CH 5

1. CH 5 Enculturation

2. Enculturation: • The process by which children learn and adopt the ways, manners and values of their culture. • Culture: • The dynamic system of rules, explicit and implicit, established by groups in order to ensure their survival, involving attitudes, values, beliefs, norms, and behaviors shared by a group but harbored differently by each specific unit within the group, communicated across generations, relatively stable but with the potential to change across time.

3. Socialization • The actual process by which we learn and internalize the rules and patterns of behavior that are affected by culture.

4. Socialization systems • Microsystem: Immediate surroundings that children directly interact with (family, peer group, school) • Mesosystem: The connections between components of the microsystem (school & family) • Exosystem: Indirectly impacts the child (parent’s workplace or other affiliations) • Macrosystem: The larger context within which the child exists (religion, culture, social class)

5. Some Dimensions of Enculturation to be Considered • Parenting • Peers • Day Care • Education • Religion

6. Parenting • Goals and beliefs parents hold for their children • Parenting styles (These parameters are value-laden!) • Authoritarian: unquestioned obedience, low warmth and responsiveness • Permissive: Few firm guidelines, children empowered • Authoritative: Responsive to child’s maturity, warm, and firm • Uninvolved: Children are not central, parents may appear to be indifferent • Behaviors & Strategies • Co-sleeping • Gender role differentiation

7. Parenting • Economics • Poor people have fewer options • Cultural differences in how much support new mothers experience • Siblings • Putting one through school • Other Mothers • Extended families

8. Peers • Postfigurative cultures: cultural change is slow, elders communicate knowledge to the next generation, history predicts behaviors associated with success (socialization) • Cofigurative cultures: change happens more rapidly than above, both adults and peers actively contribute to socialization • Prefigurative cultures: Rapidly changing culture, young people teach adults

9. Peers • Exposure to peer groups • Isolated on a farm • Hunter-gatherer peer cohorts unde supervision • Age stratified schooling • Friendships • Manifestation of values

10. Day Care • Public or private, formal & standardized or informal? • Developmental advantages associated with high quality day care

11. Education • Primary socializing agent • Conveys values • Math applications are culturally based • Language • Practical applications • Parental attitudes; Desire to please parents and high level of parental support common to Asian American students • Pedagogy: ability vs. effort • Teacher-student relationships

12. Religion • Historically neglected by psychologists • Provides guidelines for values and behaviors • Sense of belonging, place in universe • Rites of passage • Dynamic interpretation by individuals

13. Enculturation • Dynamic interplay of the previously described contributing factors and the individual’s personal and unique characteristics in a process of subjective meaning making • Cultural learning modes: Imitation, instruction, collaboration