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.