My Socialisation

Firstly, I want to start with the impact of socialisation on a personality. Socialisation is highly effective in the early childhood because children are very receptive to learning and a person is mainly influenced by parents (family) or peers (school). We acquire first social experience from parents and siblings. At this period of time, particularly first years of life, the authority of parents is held in the highest esteem. Then, when a person grows, he/she demands more social contacts and this process is inevitable because it is impossible to isolate a child from the rest of the society. This demands are amply satisfied by school but I want to underline a dualistic character of the socialisation in peer groups which is considered to be either positive or negative. Some researchers even estimate that home schooling is more preferable because it prevents children from possible negative experience.

Anyway the majority of children go to school and their peers, and partially school staff, play more and more important role for them. Consequently, the question of usefulness of such influence arises. On the one hand, it is positive because children learn how to live in a new surrounding, they acquire new social experience and they learn how to function in a new social group. But some researchers indicate that it has not only positive but negative effect as well(Maccoby and Martin, p.82). Moreover, they state that home schooling is more preferable than traditional schools.

As for me I can't fully agree with them but still they have some reasons. First of all, when children are in a peer group, especially adolescents, they risk to become peer-dependent because at this age the family is not so important for them as their peer group. By the way, it also seems to me a negative fact that a person associates him-/herself with one separate group of the society because, firstly, a person loses his/her identity, and, secondly, those who are out of the group are usually treated as outcasts that deteriorates their social status and their self-esteem. Moreover, recent studies of Urie Bronfenbrenner show that to the 6th grade children who spent more time with peers rather than with parents become peer-dependant while Albert Bandura estimates that this tendency may be observed even in the preschool period. But anyway, school remains one of the most important primary agents of socialisation.

Socialisation and the family are two notions without which human life is practically unimaginable. In general, socialisation means the learning process and how people acquire those beliefs, attitudes, values and, certainly, behavior that finally become their way of thinking. In other words, it is the way in which the society transmits its culture from one generation to another. A human being is a social creature and a person is socialised from the moment he/she is born and his/her first social group is the family. The development of a personality out of the society is impossible because those who live or grow up in the isolation from the ...