Unit 7 Lecture Notes.docx

Unit 7 Lecture Notes Now, we're going to talk about socialization for the next number of videos. I want to start with just a little bit of a thought experiment. I want you to think about what about you is unique that hasn't in any way been shaped by another human or derived in some way from a group...

Unit 7 Lecture Notes Now, we're going to talk about socialization for the next number of videos. I want to start with just a little bit of a thought experiment. I want you to think about what about you is unique that hasn't in any way been shaped by another human or derived in some way from a group that you belong to. Now, this is not a new question for you. I've been asking this question in different ways already, but if you think your way through what is unique, well, your genetic makeup is unique, right? Your DNA is uniquely yours. So that part's unique. The combination of your life experiences would also be unique, at least to some degree. I mean, your Canadian. So that already means I can predict probably a little bit of your life experience in in some ways that would be different from another country or culture, but your own life experiences and then your personality, those would be unique to you. But which parts of your personality are your personality rather than behavior that you've learned in the groups that you belong to? Another way of asking the question would be if you the exact same DNA you had been born in a completely different culture across the globe, let's say Africa or Japan, cultures that are in some ways very different than our own. Who would you be if you'd grown up inside of their norms? How much of your personality, as you know it right now and others experience it right now, would still be there? I think we might be surprised at how much wouldn't be there because so much of who we are is shaped by our culture. And what would you be like if you had never met another human being? What would you know? You wouldn't know any language. You wouldn't know any social norms, customs, or social scripts. So that's going to be our starting point today. We're going to talk a little bit about some of the effects of social deprivation. We don't get that human interaction that we've identified as being so very important to the development of self. I'm going to start by talking about feral children or isolated children. So, these are children who were untamed or socialized/raised by animals in some way, and we have just a few of them from human history. Clearly, this is not something that you intend and then study, but we have encountered a few. And so, I want to tell you about those. This is the wild boy of Aveyron. He emerged from the bush in France in the 1800s. He did walk, but he had kind of a stooped walk. It looked kind of animal like that's how it was described in the reports. He had very shrill sounding cries that he used to communicate. He had no real hygiene. He just simply stopped and relieved himself, wherever he might be. They did an examination of him, a physical examination, to see, you know, how if he was physically okay, and it appeared that he was. But socially, he also absolutely refused to wear clothes. If they tried to put clothes on him, he would simply tear them off. And yet when they tried to test for intelligence, they found some unique things. They would put a mirror in front of him. And it seemed like he couldn't recognize himself in that mirror. But then when they would, they tried putting a potato over here while he's looking in the mirror and he reached into the mirror to get the potato and realized that the potato wasn't there. And then he adjusted and reached to his neck to get the potato. They did lots of those kinds of tests on him and it became very clear that he had intelligence and reasoning power, but he was missing all the social pieces. This is Roxanna Malaya. She was found in 1992. She had alcoholic parents who left her outside at the age of three. Some of these stories are hard to tell. She was left outside at the age of three and she crawled in with the dogs. Her parents disappeared and for five years she lived with the dogs until she was approximately eight years old. And when she was found, she walked on all fours. As you can see in the picture here, she ate scraps of raw meat. She barked like a dog because with no one to teach her human customs and human ways of being or doing. She instead adopted the customs of the other living creatures around her, which were dogs. If she was itchy behind her ears, she would take her back foot and use that to scratch behind her ear. She imitated dogs entirely. Specialists worked with Oksana for many years to teach her language and it seemed like she understood some things, but she would only respond with Barks. She did, over time, make some recovery and could not speak well, but she could speak a little bit. But obviously, she never actually, like, became fully functioning in the human world. And this picture here is Jeannie. Genie was discovered in 1970. She was 13 at the time. She's found in a locked bedroom strapped to a chair. And she had been there since she was 20 months old. So, she was deprived of all sensory input of any sort. Her father had forbidden anyone to talk to her. She was fed baby food and so she didn't know how to chew. And she salivated continuously. She was beaten with a paddle if she made any noise. So, she was entirely silent. And obviously she didn't have control of her bowels. Horrific abuse and sensory deprivation. Her face was vacuous. She didn't smile, it looked as if you couldn't see the person that was inside of her. She was cared for by a team of specialists. She did eventually learn some single words, but she never learned any grammar. She never recovered enough to function normally in the human world. Just like Oksana and the wild boy. In the 1960s, Harry Harlow did some experiments with rhesus monkeys. And