What is Socialization
Are you familiar with the term socialization? What is socialization? Socialization is how we learn to be part of a culture. This happens throughout life. As a kid, you learn to be part of a specific culture. Then, when you are an adult and part of a new company, you learn how to become a part of that company. I used to be a corporate trainer, and part of my job was to teach people what the culture was in this company and how to be a good employee. They would learn about the new culture they’re living in, what the expectations are, what a good employee looks like, what their roles are, and how they should be played out.
Elevator example
We don’t just get socialized when we’re a kid. We get socialized when we’re an adult, to happen throughout life. And it’s, in a lot of times, it’s subtle, and sometimes not so subtle. If we think about a kid, I always love this explanation because looking at it from the outside is always interesting. But if you look just at getting on elevators, and you think about where people get on first. I know for me, I am the button person. I usually get on and try to get next to the buttons to push the button. But the next person that gets on usually goes to the opposite corner, directly across or catty-corner. So, if you’re in the front, towards the buttons, they might go in the back, opposite corner, and then the next person comes in, they’ll stand in one of the other corners and another person in another corner. We spread ourselves out. Everybody faces the front where the numbers are, and we watch the floor go up and down. There is an expectation about how to be in an elevator. If you watch a child get on the elevator, and the parent is teaching the child how to behave, it’s pretty subtle, like they might pull them towards them. Children pick up on the patterns of behavior that are demonstrated. It may not be someone saying this is how you send an elevator. But they might show them how to do that.
School
Kids come into a school and learn how to interact and what they’re supposed to do. Sometimes I have 15-year-old kids in high school coming to college, and they have to find their way to blend in. They’re not in high school. They can’t hang out and act like a high school student in a college classroom because they’ll be ostracized by their fellow students. You’ll find all of those students are quiet. They will blend in well by paying attention to the main categories we will look at. I will look at these individually, particularly how this relates to how we deal with food. That’s a really good example or an opening. So much of what we do is nonverbal, not spoken, is just done. And we pick up on the behavior patterns and expect them to be correct.
Socializing Agents
Family
The first one we will look at in time is family. Family is going to be the first one is going to influence a child. It’s the first group that they interact with.
School
The next one is school as a socializing agent. If people aren’t going to school, they might have church organizations that might be a socializing agent to teach them how to interact with other groups of people. But standardly, the school would be the next one.
Peers
The next one because it interacts with school is peers. I think when we look over time, certainly, in Middle school (Junior High) and high school, peers end up having a stronger influence on what happens there with students and what behaviors they might engage in, depending on what their friends might choose to engage in the culture as a whole and if you are part of a religion, that also represents your culture as you go to school in a church Go to school, the same place you go to church, for example, then you might, you’re getting an extra dose of culture in that context.
Community (Culture)
The community might be your neighborhood, church, or other social environments you might participate in. There are often some similarities between the people who might live in a community, like socioeconomic status (this generally relates to money and could relate to ethnicity, location, and the like).
Media
And then the last one that we look at is media. Media plays a significant role as a child grows older, and certainly, the idea of perfectionism is what people should look like. The important part is that we are comparing ourselves to something that doesn’t even exist. If we look at how the model’s picture is manipulated by technology, it is often no longer what a normal human being looks like, so interesting.
Those are the big socialization agents and understanding that you are constantly socialized. So, when you’re doing something new and experiencing something, you might sit back and watch how those interactions are happening and determine if you choose to be part of that.