Agents of Socialization

The way a person develops and forms his/her unique personality, norms and beliefs in socialization. Socialization is the process in which an individual learns to participate in a group, it’s obvious that different people will be different because not every person is raised under the exact circumstances. Many agents influence the way a person develops. Some of the most predominant factors are the family the person is raised is, where they the person is educated, like school or home- school, the peer group the individual belongs to and all types of media the person is exposed to.

In this essay I will discuss how these agents affected me when I was growing up and how they still affect me. The biggest agent that affected me was my family. When I was little, my family taught me a lot of the things I know today, without these essentials. Things like being polite and table etiquette. If I was raised by another family, one which didn’t pay attention to manners, I would have grown up to be a lot different.

I would have been a savage person and might not have been able to fit it because I would have been rude and impolite.

To this day, my family still contribute to how I grow up to be, by encouraging me and helping me when I need help. When children are going up, they go through stages where they develop how to trust and depend on people, If they do not pass that stage or stay in it too long they would wind up being insecure when they grow up and they won’t trust people.

This is why I think the family is the most important agent of socialization because it basically determines how a person will grow up being from the very beginning, more so than the other agents. The next agents which I think is worth writing about next is peer group socialization. My circle of friends, or my peer groups are some of the people that I’ve known since I started school. I’ve known them for years and years. My peer group has taught me things I wouldn’t have been able to learn on my own, like how to make new friends, being a good team player and just being able to do something cooperatively with someone else. My peer group also helped me shape my personality and how I behave. Because most of my friends are well behaved, I grew up not being mischievous and naughty because I didn’t see my group of friends doing that so there was no reason that I should.

Other circles of friends that I have also shaped my outlook on life by giving me different points of view and new ways of looking at and dealing with issues. Without my socialization with peer groups I wouldn’t have had anyone to look up to and say this is good or bad, I would just end up copying everything my family does which would just make me old fashioned. The next agent of socialization which relates to the last agents is where I’m educated. I go to a normal school like most of the people I know. Going to a normal school, and interacting with people of all ages and seniority levels, like teachers, principals and matrons has helped me develop my socialization skills by talking to a wide variety of people and not just interacting with a few people like people who are home-schooled. People who are home-schooled definitely aren’t as socialized as people who go to school every day are because they don’t speak to a lot of people, so most of them tend to be socially awkward. There’s also the aspect of how schools have rules and regulations that students have to abide by life dress code, the concept of due dates and how and when to speak. Rules like these are what made me socialized and civilized.

If I was home-schooled instead, I would have been an outcast because I didn’t act like everyone else did. Then of course there’s the aspect that some people don’t even go to school, so they aren’t socialized at all because interact with others. If you were to talk with someone who didn’t go to school, you would instantly notice how different he is. The last agent of socialization is the media the person is exposed to, I personally don’t think I was affected by media at all. Media didn’t have a big impact on me when I was growing up, I did however learn a lot of things from watching movies like how to act when I’m in different places and situations. Media has also affected my judgment of who to look up to as a role model. When I think of someone who wasn’t exposed to media while he was growing up, I don’t imagine he would be different from everybody else.

He would just have difficulty fitting in because most of the subjects people talk about are about media and entertainment, but in the end it wouldn’t be too bad. As you can see from the order in which I have the agents in, I believe that the family had the most impact on me while I was growing up, followed by the peer group he belongs to, followed by where he is educated and then lastly followed by mass media and entertainment. The change and variety of each of these four agents is what leads to people having different personalities, values, norms and social interactions. These four agents could be considered the pillars of socialization because without them an individual wouldn’t fit in with society and would just act strange compared to other people.