Studying The Social Worlds Of Children

Sociological Readings

Frances Chaput Waksler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135427573
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A collection of papers which examine and assess the effects on children of socialisation and which attempt to explain a range of adult perspectives on children and their social worlds.

Part I Studying Children

The five papers in Part I address various ways that children have been and can be studied sociologically. Chapter 1, from Peter and Brigitte Berger’s introductory sociology book, presents in clear and thoughtful fashion the sociological concept of socialization. This concept has served as the fundamental orienting idea for the sociological study of children. Studies of socialization are certainly worthy of serious attention by anyone interested in understanding the social worlds that children inhabit. Socialization is a particularly useful topic to explore when one’s concern is with what adults do when their goal is to prepare children for life in the social worlds of which adults are a part. Whenever adults and children are together or when children are with other children, however, a great deal is going on that is not socialization. An exclusive focus on socialization obscures from view these other activities and processes in which children are involved.

In Chapter 2, I demonstrate some of the limits of the notion of socialization, ways that it distorts lived experiences in the social world and blinds us to other aspects of the social lives of both adults and children. Chapter 3, by Robert Mackay, continues the critique of socialization, providing ample evidence of how much children know that has not been explicitly taught to them by adults. Chapters 4 and 5 provide suggestions for the study of children that respond to the criticisms of socialization as a concept and an exclusive framework within which to study children.

As a whole, Part I establishes socialization as but one process in which children are engaged. It is to other processes, those far less frequently investigated but equally important in understanding the social worlds of children, that the remainder of this book is addressed. In order to understand those other processes, however, it is important to grasp the strengths and limits of the concept of socialization. With this knowledge, reading of the papers in Part II can become a critical endeavor and adult views can be examined as data rather than accepted as necessarily true; adult views and sociological insights are not the same thing. Similarly, the papers in Part III can only exist if the concept of socialization is suspended. The papers in Part I thus require careful attention, for they provide a perspective for reading Part II and make possible the kind of sociological studies chronicled in Part III.

F.C.W.

Chapter 1
Becoming a Member of Society—
Socialization

Peter L.Berger and Brigitte Berger

Commentary

In their presentation, the Bergers provide a well-balanced description of socialization, a concept that has provided the major framework within which sociologists have studied children. Their treatment of the topic is sufficiently clear to require little introduction. Here I simply highlight some key features of the concept and suggest spheres of possible criticism.

Socialization can be conceived of as a fundamental social process through which 1) individuals becomes social members, i.e. members of specific social groups and of society as a whole, and 2) an individual develops a self. A person can be said to be socialized—and thus socialization can be said to most effectively support the status quo—when the self thinks and acts in consonance with what is deemed right by the social group of which it is a part. If, for example, murder is abhorrent to someone who belongs to a group that forbids murder, that person can be said to be well socialized to that group in that respect. If, however, someone craves meat who is a member of a vegetarian group, that person is not well socialized to that group in that respect—even if the person avoids eating meat for fear of punishment.

The socialization process rests on the idea that the self is a social product. People develop selves in interaction with others, creating selves as they simultaneously learn about others. As they learn language and the categories that make up language, they develop ways of viewing the social world that are similar to the ways of others with whom they share that social world. They learn the rules that exist in their social worlds, taking some for granted, questioning others, following some, learning how to break others. Some rules become so much a part of the self that they are unquestionably accepted as true; other rules are followed through fear of punishment; yet other rules are broken, with varying consequences for all those involved.

The process of socialization can thus be used to explain how it is possible for people to come to display the kinds of patterned social behavior that they do. In some ways the socialization process is different for every person, and every person emerges from the process different in some respects from every other person. Without denying this difference, sociologists focus on the commonalities, on the ways that all people are alike and the ways that members of a category or group are more like one another than like members of other categories or groups. The concept of socialization is thus used to explain how individuals come to resemble members of their own categories and groups and to differ from others.

Certainly socialization is an important social process and the Bergers’ article shows the many ways that it can aid in understanding children’s behavior (and adults’ behavior as well). Indeed sociologists have learned a great deal about children as they have conducted studies of socialization. For that reason Part I begins with an article on that topic. As will be seen in the remainder of Part I, however, criticisms can be directed to the whole notion of socialization and children can be studied in other frameworks as well.

Readers are advised to approach the Bergers’ chapter critically. To facilitate this process, ideas that will be further discussed in Chapter 2 will be set in bold face type. The following questions can be raised about the concept of socialization—questions that are addressed in the remainder of Part I:

• Are mothers necessarily the only or major people to socialize children?
• What are children doing when adults are socializing them?
• What power do children, even infants, have in the socialization process?
• What effects do children have on adults? Do children socialize adults?
• What are the criteria for deciding that socialization has/has not taken place?

F.C.W.

