Children Socialization

The members of any social group, whether it is as large as a nation or as small as a village darts club, have expectations of how those who join it should behave.

If the group is to survive in its present form, they must somehow or other ensure that those who join their group learn the behavior expected of them when they fill the new positions that they occupy as nationals or as darts club members. In the case of a nation, in the first place parents teach their children, often without conscious thought, how to be good whilst in a formal organization such as a sports club, frequently only those likely to conform are allowed to join, training prior to membership may be compulsory and clear rules specify what behavior is normal for those filling the position of member. In all these cases where a situation is being defined or clarified to the newcomers to any group or where social arrangements exist to ensure that mutual behavioral expectations or roles are learnt, sociologists give to the process of induction the name of socialization. Any group may be seen as made up of a number of social positions which interlock in a patterned way because the members have mutual expectations of each other.
This is most clearly seen in military units where clear-cut expectations of behavior based on accepted patterns of authority are known to all members, but similar patterns exist in all groups with any elements of permanence.

This idea has been extended beyond such simple groups to whole societies, so that sociologists speak of the social structure.

On this scale there are numbers of positions that form possible routes or pathways through the social structure.

These positions may cluster around similar activities.

For example, around the family there are such positions as father, mother, son or daughter; within education there are the positions of teacher, inspector, pupil or school caretaker; in the economy the positions of manager, worker, doctor or plumber; and, finally, within political institutions such positions as prime minister, civil servant, mayor or voter.
Any child may be expected to prepare himself so that when he is older he can play the roles successively of pupil, worker, father and voter. Any adult may be expected to behave at more or less the same time as a father, a worker and a voter.
One very important effect of having to play successions of roles and several roles concurrently is that the social structure holds together in a more or less cohesive manner, since individuals have many connections with many different parts of the society of which they are members.

The Life Cycle Anthropologists have given much attention to the ways in which different societies have divided up the succession of roles that are particularly associated with the family.

In simple societies, and even in the rural sectors of more advanced societies, where the family forms the unit of subsistence, these roles are central to much of social life. This succession of divisions has been called the life cycle. Eight major positions with specific expectations of behavior existed: baby, child, lad/maiden, newly married, father/mother, widow(er), old person, and, finally, that role for which we are all destined, deceased person.' To anyone who has been socialized into a Westernized urban society there is one obvious omission here, the role of a mother or father whose family has left home. This omission highlights the fact that the rural cycle differs both between and within societies.

There are rural and urban versions of the role which a boy or a girl must learn, but there are also differences in what is considered normal behavior for an adult woman in different countries.