A common adage has it that “no man is an island entirely on his own or to himself”. This statement summarizes the fact that human beings are social animals. We live in a community of human relationships.
Although
from infancy it appears everyone strives to carve for themselves a unique
personal identity of self, any individual’s uniqueness is a product of their
interactions with other selves in a social environment. We all share the
awareness that somehow human beings inter-depend on one another for meaningful
living. The unique qualities that make us human are acquired through social
interaction in the family, and other social systems. We discuss the meaning of socialisation,
and agents of socialisation. We examine the pattern of psychosocial
development. We will also examine the educational significance of social
development.
At the end of page, you should be able
to:
· Define
Socialisation
· List
and describe the key agents of socialisation
· Outline
the pattern of social development
· Discuss
the educational importance of social development.
Meaning
of
Socialisation is the process by which the
child acquires the ability to behave in socially acceptable ways or in
accordance with social expectations. Socialisation entails the following:
· Learning
to behave in socially approved ways. This may mean modelling behaviours
that are appropriate for different social settings.
· Playing
approved social roles, for example, playing appropriate gender role, child
role, student role, or even parental role.
· Developing
appropriate social attitudes. This may involve learning various display
rules that guide social acceptance or rejection as may be appropriate. Socialisation
is involved in social development.
That is, socialization explains the way in which individual’s interactions with
others and their social relationships grow, change, and remain stable over the
course of life.
The
process of socialisation may produce three categories of people, namely:
(i)
Pro-social People: Pro-social people are persons whose behaviour
pattern conforms with group expectations and norms. They are fully accepted
within the membership of the social group.
(ii)
Unsocial People: These are persons whose behaviour pattern falls
short of social expectations. Their behaviour is nonconforming.
They
are therefore, rejected within the social group they wish to identify with, the
social expectation owing to their own ignorance
of what is acceptable behaviour.
(iii)
Anti-social People: Anti-social persons know what the acceptable
pattern of behaviour is. However, because they are antagonistic to group norms,
they willingly violate group expectations. They are usually rejected among the
group they wish to identify with. Socialisation may be achieved through any of
the three ways: A child may become socialised through modelling the behaviour of parents or significant others. If
parents are law-abiding and respectful of constituted authority, their children
may model their behaviour and be law-abiding as well. On the other hand, if
parents are rebellious, play public hypocrisy or take liberties with the law,
their children may also model their anti-social behaviour.
A
child may also become socialised through contingency
management.
This
is a system of rewarding a child for obeying rules, and withholds reward when
rules are broken. In other words, rewards for ruler and regulated behaviour can
get children to conform to rules even in the larger society. By the same token,
parents who reward rule breaking behaviours of children should expect
anti-social behaviours from those children.
Children
may also become socialised through social cognition. As children’s maturation
increases, their cognitive abilities also expand; so they begin to understand
display rules that guide social actions.
Learning
of display rules is facilitated by social referencing. In this way, children
begin to understand intensions behind specific actions and they pattern their
behaviour accordingly.
Agents of Socialization
Children’s
relationships with parents, family members, peers, friends, teachers, mentors,
and others in the various social systems that they (the children) are exposed
to can profoundly affect their social development.
Social
development is neither simple nor automatic, but it is crucial the bonds that
grow between the child and the parents, family, and other significant persons
provide the foundation for a lifetime’s social relationships. We classify the
important sources of socialization into three social agents: primary, secondary
and tertiary social groups.
(a)
The Primary Socialisation Agent: The family is the primary
socialisation agent and the seat of learning for social skills. The family is the
source of nurturance, warmth, contact comfort, security and trust. There
are the ingredients that engender the child’s initial affectional
bonding. Human beings generally like those who provide and care for
them. Thus, prosocial and unsocial patterns of behaviour are established
during the early formative years in the family.
Early
social experiences significantly influence what sort of adults children grow to
become. The critical factors in the family that influence social development include:
the family demographic characteristics, the child-rearing practices, and
provision of specific experiences at home.
Parents
with more education are more likely than less-educated parents to believe that parental
involvement in the child’s education is important. Educated parents are more
likely also to actively provide intellectually stimulating experiences and
materials at home (Schneider and Coleman, 1993). When parents’ time and energy
are largely consumed by attention to parents’ other concerns or people other
than the child, then the child’s social development suffers. Living in a single-parent
family, having parents who are consumed by their work, and living in an
over-crowded family can undercut children’s development.
Child-rearing
Practices
child-rearing
practices impact greatly on a child’s social development. The critical aspects
of the child-rearing practices relate to the following:
·
Parents knowing enough about the child to provide the right amount of challenge and support, and to have
realistic expectation from the child.
·
Parents providing positive emotional
climate to motivate the child to internalize parents’ values and goals.
·
Parents’ modelling motivated
achievement behaviour, including working hard and persisting with effort
at challenging tasks.
·
Parents adopting a firm, consistent discipline style that encourages the child
to internalise the values of discipline and achieve self control.
