Chapter 5: Socialization and the Life Cycle

1. Chapter 5: Socialization and the Life Cycle

2. Socialization • Socialization: The process by which individuals are incorporated into society, internalizing its codes, narratives, values, and symbols. This process begins at birth and usually takes place first in the family. • Self: Our sense of who we are in relation to ourselves, others, and society

3. The Paradox of Socialization Socialization brings us into society and allows us to internalize the codes, narratives, values, and symbols that already exists, thereby ensuring the continuity of our societies over time. Yet…learning to be “like us” means, at the same time, learning how to be unique.

4. Figure 5.1 Nature or Nuture

5. Nature or Nurture?

6. Toward the Modern Self “ I think, therefore I am.” - Decartes “To be or not to be, that is the question.” - Shakespeare, Hamlet The anti-authoritarian, consent-based system of democracy rests upon the deeply rooted belief that the self is autonomous and internally integrated. Only the presumption of such autonomy allows us to think of the human as possessing “inalienable rights” that can be protected by a democratic form of government.

7. Toward the Postmodern Self People are now more exposed to variation in their environments and experience steep increases in individual sensitivity and responsiveness due to… • the development of advanced communication technologies • the rapidity of migration • the displacement of assimilation the promotion of difference and multiculturalism

8. Which Self is the Best?

9. Creating the Self • Selfways:The characteristic cultural ideas and values associated with particular social and cultural groups in the world. These emerge from living one’s life in particular sociocultural contexts. • Agents of socialization: The influences from the social environment that transform a child from an unaware infant into a competent social person. Agents of socialization might include the family, parents, school, or peer groups

10. Figure 5.2 Historical Stages of the Self

11. Primary Socialization • Parents

12. Primary Socialization (continued) • Siblings and Birth Order • Gender • Gender: A term that refers to cultural ideas, norms, and values the construct images and expectations of females and males, particularly in terms of behavior and appearance. Unlikesex, which is limited to biological distinctions between males and females, gender is socially and culturally constructed and understood.

13. Secondary Socialization • Secondary social experiences: While institutions, such as the family, are crucial in early socialization, secondary socialization experiences often foster individuation and challenge primary socialization. • Schools • Peer Groups • The Media

14. Figure 5.5 Growing Up in the Digital Age

15. Media Socialization

16. Figure 5.6 The Media Budgets of Girls and Boys

17. The Life Cycle • There are different definitions of childhood for different historical periods and geographical regions.

18. The Life Cycle (continued) • Life course: A term that, instead of describing life as a linear biological path from birth to death, refers to the role of historical, social, and cultural contexts in shaping an individual or group’s life trajectory. • Life stages: Various points of transition and experience throughout the life course. For example, adolescence and retirement are two life stages. They entail not only biological stages of development, such as adolescence, but also key social stages, such as marriage or retirement.

19. Figure 5.7 Deaths from Suicide, United States, 2002

20. Figures 5.8 and 5.9Suicide

21. Figure 5.10 Prevalence of Deliberate Self-Harm and Suicidal Thoughts

22. Figure 5.11 When Are You Really Grown Up?

23. Figures 5.12 and 5.13

24. Figure 5.14 Proportion of Young Adults Receiving Financial Assistance

25. Emotion Work in Postmodern Life The postmodern self has the capacity to manage complex emotions, to refer to multiple and simultaneous cultural frameworks, and to project a convincing relation to the ambiguities of social structure—the socialized inner self develops a “working” self to handle the complexities of interaction, or a series of working selves.

26. Emotion Work in Postmodern Life (continued) • Feeling rules: As theorized by Arlie Hochschild, cultural scripts that direct how we want to feel and how was want others to interpret our feelings. “Feeling rules” are significant in that they mark how, in the uncertainty of postmodern life, we must work to manage our emotions, as well as to be interpreted and understood by another.

27. Study Questions • What is socialization, and in what sense is it paradoxical? • How did classical and modern sociology conceive of socialization, and in what ways did this conception reflect modern social life? How does postmodern society challenge this conception? • What is Julian Jaynes’s provocative argument about selfhood in ancient Greek society?

28. Study Questions (continued) • Why did the concept of the autonomous self disappear in the Middle Ages? • What role did the “civilizing process” play in the modernization of European society? • Why do some social observers believe that the postmodern self is an improvement on its modern counterpart while others believe it is a degradation of its predecessor?

29. Study Questions (continued) • When children are socialized, how are most cultural lessons learned? What is the content of these cultural lessons? What is the “social” dimension of culture imparted to children in socialization? • According to Gary Peterson and Boyd Rollins, what is the best style of parenting? What qualities does it combine, and why are these effective? What is coercive control, and what are the consequences of a parenting style that overuses it?

30. Study Questions (cont’d) • When does gender socialization begin in a child’s life? How do parents contribute to the “gendering” of a child?