Being an Infant: Non-Social and Social Components

For better or worse, all of us begin by being born. The first condition we experience is the condition of being an infant. When we begin to analyze what this condition entails, we obviously come up against a number of things that have nothing to do with society. First of all, being an infant entails a certain relationship to one’s own body. One experiences hunger, pleasure, physical comfort or discomfort and so forth. In the condition of being an infant one is assaulted in numerous ways by the physical environment. One experiences light and darkness, heat and cold; objects of all sorts impinge upon one’s attention. One is warmed by the rays of the sun, one is intrigued by the smoothness of a surface or, if one is unlucky, one may be rained upon or bitten by a flea. Being born means to enter into a world with a seemingly infinite richness of experience. A good deal of this experience is not social. Needless to say, an infant at the time does not make such distinctions. It is only in retrospect that it is possible to differentiate the social and the non-social components of his experience. Having made this distinction, however, it is possible to say that the experience of society also begins at birth. The world of the infant is populated by other people. Very soon he is able to distinguish between them, and some of them become of over-whelming significance for him. From the beginning, the infant not only interacts with his own body and with his physical environment, but with other human beings. The biography of the individual, from the moment of birth, is the story of his relations with others.

More than that, the non-social components of the infant’s experience are mediated and modified by others, that is, by his social experience. The sensation of hunger in his stomach can only be assuaged by the actions of others. Most of the time, physical comfort or discomfort is brought about by the actions or omissions of others. The object with the pleasurably smooth surface was probably placed within the infant’s grasp by somebody. And very likely, if he is rained upon, it is because somebody left him outside without cover. In this way, social experience, while it can be distinguished from other elements in the infant’s experience, is not in an isolated category. Almost every aspect of the infant’s world involves other human beings. His experience of others is crucial for all experience. It is others who create the patterns through which the world is experienced. It is only through these patterns that the organism is able to establish a stable relationship with the outside world—not only the social world but the world of physical environment as well. But these same patterns also penetrate the organism; that is, they interfere with the way it functions. Thus it is others who set the patterns by which the infant’s craving for food is satisfied. But in doing so, these others also interfere with the infant’s organism itself. The most obvious illustration of this is the timetable of feedings. If the child is fed at certain times, and at certain times only, the organism is forced to adjust to this pattern. In making this adjustment, its functioning changes. What happens in the end is not only that the infant is fed at certain times but that he is hungry at those times. Graphically, society not only imposes its patterns upon the infant’s behavior but reaches inside him to organize the functions of his stomach. The same observation pertains to elimination, to sleeping and to other physiological processes that are endemic to the organism….

Socialization: Relative Patterns Experienced as Absolute

The process through which an individual learns to be a member of society is called socialization…. [S]ocialization is the imposition of social patterns on behavior. And, as we have tried to show, these patterns even interfere with the physiological processes of the organism. It follows that, in the biography of every individual, socialization, and especially early socialization, is a tremendously powerful and important fact. From the point of view of the outside observer, the patterns that are imposed in socialization are highly relative…. They depend not only upon the individual peculiarities of the adults who are in charge of the child but also upon the various social groupings to which these adults belong. Thus, the patterns of a child’s behavior depend not only upon whether he is a Gusii [of Kenya] or an American but also whether he is a middle-class or working-class American. From the point of view of the child, however, these same patterns are experienced in a very absolute way. Indeed, there are reasons to think that if this were not so, the child would become disturbed and socialization could not proceed.

The absoluteness with which societies’ patterns confront the child is based on two very simple facts—the great power of the adults in the situation, and the ignorance of the child of alternative patterns. Psychologists differ in their view as to whether the child experiences the adults at this stage of life as being very much under his control (because they are generally so responsive to his needs) or whether he feels continually threatened by them (because he is so dependent upon them). However this may be, there can be no question that, objectively speaking, adults have overwhelming power in the situation. The child can, of course, resist them, but the probable outcome of any conflict is a victory on the part of the adults. It is they who control most of the rewards that he craves and most of the sanctions that he fears. Indeed, the simple fact that most children are eventually socialized affords simple proof of this proposition. At the same time, it is obvious that the small child is ignorant of any alternatives to the patterns that are being imposed upon him. The adults confront him with a world—for him, it is the world. It is only much later that he discovers that there are alternatives to this particular world, that his parents’ world is relative in space and time, and that quite different patterns are possible. Only then does the individual become aware of the relativity of social patterns and of social worlds—in the extreme case, he might even follow up this insight by becoming a sociologist.

Initiating a Child: The World Becomes His World

There is, thus, a way of looking at socialization from what one might call the ‘policeman’s point of view’; that is, socialization can be viewed primarily as the imposition of controls from without, supported by some system of rewards and punishments. There is another, if you will, more benign way of looking at the same phenomenon, namely, one can look upon socialization as a process of initiation in which the child is permitted to develop and expand into a world available to him. In this aspect, socialization is an essential part of the process of becoming fully human and realizing the full potential of the individual. Socialization is a process of initiation into a social world, its forms of interaction and its many meanings. The social world of his parents first confronts the child as an external, vastly powerful and mysterious reality. In the course of socialization, that world becomes comprehensible. The child enters it, becomes capable of participating in it. It b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Part I: Studying Children
• Part II: Children In an Adult World
• Part III: Children In a Child’s World
• Conclusion
• Appendix I: Rules for Reading and Writing Sociology
• Appendix II: Exercises
• References
• Notes On Contributors