the reason they're working with rhesus monkeys or monkeys in general, is because monkey behavior is profoundly social in many of the same ways that human behavior is. And so, a lot of the things that we see in monkey behavior, we can also see in the human world. And so, we study monkeys. I'm not sure that this kind of a study would now pass all the ethical standards that we have in place now. But in the 1960s, it did. So, what they did was they experimented with what happened if you isolated monkeys and for various lengths of time when they would isolate a single monkey for three months, that monkey, when placed back in with the rest of the monkeys, could recover, and learn monkey behavior. And monkey social interactions and social norms. But when they made the isolation period six months, and then they put the monkey back in with the other monkeys, then the monkey could no longer learn enough to function properly with the other monkeys. Another experiment that they did was they had two artificial wire mother dolls. One of them had terrycloth on it, but no milk and the other one had no terrycloth, but it had milk. So, a food source and these were both mother dolls. When the little baby monkeys were frightened, the babies sought the comfort not of the milk, but of the terry cloth, which is a psychological comfort rather than a physical comfort. So, it's an indication of the need for that psychological peace to be present when these babies become adults. They were not able to integrate properly with other adult monkeys or monkeys their own age because they had been isolated for too long. They couldn't even engage in sexual relations with the other monkeys. Something we think is entirely biological and instinctual was in some ways profoundly learned, even in the monkey world. And there was also no opportunity for any kind of infant attachment to happen. And so, their development was profoundly stunted. One of the things they did find was that if infant monkeys were surrounded by other monkeys, it didn't matter. If they didn't have their mother, their biological mother, they would have done just fine if they had other monkeys. That's all they needed. In 1945, R.A. Spritz did not conduct an experiment, but did an observational study of something that already existed. And so, he just gained permission to observe something that was already going on in the world. He was observing one, a prison nursery and the babies in it, and an orphanage and the babies in it. In the prison nursery, the mothers interacted regularly with their babies, feeding them, changing their diapers, bathing them, talking to them and playing with them. All the things that you would anticipate in the orphanage, the babies were cared for by the staff. The staff was minimal. The babies spent most of their day on their backs, in their individual cribs. They were changed, you know, on a time rotation. They were fed on a time rotation but there was no time spent playing with them or interacting with them. And then he came back two years later to observe and compare the babies in the prison nursery with the babies in the orphanage. And what he found was that the children, now toddlers in the orphanage, were socially and psychologically significantly underdeveloped. So, they were fed, they were changed, their physical needs were cared for, but their social needs and their interactive needs were not cared for. And so, they did not psychologically develop. The word that he used in his report and would never be used now for a lot of good reasons would be the word retarded. That is the word that he used to describe them. In our current context, we have you know, we would say that these are children who were not psychologically developed. It had nothing to do with their intelligence. It had to do with all the socializing that they didn't get. There were no problems like this in the prison nursery among those toddlers. Two years later, he went back again at the four-year mark, and there he found that some of the babies in the prison nursery had died. We would now call that failure to thrive without human interaction, human touch, human voice, and human sounds. We don't turn into fully functioning humans because that's so significant to us. You might have heard now, if you know anyone who's had a baby when they're first born, people talk about doing skin time with their babies because we now so thoroughly understand the coming of that womb is a very traumatic experience. And for that little one to be immediately placed against the skin of another human, the caregiver, mother, or father, is psychologically important and stabilizing for that little human who has just arrived in the world. And this is why we say, and this is why an African proverb says a person is only a person with other people. This is incredibly profound because your personhood, your human hood, cannot develop unless you are with other humans. That's the only way that it can happen. And I'm not suggesting that any of those feral children were not human, only that they couldn't access the human experience because they weren't given enough contact time with other humans for that to happen. And so, they could not live into their humanness. It's interesting to me, I like it that I mean, sociology studies this now we've got all kinds of theories and I'm going to roll out all kinds of ideas about socialization. But this is a very old proverb. So, sociology is not the only one thinking in these directions. Features of Socialization We're going to keep talking about socialization. And this is a word I've been using now to describe feral children and some of the experiments from the past. So, what exactly is socialization? Here is a definition for you: it is the learning process through which individuals develop their selfhood. So, I want you to think now about those pictures you were looking at in the previous video and what I was describing