Why Is the Family So Important to the Socialization Process?

4.two Explaining Socialization

Learning Objective

1. Describe the theories of Cooley, Mead, Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg, Gilligan, and Erikson.

Considering socialization is so important, scholars in various fields have tried to understand how and why it occurs, with different scholars looking at different aspects of the process. Their efforts by and large focus on infancy, childhood, and adolescence, which are the critical years for socialization, but some have also looked at how socialization continues through the life course. Let's examine some of the major theories of socialization, which are summarized in Table iv.one "Theory Snapshot".

Tabular array four.1 Theory Snapshot

Theory	Major figure(s)	Major assumptions
Looking-glass self	Charles Horton Cooley	Children proceeds an impression of how people perceive them as the children interact with them. In issue, children "see" themselves when they interact with other people, every bit if they are looking in a mirror. Individuals employ the perceptions that others take of them to develop judgments and feelings about themselves.
Taking the role of the other	George Herbert Mead	Children pretend to be other people in their play and in then doing acquire what these other people look of them. Younger children take the role of significant others, or the people, almost typically parents and siblings, who have the nearly contact with them; older children when they play sports and other games have on the roles of other people and internalize the expectations of the generalized other, or society itself.
Psychoanalytic	Sigmund Freud	The personality consists of the id, ego, and superego. If a child does non develop normally and the superego does not go stiff enough to overcome the id, antisocial beliefs may event.
Cognitive development	Jean Piaget	Cerebral development occurs through 4 stages. The final stage is the formal operational stage, which begins at historic period 12 as children brainstorm to utilise general principles to resolve diverse problems.
Moral development	Lawrence Kohlberg, Ballad Gilligan	Children develop their ability to think and act morally through several stages. If they neglect to achieve the conventional stage, in which adolescents realize that their parents and society take rules that should be followed considering they are morally correct to follow, they might well engage in harmful beliefs. Whereas boys tend to use formal rules to decide what is right or wrong, girls tend to take personal relationships into account.
Identity evolution	Erik Erikson	Identity development encompasses eight stages across the life form. The fifth stage occurs in adolescence and is peculiarly critical considering teenagers oftentimes experience an identity crisis as they move from babyhood to adulthood.

Sociological Explanations: The Development of the Self

One set up of explanations, and the almost sociological of those we discuss, looks at how the self, or one's identity, self-concept, and self-image, develops. These explanations stress that we learn how to interact by first interacting with others and that we exercise then by using this interaction to gain an idea of who we are and what they await of us.

Charles Horton Cooley

Among the start to advance this view was Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929), who said that past interacting with other people nosotros proceeds an impression of how they perceive us. In event, we "see" ourselves when we collaborate with other people, every bit if nosotros are looking in a mirror when nosotros are with them. Cooley (1902) developed his famous concept of the looking-glass self to summarize this procedure. Cooley said we showtime imagine how nosotros appear to others and then imagine how they recall of u.s. and, more than specifically, whether they are evaluating us positively or negatively. Nosotros and then utilize these perceptions to develop judgments and feelings well-nigh ourselves, such as pride or embarrassment.

Sometimes errors occur in this complex process, as nosotros may misperceive how others regard u.s. and develop misguided judgments of our beliefs and feelings. For example, you lot may take been in a situation where someone laughed at what yous said, and you idea they were mocking you, when in fact they just idea you were being funny. Although you should accept interpreted their laughter positively, you lot interpreted it negatively and probably felt stupid or embarrassed.

Charles Horton Cooley wrote that nosotros proceeds an impression of ourselves past interacting with other people. By doing so, we "run into" ourselves every bit if nosotros are looking in a mirror when we are with them. Cooley developed his famous concept of the looking-glass self to summarize this process.

Whether errors occur or not, the process Cooley described is especially disquisitional during childhood and adolescence, when our self is still in a state of flux. Imagine how much better children on a sports team experience after existence cheered for making a corking play or how children in the school band experience later on a standing ovation at the stop of the band's performance. If they feel amend virtually themselves, they may practise that much better adjacent time. For ameliorate or worse, the reverse is also true. If children do poorly on the sports field or in a school performance and the applause they hoped for does not occur, they may feel dejected and worse about themselves and from frustration or anxiety perform worse the adjacent fourth dimension around.

Yet it is also true that the looking-glass-self process affects us throughout our lives. Past the time nosotros become out of belatedly boyhood and into our early on adult years, we accept very much adult our conception of our self, notwithstanding this development is never consummate. As immature, middle-aged, or older adults, nosotros continue to react to our perceptions of how others view u.s., and these perceptions influence our conception of our self, even if this influence is often less than was true in our younger years. Whether our social interaction is with friends, relatives, coworkers, supervisors, or even strangers, our self continues to change.