Provision
of Specific Experiences at Home
Specific
experiences at home that will positively influence social development may
include:
·
Talking to and with the child.
·
Explaining nuances, display rules, and other non-verbal gestures that guide
social intercourse.
·
Allowing the child to go out and explore the world rather than “imprisoning”
the child in the house in the name of protection.
In
all, satisfactory relationship with family members encourages children to
strive to develop and enjoy fruitful social relationships with people outside
the home. It helps children to develop healthy attitude toward people, and to
learn to function effectively in peer associations.
(b)
The Secondary Socialisation Agent: The secondary socialisation
agent is defined as the social groups outside the home whom the child has
continuous social contact with on a daily basis. They include: the peers, organised
playgroups, school clubs, classmates, the teacher, the church members and
members of the neighbourhood. Throughout childhood, the child spends significant
amount of working hours with members of this social group. These groups outside
the home encourage the child in their desire to gain independence from the
parents and the family. The peer group and the teacher impact greater influence
on social development among the other secondary socialisation agents.
The
Peers
In
child development, peers are children about the same age or maturity level.
Same age peer interaction plays a unique role. Peers provide avenues for social comparison, and social competence training through peer co-learning and peer influence. According to Eccles,
Wigfield and Schiefele (1998), positive social comparison usually results in
higher self-esteem, while
negative social comparison results in lower selfesteem.
Children
who are accepted by their peers and who have good social skills often do better
in school (Wentzel, 1996). Children who are rejected by peers, especially those
who are more aggressive, are usually at risk in a number of school-related
activities. For example, they obtain low grades, and often dropout of school.
The
Teacher
Children
who have negative interactions with a number of their teachers do not do well
in school. They do not pay attention; do not complete assignments on schedule;
and generally act out in the class. In general, school is an unpleasant place
for such children.
Generally
speaking, the school should not be an unpleasant place for any child. According
to Noddings (1992:2001), children are most likely to develop into competent
human beings when they feel cared for. Teachers are invited to develop the skill
of knowing the children under the care fairly well. Indeed, children get to
know that a teacher cares for them. They report that those teachers who care
for them talk to the individual child. A teacher who cares listens; pays
attention; is honest and fair to all; seeks to know each child’s problems;
addresses them by their names; and makes effort to make the class interesting.
On the other hand, the teacher who does not care for the children teaches in a boring
way; he keeps talking even when the children are not paying attention; he
ignores and embarrasses children; he forgets their names; and does nothing when
a child does something wrong.
In
essence, the social climate of
the entire school impacts significantly on children’s social development. We
often talk about the school tone.
The
tone of the school refers to the general spirit, character, morale, and social
climate of the school. When the tone of the school is excellent, it is supportive
to the general developmental needs of
the children.
Children
are motivated and challenged to develop self-control through identification
with and internalisation of the school values and norms. Children learn to get
along well with others without external force.
(c)
The Tertiary Socialisation Agent: The tertiary socialisation
agent includes groups the child has fleeting contacts with. They are generally
transitory – people the child may have contact with on their way to school,
church, or market; contact in magazines and newspaper; contact on radio,
television, internet, and the World Wide Web. The strength of influence these
groups have on social development will largely depend on type of presentation,
sensual appeal or attraction, and the contrasting theme with what the child
ordinarily encounters. The television and
the cyberspace stand out among
these groups.
The
Television and the Cyberspace
In
Nigeria today, the television has
become a ubiquitous household item.
In
rural communities, households that are so impoverished they do not have a
toilet facility own television sets. In highly urbanised areas such as Lagos,
families that cannot not afford a rented apartment, but are squatters in
uncompleted buildings and kiosks own television sets.
Television viewing is a valued pastime
for children and adults alike in Nigeria.
It
may be true that the television, the Internet,
and the World Wide Web are
among the great frontiers of high technology. People predict that they will change the lives of everybody
in the global village. However, educators
are regarding these untamed
information media with great caution.
This is more so with regard to their effect on children’s social development.
Children
have increasingly become targets for all
manner of advertisement and pornography
on television screens, and the Internet.
Educators
worry about the extent to which parents are able to monitor children’s
television viewing, and their hook-on to the internet. The type, quality and
educational value of what children view on the television are sources of
concern. The type of materials and information children access on the internet,
and the person(s) with whom they enter into personal interactive sessions are major
sources of concern. Of no less concern also is the amount of time children
spend on these ubiquitous media of
uncertain consequences.
Some
issues relating to children’s access to information and communication
technological media are not contentious. For example, in many homes, children
spend more time watching the television than talking to adults or parents,
playing with siblings, attending school or working on class assignments. Research
findings suggest that young children do not fully understand the plots of the
stories they view on the home video. Most children are not able to recall
significant details of the stories they have viewed. Very often, the inferences
children make about the motivations of the key characters in the stories they have
viewed are limited, if not completely wrong. Also, children have difficulty
separating fantasy from reality in television programmes. In summary, the
consequences of children viewing television so much are not quite clear.