there. Right there, selfhood couldn't fully emerge because they weren't with other humans for that to happen. So, socialization is the process through which individuals develop their selfhood and then acquire the knowledge, the skills, and the motivations that they need to participate in social life. Your competence in the world right now comes from the ways in which you were socialized to acquire those skills, that knowledge, and the motivation to do things the way your culture does them. That's how you socialized. Socialization is not a complicated process at all, but it's one of the most powerful forces in human experience. Because it is the process which awakens invites us into the human world to participate in it. It is in the best interests of both the individual and society that you receive socialization, that you go through your socialization process. And all I need to do is point you back to those children in the previous video who didn't get socialized, who didn't have that opportunity that most humans have. It's best for the individual because that's how you learn the prerequisites for functioning in your particular culture, and that's how you become a member of your own community and your own culture through your socialization process. So, it's in your best interests. It's also in the best interests of society because that's how societies and cultures perpetuate themselves. It's social reproduction, not biological, but social reproduction. It links one generation to the next and keeps the culture alive and thriving. It's also a lifelong process. You must be socialized, first, just into the human world more generally in your early years. But then you must be socialized into kindergarten in grade one and learn how to behave in a school setting. You're socialized in your own family because each family has its own unique patterns and norms. And so even there you're socialized, you're socialized into your work world, you're socialized into a lifelong partnering with someone. Maybe that's a marriage or a living situation, whatever that might be. When you retire, you will have to socialize into that as well, because that's something new for you. Now, the most powerful socialization happens in childhood. We'll talk about that more in the next video. But socialization is also never a finished process. You are always being socialized and we're always adjusting and modifying in all sorts of ways. When I first began teaching, I had a whole new set of socialization norms to learn about how I was supposed to conduct myself, what was expected of me, what were the norms, what made me a better and or worse kind of a professor, those sorts of things. So, you're always still working on it. And then also it's never total. No one is fully socialized. No one conforms completely. We all have our own little unique things where and we might have pushed back. We might have complied with what was asked of us, but we didn't conform internally. We still had our own way of thinking about something that was different. And so socialization is in some ways limited, you have to be a little bit careful because there's two things going on here. There's social determinism and there's biological determinism. And social determinism is the notion that you are nothing, but your social context and biological determinism is that you are nothing but your biology. We can explain everything about your behavior using biology. We can explain everything about your behavior, using your environment. And so that is called the nurture nature debate. Which is it? Which are we more of which? And it's not an either-or thing. There's lots of different opinions about this within the world of sociology and much beyond it. You know, what percentage of us is nurture, environment, social world, and what percentage of us is our biology, the DNA and personality packaging that we're all born with. And it's fun to think about that. Typically, most people assume that we're mostly our biology. A sociologist would make the case, as I'm doing, and will continue to do that a large chunk of who we are comes from our environment or our nurture. Now, I do still think some of what we are comes from our biology, but I would think the larger chunk of it comes from our social environment. You will of course be free to make your own choices about that. So, when it's when it's nature, it's called biological determinism because your biology determines sometimes it's referred to as essentialism because it's just boiled down to the biological essentials. That's nature. And then culture would be often referred to as cultural determinism or social constructionism. Both of those, you can sort of intuit their meaning, right? Obviously, culture determines so, your social environment constructs or determines. And so that's a very live debate in the world of the social sciences and much beyond it. How much are we a product of socialization and how much are we a product of our nature? Surprisingly, nature can also serve, nurture can also shape nature. So as someone who is sight impaired and who reads Braille, they will have an increase in the size of the area of the brain that controls their reading finger because their social environment, their physical environment and conditions is causing a change in their biology. So, it can happen. We don't tend to think of it in that direction, but it can happen in that direction. Some more recent studies measure testosterone and the impacts of testosterone levels going up and aggression levels going up. And what we have found now is that first of all, studying men and testosterone and aggression, that not nearly all men have high testosterone and that there's actually a significant range within men themselves. But what we are finding now that aggressive behavior increases testosterone. So, your nurture, your environment affects your biological chemistry. And this is true for women as