Socialization

Socialization is a process where humans develop and become a part of a certain culture, where the individual will take on those particular beliefs, values, customs, behaviors that are acquired in that culture. Socialization is a way to teach individuals what a desired behavior is. The developmental niche is a model which combines the features of a person’s environment to explain human development. The niche is the environment state an individual is currently in, and consists of physical and social settings of daily life that belong to the child, culturally specific customs and child care/child rearing practices around that child and the psychology of the caretakers. These factors are dynamic and change over time. It connects the interaction between culture, ecology and socialization. In a sense an individual will be socialized to the particular developmental niche that they are currently belonging in.  Since Socialization is dynamic and flexible and constantly changing it allows individuals to adapt to whatever developmental niche they are presently apart of. Changes throughout our lifetimes. Infants are socialized, then children are, then adolescences and then become adults as they are move through different developmental niches. As you grow your environment is not always going to be the same so you need to adapt to the new settings. A good example is Parenthood because this is so dynamic in that the parent is becoming socialized into the new role of a caretaker where they also have the responsibility of socializing their children. That is, the parent will attend to develop sleeping patterns for the child or feed the child. There are variations among the ways the parents socialize they behavior’s, such as for sleeping there could be co-sleeping or the infant could be socialized to sleep in his/her own room. Variations in feeding occurs when parents decide what the child eats. The parent’s actions towards these behaviors influence the future behaviors of those children. For example, a mother needs to socialize a newborn to sleep, and she chooses that co-sleeping is what she wants to do. The co-sleeping is explicit in a way that that child is being socialized into a collectivist or interdependent cultural background, while the child who sleeps alone is developing independence seen in an individualistic culture. Parents can have subtle ways of serving as socializing agents as seen in informal learning. Through observation children will learn behaviors and adopt the behaviors seen in their parents which socializes the children to the parent’s culture.

Self-Awareness

One interesting concept studied in psychology is self-awareness. That is, how do we view ourselves? Self-awareness can be categorized into two different ideas, one being that a person sees themselves through the perspective that they themselves are interacting with others or objects. They are having experiences that are "I" experiences. For example, I will study for my test tonight. Our attention is from within ourselves and then directed to the world. The other view is when a person has the perspective that they see themselves as the object, and see what other people might see when observing us. This is known as the "Me" perspective. For example, there is a test and my parents and teacher expect me to study. Attention from the outside world is being directed at us and we have an understanding how things are interacting with us and people can be observing/judging us. Since people can take on different views of self-awareness then it could be said that people will obviously think differently and may even react different or be affected differently by the same scenarios. A person in the "I" state I am not viewing myself as how others see me, but as how I interact with others, and vice versa, if a person is in the "Me" state that are constantly viewing themselves as how others would see them. With that in mind, to me, it seems that a person in the "Me" state of self-awareness could potentially have less self-esteem, because if they are told from others that they are no good, or something along that lines, then they are going to believe that they are no good because they take on the view of what others think. This idea of self-awareness can vary across people, and studies have shown that it can vary across cultures. So that argument could mean that depending on what self-awareness view a person takes on can influences their self-esteem, and since the two concepts of self-awareness can be specific to a particular culture does that mean that certain cultures are more prone to lower self-esteem.

Babies

During this course we were to watch the film "Babies". The film follows 4 different cultures as the parents raise their children from newborns to toddlers. What is great about this film is that you get the perspective of 4 different cultures where you can see great similarities of child rearing but also some differences. The film followed the development of children from Mongolia, Namibia, Japan and USA.  One of the major differences in the child rearing the stood out the most to me was how the mothers in Mongolia left their children to be while they carried on house duties. There was less supervision of the infants in this country. In Namibia was stood out the most was how there were no fathers around, in fact in all countries the father were not really present, and if so, they were both juggling work and watching the child. Also, in Nambia, it was interesting to see how one mother would be breastfeeding multiple children, of which (I'm not positive) but may not have even been her own children. Japan and USA seemed to have the most similar ways across their cultures of raising children. That is probably because both were urban cities where the children were being raised as compared to Mongolia and Nambia being rural. This film really took home the point of the developmental niche. Each child has their own "niche" in which there is a particular Physical and social settings of daily life that belong to the child, and there is Culturally specific Customs and child care/child rearing practices around that child as well as the Psychology of the caretakers impacting and influencing the development of the children.