as likely to lead to rejection. Thus, part of rejection is being too different from the norm. Also, pro-social behaviors such as sharing, cooperating, empathy, and friendly interactions are associated with peer acceptance, no matter what the classroom context. Many aggressive and withdrawn students, lack these social skills; inattentive- hyperactive students often misread social cues or have trouble controlling impulses, or their social skills suffer. A teacher should be aware of how each student gets along with the group. Are there outcasts? Do some students play the bully role? Careful adult intervention can often correct such problems, especially at the middle-elementary-school level.

 

Peer culture also plays a powerful role in children's development. Peer cultures are groups of students who have a set of "rules"- how to dress, talk, style their hair. The group determines which activities, music or other students are in or out of favor. It encourages conformity to the group rules.

 

Peer relationships in particular contribute a great deal to both social and cognitive development and to the effectiveness with which we function as adults. He states that "the single best childhood predictor of adult adaptation is not school grades, and not classroom behaviour, but rather, the adequacy with which the child gets along with other children. Children who are generally disliked, who are aggressive and disruptive, who are unable to sustain close relationships with other children, and who cannot establish a place for themselves in the peer culture are seriously at risk". The risks are many; poor mental health, dropping out of school, low achievement and other school difficulties, and poor employment history.

 

Because social development begins at birth and progresses rapidly during the preschool years, it is clear that early childhood programs should include regular opportunities for spontaneous child-initiated social play. It is through symbolic pretend play that young children are most likely to develop both socially and intellectually. Thus, periodic assessment of children's progress in the acquisition of social competence is appropriate.

 

The set of items presented below is based on research on elements of social competence in young children and on studies in which the behaviour of well-liked children has been compared with that of less-liked children.

 

The Role of Parents in the Development of Peer Group Competence

 

As the child leaves infancy and approaches toddlerhood, one of the tasks parents face is introducing the child to the peer group. To be sure, parents are interested in their child's earliest interactions with peers, but in time/ parents become more seriously invested in their children's ability to get along with playmates. Getting along has different meanings for different parents, but in general, parents want their child to enjoy the company of other children, be liked by them, be well-behaved in their presence (for example, share and cooperate with them), and resist the influence of companions who are overly boisterous, aggressive or defiant of adult authority.

 

How do parents help their child become a socially competent, well-liked playmate who is not too easily influenced by ill-behaved peers? The three parenting styles differ particularly on two parenting dimensions: the amount of nurturance in child-rearing interactions and the amount of parental control over the child's activities and behaviour.

 

Authoritarian parents tend to be low in nurturance and high in parental control compared with other parents. They set absolute standards of behaviour for their children that are not to be questioned or negotiated. They favor forceful discipline and demand prompt obedience. Authoritarian parents also are less likely than others to use more gentle methods of persuasion, such as affection, praise and rewards, with their children. Consequently, authoritarian parents are prone to model the more aggressive modes of conflict resolution and are lax in modeling affectionate, nurturant behaviors in their interactions with their children.

 

In sharp contrast, permissive parents tend to be moderate-to-high in nurturance, but low in parental control. These parents place relatively few demands on their children and are likely to be inconsistent disciplinarians. They are accepting of the child's impulses, desires, and actions and are less likely than other parents to monitor their children's behaviour. Although their children tend to be friendly, sociable youngsters, compared with others their age they lack knowledge of appropriate behaviors for ordinary social situations and take too little responsibility for their own misbehavior.

 

Authoritative parents, in contrast to both authoritarian and permissive parents, tend to be high in nurturance and moderate in parental control when it comes to dealing with child behaviour.

 

It is this combination of parenting strategies that researchers find the most facilitative in the development of social competence during early childhood and beyond. The following discussion describes specific behaviors used by authoritative parents and the role these behaviors play in fostering social development.

 

4.  Processes of socialization within school settings

 

Structural features of schools/ such as school and class size, teacher-student ratios, and funding, can influence the amount and quality of resources and opportunities available to students. Social interactions and relationships with teachers and peers describe the more proximal contexts that can influence student adjustment.

 

Social Interactions with Teachers

 

In the classroom, teachers play a very important pedagogical function of transmitting knowledge and training students in academic subjects. However, during the course of instruction, teachers also promote the development of behavioral competencies by way of classroom management practices and by structuring learning environments in ways that make social goals more salient to students. For example, cooperative learning activities can be devised to promote the pursuit of social goals for cooperation and helping each other, to be responsible to the group, and to achieve common objectives. Students report stronger levels of satisfaction when given the opportunity to learn within cooperative learning settings. Researchers have documented that many teachers hold negative stereotypes of minority and low-achieving students, expecting less competent behaviour and lower levels of academic performance from them than from other students. Of particular importance is that teachers' false expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies, with student performance changing to conform to teacher expectations. Although the effects of these expectations tend to be fairly weak, self-fulfilling prophecies tend to have stronger effects on students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and low achievers. Moreover, teachers who communicate high expectations can bring about positive changes in performance: Teachers' overestimations of ability seem to have a somewhat stronger effect in raising levels of achievement than teachers' underestimations have on lowering achievement, especially for low-performing students.