well. We are seeing that when women are involved consistently in some kind of aggressive activity, sports or whatever it might be, that their testosterone levels go up as well. So, it goes both ways and it's not a straightforward equation. Types of Socialization We've already talked about socialization, its breadth, and its impact. And we're going to continue now to talk about different types of socialization. I'm going to begin by talking about primary socialization, which is the basic socialization that occurs in childhood. This is learning language, individual identity, cognitive skills, self-control, values, all of which, of course, are located inside our own culture. So even something like individual identity might be collective identity in the socialization of a collective culture. This is the most powerful, most impacting socialization any human will go through. Recall the pictures you saw of Jeannie, Oksana, and the Wild Boy of Aveyron that we looked at previously. And the extreme things that can happen when a human doesn't interact with other humans. Secondary socialization is what happens in adulthood. So, this is when we learn all kinds of new adult rules. For example, life partners. Cohabitating. That requires new learning and new socialization. Parenting is another example. When a child enters the world that you are responsible for, that requires massive secondary socialization, because that's a whole new set of skills and way of living that you now must come to terms with and be able to work with. New technologies. When I first became a student in post-secondary, I wrote my assignments. We are light years away from that at this point. So, the socialization process that I have gone through to keep up with what's happening in the world of technology and education is significant. Occupations, vocations, interests. Many of you are taking this course because it's part of your journey toward a particular vocation and hopefully an occupation. So, you might want to become a nurse, business manager or an agricultural specialist. Whatever it is, entering that world is going to require some secondary socialization as you learn how to be competent and behave in that practice. Going to roll out a bit of a chart here that helps us to compare primary and secondary, because these are important concepts in sociology. So, I really want you to sort of lock these in. So, when we look at the focus of primary socialization, it's clearly about values and motives. You're teaching the child what it means to be fair and the behaviors that should roll out of being fair in secondary socialization. For example, in a typical classroom setting. I'm not teaching you about fairness. I'm simply expecting the behavior of not cheating. I'm not targeting fair. Your values are motives. I'm just requiring specific kind of behavior from you. If we look at the nature of it, primary socialization is very idealist. Parents teach their children to be honest because they want honesty from their children. Even though in secondary socialization, even in the real world as adults, we know that dishonesty is a is something we're going to encounter all over the place. And I don't think any of us can say we're above having been dishonest at some point in some context. So again, the nature of what's going on is very different. The scope is also very different. Primary socialization is very general. It blankets the entire life of that young child. It's about everything related to that child’s engagement with the world. Whereas in secondary socialization, it's very specific. How? What does an engineer need to know and do? What does a professor need to know and do? What does a nurse need to know and do. The context of primary socialization is very informal. You know, we don't sit our children down in rows with desks when they're tiny and start explaining. Now this is how much distance there should be between you and the next person when you talk to them. They just absorb these sorts of things. Whereas the context of secondary socialization is very formal. There's lots of formalized learning involved. Structured ways that you must behave and forms you have to fill out or whatever it is in any particular vocation, but it's formal. And then finally, another significant difference is that in primary socialization, relationships are intense. These are powerful human bonding relationships, we hope, because that's the best thing for the child. Whereas in secondary socialization, there's lots of detachment. People come and go in a workplace, and we expect that, and that's normal. And we might get attached to our colleagues and must let them go. But detachment is a part of secondary socialization. So, as you can see, there's lots of differences between these. Another type of socialization is what we call anticipatory socialization. This is when you're adapting to the ways of a group to which you aspire to be a part of, but which you might not yet belong to. This usually occurs in advance of playing the role. So, children who play occupations in anticipation of being those things. So, when I played Teacher, when I was little, in anticipation of one day being a teacher, that's anticipatory. And never underestimate the importance of what's going on in children's play. Children's play is their work, and the toys you put in their hands will suggest to them what their work should be. In the toys you don't put in their hands suggest, don't even suggest. Leave a complete blank. There's lots of ways in which we participate in anticipatory socialization. If you look at these two pictures here and notice that I'm playing around with what have been historical gender stereotypes. Normally we would have seen a little boy on that tractor and that would have been him practicing anticipatory socialization about becoming a farmer. And we would have put a little girl in this picture on the other side, anticipating that, you