Socialization Essay

Socialization is how we learn to interact with other people. All of our behaviors are learned through socialization. There are five agents of socialization family, schools, community, peers, and mass media. Family is considered to be the most important agent of socialization. Parents are the biggest influences for the social development of children. As infants, we are completely dependent on others to survive. Our parents, or those who play the parent role, are responsible for teaching us to function and care for ourselves. Socialization in a family setting can be both deliberate and unintended. A child that grows up in a home where there is reasonable structure, love and discipline, based on clear moral and ethical standards will absorb

Your peers are usually the same, share similar interests, and come from similar backgrounds. While you are with your peers you experience moments with them that contradict the values and beliefs you learned from your family. What makes a peer group an important factor in socialization is that it enables a child to engage in experiences which he/she would otherwise never experience within his/her family. Things such as competition, conflict and cooperation as well as the concepts of hierarchy and egalitarianism can be learned and imbibed through a peer group. Peer groups also, many times, promote the idea of independence from the thought process of the family. Individuals begin to think and act in different ways which may be, sometimes, completely opposite of their family values. Nevertheless, peer groups, as agents of socialization, are important entities granting social approval and support (Baxamusa, B. (2012, November 22). Agents of

When it comes to mass media there is no personal contact between us and the people send the information. Out of all the mass media television has the most influence on socialization because just about everyone has one or more televisions in their home. There is a lot of violence in our media now a day which can have an adverse effect on people. For example children see violence on television and they might think its ok, they might show aggressive behavior towards others because they learned this from television. The agents of socialization thus have a very profound effect on our personal and conceptual development. They help us interact and communicate with society and also to understand our social roles. However, the impact these agents have on our lives, and consequently on society, also depends largely on the parameters of time and space. For instance, these agents, though performing similar functions worldwide, may have contradicting impact on the mindset of the people of a country at war, as opposed to the one at peace (Baxamusa, B. (2012, November 22). Agents of