 

Social Interactions with Peers

 

Interactions with peers also can lead directly to resources and information that help students to be socially competent. Even in preschool settings, peers can create beneficial as well as risky contexts for the development of self-regulatory skills. At older ages, peers provide information and advice, modeled behaviour, or specific experiences that facilitate learning social expectations for behaviour. Students frequently clarify and interpret their teacher's instructions concerning what they should be doing and how they should do it and provide mutual assistance in the form of volunteering substantive information and answering .questions Classmates also provide each other with important information about themselves; information concerning social self-efficacy and skills can be gleaned by observing social competencies and skills demonstrated by peers.

 

Other evidence suggests that peer expectations have the potential to provide the most proximal input concerning whether doing something might be important or fun. For instance, middle school students who perceive relatively high expectations for pro-social behaviour from their peers also pursue goals to behave pro-socially for internalized reasons, or because they think 11 is important; in contrast, perceived expectations from teachers are associated with pro-social goal pursuit in order to stay out of trouble or to gain social approval. Therefore, peers who communicate a sense of importance or enjoyment with regard to specific types of behaviour are likely to lead others to form similar attitudes. This is especially true if students are friends; strong emotional bonds associated with friendships tend to increase the likelihood that friends will imitate each other's behaviour. This latter point highlights the quality of students' interpersonal relationships as an additional, potential influence on their social and academic functioning. This aspect of socialization in school settings is discussed next.

 

Teacher's role: Teachers today have to deal with issues that once stayed outside the walls of schools. The first and most important task of a teacher is to educate, but student learning suffers when there are problems with personal and social development. Teachers are sometimes the best source of help for students facing emotional or interpersonal problems. When students have chaotic and unpredictable home lives, they need a caring and firm structure in schools. They need teacher who set clear limits, are consistent, enforce riles firmly but not punitively, respect students, and show genuine concern. As a teacher, you can be available to talk about personal problems without requiring that your students do so.

 

5.  Mass media

 

In the last 50 years the media influence has grown exponentially with the advance of technology. We live in a society that hinges on information, communication and technology to keep moving and do our daily activities like work, entertainment, health care, education, personal relationships, traveling etc. The mass media introduced worldwide cultures and norms that the child would otherwise not become aware of. The other agents of socialization, family, peer groups, and school are most commonly a part of one society and one culture, but the mass media enlarges one's exposure to the social world.

 

The amount of time that youth now-a-days devote to media consumption, the lack of parental awareness and control over that media exposure, and the reduction in time that some children might spend on other socializing activities, one has to be concerned with the role of the mass media in socializing children. The very act of engaging with the mass media either alone or with peers provides learning opportunities that socialize children, and what children observe through the mass media alters their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Since the introduction of television in the 1950s, the mass media steadily gained influence in socializing children while more traditional socializing organizations like schools, family etc. steadily lost influence. Because much of the content of the mass media to which children are exposed contains stereotyped, unrealistic and anti-social models of social behaviour, it is only natural that social scientists have focused more on understanding the negative influences of the mass media in socializing children. Yet, the mass media also provides opportunities for positive socialization. Whether the mass media teaches pro-social or antisocial behaviour more easily certainly depends on how the behaviour is presented, but the same learning processes are involved in both cases.

 

Short-Term Effects of mass media: Most short-term effects of exposure to television, films, video games, or Internet web pages are a consequence of three processes: (1) priming of already existing cognitions or scripts for behaviour; (2) immediate mimicking (imitation) of observed behaviors; or (3) changes in emotional arousal and the misattribution of that arousal (excitation transfer)

 

Priming: Priming is an increased sensitivity to certain stimuli because of prior experience. It can occur following perceptual, semantic, or conceptual stimulus repetition. For example, if a person reads a list of words including the word tamarind, and is later asked to complete a word starting with tarn, the probability that he or she will answer tamarind is greater than if not so primed. Another example is if people see an incomplete sketch that they are unable to identify and they are shown more of the sketch until they recognize the picture, later they will identify the sketch at an earlier stage than was possible for them the first time.

 

Neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists posit that the human mind acts as an association network in which ideas are partially activated, or primed, by stimuli with which they are associated. Thus an encounter with an event or object can prime related concepts, ideas and emotions in a person's memory, even without the person being aware of it. For example, the mere presence of a weapon in a person's visual field can increase aggressive thoughts or behaviour. Alternatively, exposure to a scene of helping behaviour can stimulate related pro- social thoughts and supportive feelings.

 

Repeated exposure to specific media content, therefore, has the potential to bias individuals towards thinking, feeling or behaving in ways relevant to that content.

 

Imitation: Immediate mimicry of specific behaviors can be viewed as a special case of the more general long-term process of observational learning. Humans have an innate tendency to imitate whomever they observe. Observation of specific facial expressions or social behaviours increases the likelihood of children immediately displaying those expressions or behaviours. In fact, many studies have shown that most young children frequently mimic the behaviours of those characters they observe in the media.

 

Arousal and excitation transfer: Media portrayals are often high-action sequences that can be very arousing for youth, as measured by increased heart rate, and other physiological indices of arousal. When a child has been generally aroused by a media stimulus, the specific emotion, for example, anger generated by a subsequent real world event for example an insult may be felt as more severe.