The Importance of Socialization

Socialization is the process a child goes through while growing up; they learn and develop by following in the footsteps of their family, peers, teachers, and the media. Along the way they develop a sense of self and become their own person. This is also known as internalization, the process in which people take as their own and accept the norms, values, beliefs, and language that their peers are attempting to pass on. Family, school, peers and mass media are all major agents of a child’s socialization. Without interacting with these agents, a child can suffer in many ways. Extreme isolation can effect a child’s emotional, mental, and physical development. While if a child experiences nature, nurture, and gets to watch television and interacts with people, the child will be able to develop as a person and learn and have normal social graces.
Family is a social group with face-to-face contact and strong emotional ties. To develop normally, children need close contact and stimulation from others. Adequate stimulation comes from a strong relationship with a caring adult. For a child to have this bond to help develop, there must be at least one person who knows the child well enough to understand his or her needs and feelings who will act to satisfy them. For example, children go to adults with their questions and needs, adults respond by offering explanations, expressing concern, or no concern. This is one kind of socialization. The family is an important agent of socialization because it gives individuals their deepest and earliest experiences with relationships and their first exposure to the “rules of life”. In addition, the family teaches its members about the social and physical environment and pays to respond to that environment.
Mead assumed that the self develops through interaction with others. For example, playing and interacting with other children. When children play games they learn how to behave and how to follow established rules. Memory is more than an individual thing; it helps in socializing with peers and teachers. No one can socialize with anyone without the ability to remember names, faces, places, words symbols or norms. A friendship comes with significant symbols and gestures. For example, a hand shake, or a wave, or a certain word that both parties recognize and has the same meaning. In another part of socialization with peers, the book talks about the play stage. In the play stage, children’s role taking comes from what they see and hear going on around them. Also, children pretend to be significant others, like people who are important in the child’s life, which encourages the child to act in a certain way. That could also happen when a child socializes with others, using things they learned from the mass media.
Mass media is a form of communication designed to reach large audiences without face-to-face contact. Examples of mass media are television, radio, books, websites and music. They introduce their audiences to different people, cartoon characters, and musicians. Children become such dedicated fans, that they act like the character or musician, and want to buy products they endorse. One example of a socializing television show for children would be Sesame Street. The most watched children’s television show in history, it airs in at least 120 countries. It first aired in the U.S. in 1969, with a ground breaking multiracial cast. Sesame Street’s mission is to level the educational playing field for all preschoolers. The shows goal is to spread learning, tolerance, love and mutual respect.
While humans have a biological make up that allows them to speak a language, the language itself is learned though interactions with others. If children are not exposed to language, they will not acquire that communication tool. While social interaction is essential to language development, it is essential to human development in general. If children are deprived of social contact with others, they cannot become normally functioning human beings.