George Herbert Mead

Another scholar who discussed the evolution of the cocky was George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), a founder of the field of symbolic interactionism discussed in Chapter 1 "Sociology and the Sociological Perspective". Mead'due south (1934) main emphasis was on children's playing, which he saw equally central to their understanding of how people should interact. When they play, Mead said, children accept the office of the other. This means they pretend to be other people in their play and in so doing acquire what these other people expect of them. For example, when children play house and pretend to be their parents, they care for their dolls the manner they retrieve their parents treat them. In so doing, they go a meliorate idea of how they are expected to comport. Some other way of maxim this is that they internalize the expectations other people have of them.

Younger children, said Mead, take the role of meaning others, or the people, nearly typically parents and siblings, who have the most contact with them. Older children have on the roles of other people and larn society's expectations equally a whole. In and so doing, they internalize the expectations of what Mead chosen the generalized other, or social club itself.

This whole process, Mead wrote, involves several stages. In the imitation stage, infants can only imitate behavior without really understanding its purposes. If their parents rub their own bellies and laugh, 1-year-olds may practise also. Subsequently they reach the age of 3, they are in the play phase. Hither most of their play is by themselves or with only ane or two other children, and much of it involves pretending to be other people: their parents, teachers, superheroes, boob tube characters, and so along. In this stage they brainstorm taking the role of the other. Once they reach age 6 or 7, or roughly the time schoolhouse begins, the games stage begins, and children start playing in team sports and games. The many players in these games perform many kinds of roles, and they must all learn to conceptualize the actions of other members of their team. In so doing, they learn what is expected of the roles all team members are supposed to play and past extension begin to empathise the roles guild wants us to play, or to utilize Mead'southward term, the expectations of the generalized other.

Mead felt that the cocky has ii parts, the I and the me. The I is the creative, spontaneous role of the self, while the me is the more passive role of the self stemming from the internalized expectations of the larger society. These two parts are not at odds, he idea, but instead complement each other and thus heighten the private's contributions to society. Guild needs creativity, but it also needs at to the lowest degree some minimum of conformity. The development of both these parts of the self is important not only for the individual just also for the society to which the private belongs.

Social-Psychological Explanations: Personality and Cognitive and Moral Development

A second set of explanations is more psychological, every bit it focuses on the development of personality, cerebral ability, and morality.

Sigmund Freud and the Unconscious Personality

Whereas Cooley and Mead focused on interaction with others in explaining the development of the self, the great psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) focused on unconscious, biological forces that he felt shape private personality. Freud (1933) thought that the personality consists of three parts: the id, ego, and superego. The id is the selfish role of the personality and consists of biological instincts that all babies have, including the need for food and, more more often than not, the demand for firsthand gratification. Every bit babies go older, they learn that non all their needs can be immediately satisfied and thus develop the ego, or the rational role of the personality. Equally children get older however, they internalize society's norms and values and thus begin to develop their superego, which represents society'south censor. If a child does non develop normally and the superego does not become strong enough, the individual is more at hazard for existence driven by the id to commit antisocial behavior.

Sigmund Freud believed that the personality consists of iii parts: the id, ego, and superego. The development of these biological forces helps shape an private's personality.

Freud'southward bones view that an individual's personality and behavior develop largely from within differs from sociology'due south emphasis on the social environment. That is not to say his view is wrong, but information technology is to say that information technology neglects the many very important influences highlighted past sociologists.

Piaget and Cerebral Development

Children acquire a self and a personality simply they also learn how to think and reason. How they acquire such cerebral development was the focus of research by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980). Piaget (1954) thought that cognitive development occurs through four stages and that proper maturation of the brain and socialization were necessary for adequate development.

The get-go phase is the sensorimotor stage, in which infants cannot really think or reason and instead use their hearing, vision, and other senses to find the globe around them. The 2nd stage is the preoperational stage, lasting from near age 2 to historic period 7, in which children brainstorm to utilise symbols, specially words, to understand objects and simple ideas. The third stage is the concrete operational phase, lasting from about age 7 to historic period eleven or 12, in which children begin to think in terms of cause and effect merely still exercise not understand underlying principles of fairness, justice, and related concepts. The fourth and final stage is the formal operational stage, which begins nearly the age of 12. Hither children begin to think abstractly and employ general principles to resolve various problems.

Recent research supports Piaget's emphasis on the importance of the early years for children's cerebral development. Scientists have found that brain activity develops rapidly in the earliest years of life. Stimulation from a child'south social surroundings enhances this development, while a lack of stimulation impairs it. Children whose parents or other caregivers routinely play with them and talk, sing, and read to them have much better neurological and cognitive development than other children (Riley, San Juan, Klinkner, & Ramminger, 2009). By providing a biological basis for the importance of human stimulation for children, this enquiry underscores both the significance of interaction and the dangers of social isolation. For both biological and social reasons, socialization is not fully possible without all-encompassing social interaction.