Parents are therefore cautioned about the potential hazards existing in
children’s unfettered or untamed
access to television and home computers. The direction of their impact
on children’s social development is not very clear.
Trends in Psychosocial Development
Social
development starts at infancy and continues across the entire lifespan. This theory
considers how the children come to understand themselves, and the meaning of
their behaviour and the behaviour of others.
Erikson’s
theory explains how society and culture present challenges that shape the child’s social behaviour. According to
the theory, social developmental
changes may be conceived as a series of eight stages.
Each
stage presents a developmental task or
a crisis. Each stage crisis is a
turning point with positive and negative poles. The individual is expected to
resolve each stage crisis. The more successful a child is in the resolution of
a stage crisis, the more psychologically
healthy the child will be. Unsuccessful resolution of a stage crisis
leads to pathology. Pathology
means that the individual finds it increasingly difficult to deal with the
demands of the next stage of development. In other words, unsuccessful
resolution of a stage crisis leads the individual to be more prone to maladjustment and behaviour problems. We outline below
the first five stages of Erikson’s theory. The first five stages cover social
development from infancy, through childhood, to adolescence.
Erikson’s Stages
Stage
One – Trust versus Mistrust
Erikson’s
first stage of psychosocial development occurs in the first year of a child’s
life – that is, during infancy. The development of basic trust requires warm, nurturant caregiving. The positive
outcome is a feeling of comfort and minimal fear. Basic mistrust develops if the infant is deprived of nurturant
and contact comfort.
Stage
Two – Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt
The
second stage of psychosocial development occurs between late infancy and
toddler years, that is, the second year of life. After gaining trust in their
caregivers, children begin to move freely, and explore the immediate
environment. They begin to discover that their behaviour is their own. They
start to assert their independence,
and to realise their will. Caregivers might mistake this and interpret the
child’s actions as stubbornness.
If infants are restrained too much or punished too harshly, they develop a sense of shame and doubt.
Stage
Three – Initiative versus Guilt
This
stage is the early childhood or pre-school years, ages 3 to 5. Young children
begin to explore the neighbourhood. Their social world begins to widen.
Children experience more challenges as they strive to know more about their
widening social circle. In order to cope with these challenges, children engage
in more active and purposeful
behaviour.
Children
begin to insist on doing their own things. For example, at this stage, children
begin insisting on bathing themselves, putting on their dresses, their shoes,
combing their hair, and even washing their clothes.
They
want to be responsible to themselves.
Developing
a sense of responsibility increases
children’s initiative. If children
are thwarted in their efforts at caring for themselves, and made to feel that
they are not yet capable of being responsible for their bodies and their
belongings, they feel discomfort.
They begin to develop guilt feelings.
Stage
Four – Industry versus Inferiority
This
stage corresponds to middle and late childhood or the elementary school years
(between 6 years and puberty or early adolescence). The sense of initiative
developed at the earlier stage brings children in contact with greater wealth
of practical experience with tools and people. Children’s energy is now
directed toward mastery of knowledge
and intellectual skills.
Children, at this stage, show great enthusiasm
for learning. Their
imagination is expansive. The negative polarity for this stage is the danger of
developing a sense of inferiority,
unproductiveness, and incompetence. This may happen if the primary school
experience lacks intellectual challenge.
Stage
Five – Identity versus Identity Confusion
This
stage corresponds to the adolescent years (between 10 and 20 years).
Adolescents want to answer questions like: Who am I? What is life about? Who am
I going to become?
The
adolescents are confronted with many new roles to explore. These include:
gender role (being a man or a woman), romantic role, vocational role, and a
definitive outlook on life. They seek to gain a healthy self identity. If adolescents do not have adequate
opportunity to explore these different roles, they may develop confused identity.
Educational Implications of Social Development
The
educational implications of socialisation to social development include the
following:
·
Behaving in socially appropriate and responsible ways is valued in its own
right as an important educational objective. The development of citizenship skills and other
important life skills such as
cooperation, communication, self-care, and home making is entrenched as an
objective of education in the national policy on education (Federal Republic of
Nigeria, 2004).
·
Social responsible behaviour helps to create a classroom climate conducive for instruction and learning.
·
Anti-social behaviour can be highly detrimental to classroom learning by
distracting students from academic activities.
·
Social conduct impacts teacher’s preference for students, which in turn influences
the quality of instructional exchanges.
·
Children tend to dislike classmates who start fights and break rules.
Therefore, school children who display anti-social behaviours are at disadvantage
in reaping the benefits of peer colearning.
·
Children who display anti-social behaviours are more likely to be labeled disabled
academically.
Children
acquire the unique qualities that make them social beings through a social
process. This process ensures that the child lives the life they are immersed
in. the social forces playing out in the family and other social agents are
replicated in the lives of children.
After
going through this unit, you must have come to the awareness that the way
significant adults act in public and even in private impacts on children’s
behaviour. The dictum that when the mother cow chews cord, the young watches
its mouth is very true of social development.
You,
as a caregiver, are sensitised to model pro-social and goal-oriented behaviours
for children to emulate.
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