Socializing agents are said to play an important role on a child’s social and emotional development, such factors are family, peers and schools. Socialization is a process that occurs throughout our lives, but the most socialization should be done in childhood, throughout this period we learn how to interact with people and their social expectations.
Family is seen to be the most important agent when it comes to socialization this is because it is the first environment that a child grows up in, from a young age, children are completely dependent on those around them. Those who take on parental roles are seen are our role models and teach us their norms, values and beliefs about society whilst also teaching us to care for ourselves and develop relationships with those around us. The lessons we are taught are reflections of our family’s beliefs and upbringing through generations and sometimes cultural perspectives. This provides us with the fundamental building blocks for our adult lives, from a young age we are exposed to what we expect a family to be like and the basic gender roles, all these factors start to shape us as we get older.
Parenting style contributes massively towards development as this is the child’s upbringing. All parents have a different style of which they adhere to when raising their child. Baurmind (1971) speaks of two dimensions these are: acceptance/responsiveness and demandingness/control he uses these dimensions to form 4 different parenting styles: authoritative and authoritarian, which are high control, permissive and neglectful, added later by Maccoby and Martin (1983), which are low control styles. Authoritarian parents are high demanding of their children and often use punishment as a way to control them, this style is seen to stunt emotional and social growth as the parents aren’t responsive towards the child. Children are often seen to lack self-esteem, have poorer social skills and do worse academically due to them not being able to find their own sense of identity as they are so controlled by their parents. Similarly, authoritative are high demanding of their children but are nurturing and responsive to their child, even though rules are enforced by the parents they are open to discussion and reason, these parents boost independence and are affectionate, this style is seen to produce happier more confident children who do better academically and possess better social skills. This style is seen to be the most effective for a child’s development. A permissive parenting style is low in control and demandingness, they set very few rules for their children and hate to say ‘no’ to them, this style creates children who cannot follow rules, do not perform well academically and find it difficult to interact socially. Finally, neglectful or uninvolved parenting is when parents do not set any rules at all, are not demanding and have little no knowledge of their child’s needs. Children from this type are more impulsive, aggressive and have more mental health issues.
Parenting styles do have a major effect on a child’s development both socially and emotionally as seen above. However, some issues are present, conflict can arise between parents on which parenting style is best to use, the child could become confused as both parents are asking different things off them which could cause behavioral issues in the long run, parenting styles are not seen to be affective in this case (Rodriguez & Wittig 2019). Further limitations were found by Spera (2005), even though it’s stated that authoritative parenting styles are associated with academic success his findings were not consistent with this.
In conclusion, I believe family is the most important socializing agent as it is the child’s biggest influence because we learn so much from them.