Kohlberg, Gilligan, and Moral Evolution

An important part of children's reasoning is their ability to distinguish right from incorrect and to decide on what is morally correct to do. Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987) said that children develop their ability to remember and deed morally through several stages. In the preconventional stage, young children equate what is morally right but to what keeps them from getting punished. In the conventional stage, adolescents realize that their parents and society take rules that should be followed because they are morally correct to follow, not merely because disobeying them leads to punishment. At the postconventional stage, which occurs in belatedly boyhood and early adulthood, individuals realize that higher moral standards may supervene upon those of their own society and fifty-fifty decide to disobey the law in the proper name of these higher standards. If people fail to reach at least the conventional stage, Kohlberg (1969) said, they practice not develop a censor and instead might well engage in harmful behavior if they think they will non be punished. Incomplete moral development, Kohlberg concluded, was a prime cause of antisocial beliefs.

Ballad Gilligan believes that girls have personal relationships into account during their moral development.

Vladimir Pustovit – Girls – CC BY 2.0.

Ane limitation of Kohlberg'due south research was that he studied only boys. Do girls become through similar stages of moral evolution? Carol Gilligan (1982) concluded that they exercise not. Whereas boys tend to use formal rules to decide what is right or wrong, she wrote, girls tend to take personal relationships into account. If people pause a rule because of some important personal need or considering they are trying to help someone, then their beliefs may not be incorrect. Put another mode, males tend to utilise impersonal, universalistic criteria for moral decision making, whereas females tend to use more individual, particularistic criteria.

An example from children'southward play illustrates the deviation between these two forms of moral reasoning. If boys are playing a sport, say basketball, and a player says he was fouled, they may disagree—sometimes heatedly—over how much contact occurred and whether it indeed was enough to be a foul. In contrast, girls in a similar situation may make up one's mind in the involvement of having everyone get along to phone call the play a "do-over."

Erikson and Identity Evolution

We noted earlier that the development of the self is not limited to childhood simply instead continues throughout the life span. More generally, although socialization is most important during childhood and adolescence, information technology, besides, continues throughout the life span. Psychologist Erik Erikson (1902–1990) explicitly recognized this primal fact in his theory of identity development (Erikson, 1980). This sort of development, he said, encompasses eight stages of life across the life grade. In the beginning 4 stages, occurring in succession from nascency to age 12, children ideally learn trust, cocky-command, and independence and also learn how to do tasks whose complexity increases with their age. If all this development goes well, they develop a positive identity, or self-epitome.

The fifth stage occurs in adolescence and is especially critical, said Erikson, because teenagers oftentimes experience an identity crisis. This crisis occurs considering boyhood is a transition between childhood and adulthood: adolescents are leaving babyhood but take not withal achieved adulthood. Every bit they endeavour to work through all the complexities of adolescence, teenagers may become rebellious at times, but most eventually enter immature machismo with their identities mostly settled. Stages vi, vii, and eight involve young adulthood, heart machismo, and late adulthood, respectively. In each of these stages, people's identity development is directly related to their family and piece of work roles. In tardily adulthood, people reverberate on their lives while trying to remain contributing members of club. Stage 8 tin can be a particularly troubling stage for many people, as they realize their lives are almost over.

Erikson's research helped stimulate the further study of socialization past adolescence, and today the study of socialization during the years of adulthood is burgeoning. We return to adulthood in Affiliate iv "Socialization", Section iv.4 "Socialization Through the Life Course" and address information technology again in the give-and-take of age and crumbling in Affiliate 12 "Aging and the Elderly".

Key Takeaways

• Cooley and Mead explained how ane's self-concept and self-paradigm develop.
• Freud focused on the need to develop a proper balance amid the id, ego, and superego.
• Piaget wrote that cognitive evolution among children and adolescents occurs from four stages of social interaction.
• Kohlberg wrote well-nigh stages of moral development and emphasized the importance of formal rules, while Gilligan emphasized that girls' moral development takes into account personal relationships.
• Erikson's theory of identity development encompasses 8 stages, from infancy through old age.

For Your Review

1. Select one of the theories of socialization in this section, and write about how it helps yous to sympathise your own socialization.
2. Gilligan emphasized that girls accept social relationships into account in their moral evolution, while boys tend to stress the importance of formal rules. Practice yous agree with her argument? Why or why not?

References

Cooley, C. H. (1902). Social arrangement. New York, NY: Scribner's.

Erikson, E. H. (1980). Identity and the life cycle. New York, NY: Norton.

Freud, S. (1933). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. New York, NY: Norton.

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different vocalization: Psychological theory and women's development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kohlberg, 50. (1969). States in the development of moral thought and activeness. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, cocky, and society. Chicago, IL: Academy of Chicago Press.

Piaget, J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Riley, D., San Juan, R. R., Klinkner, J., & Ramminger, A. (2009). Intellectual development: Connecting science and exercise in early childhood settings. St. Paul, MN: Redleaf Printing.

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Source: https://open.lib.umn.edu/sociology/chapter/4-2-explaining-socialization/