know, she's going to learn to be a good cook in the kitchen. Now, those stereotypes are beginning to shift significantly for the betterment of both males and females so that people can follow one of their interests, not just some of the strong, strict gender stereotypes we've had. But as you can see, each of these is anticipatory. Whatever children played is what they may and hope to become. So, this is an important part of socialization. And then we have re-socialization. This is when a new role or situation is required from a person to replace what are already established patterns of behavior. So, this is different than the other forms we've talked about because they're just adding, you're not adding another chunk of knowledge to where you've been socialized. Here you're taking something that you've been socialized into and putting other different content in and taking out the previous content. You're being re-socialized with a new set of thoughts. This is often very difficult. This can be confusing and painful. This can happen voluntarily, as would be the case, for example, with religious conversion. Or if you transition your gender identity or go for therapy. And the whole point of therapy is to ask that therapist to help you to think in new ways about something and replace your old ways of thinking about something. Completing a PhD program is a voluntary form of re-socialization. There are also involuntary forms of re-socialization. Prisoners. Military recruits. Child soldiers. This is not voluntary. They do not sign up to do this and yet these environments profoundly strip the person of who they are, what they have believed about themselves in the world, and replace it with other things, other forms of involuntary socialization. I’m going to give you just a few more categories here. Total institutions, because total institutions, prisoners, child soldiers, they have some overlap in them. But in one case, I'm talking about the individual experience (prisoners, child soldiers). But with total institutions, I'm talking about the institution set up to do that socializing. So here we have things like, you know, the Holocaust concentration camps, religious cults, mental hospitals, boarding schools, convents, or military boot camps. These are all their clear intention is to socialize you. So, in some cases, people might spend their whole life in a context like this under a single authority system in all aspects of their life are controlled by them. That is a total institution. Now we have micro examples of that. You know, when a child heads off to a religious camp that is highly emotive and requires strong emotional responses as part of practicing their religion and the child is sort of with this camp for a week or a month and not with their parents, that that becomes like a mini form of involuntary re-socialization. I've spoken with individuals who come out of those contexts and later in life, work through several trauma issues that came from those micro religious experiences that they had. So, there's lots of ways in which involuntary re-socialization can happen. In any case, these are all ways in which we are shaped and formed by the environments, the experiences, and the people around us. Theories of Socialization We are going to explore some theories about socialization. How this process which you've been talking about, rules out in our individual lives. All of this is going to come from the theoretical paradigm of symbolic interactionism. The development of the self in our sense of personhood is very complex. Initially, a child doesn't distinguish themselves from the world out there. They must learn that you are not me and I am not you, that they have their own individual consciousness. Babies don't come packaged with that form of development that has to be learned. So, these theories are exploring all the different ways in which that's learned. We're going to look at Charles Horton's Cooley's "Looking Glass Self." Charles Horton Coolie explores how we see ourselves through the eyes of the other, because that's how an individual self-starts to form. Recognizing that others look at us. Therefore, we are a separate identity. And the idea here is very simple. He's using the frame, the term looking glass self, which basically means mirror, but this is the term that he was using. And there are three steps to this. First. So, imagine this is the mirror and put someone significant in your life. Put your mother or your father in that mirror and we imagine how we appear to them. This father or mother or friend or whoever is in our looking glass. So, we're looking at that and seeing how we appear in their eyes. That's the first step. And then as we look at that, the way. I'm looking at my hand as if it's that mirror of that person you've chosen. And we look at that, we imagine that person's judgment of our appearance. What do they think about us? Well, my friend thinks I'm very funny or my father finds me irritating. Most of the time, my father thinks I'm clever and funny, whatever it may be, whatever judgment we think that person's making of us, that's what we see in the mirror of that person. And then we conceive of ourselves that way. And this is one of the ways socializations happens. So, a child who might be very busy and doesn't sit still if they're constantly made to feel like they're irritating everyone around them, those are their mirrors. That child comes to internalize the idea that they're kind of basically annoying and that sits somewhere deep in the child in a way that the child can likely never articulate, maybe until well into adulthood. A child who is always treated as if their ideas are clever and that their caregiver or mum, dad or grandma, grandpa, whoever that is, really loves to hear about their creative ideas. That's what they're seeing in that mirror. Then that's what that child internalizes. It's a simple and powerful concept. What's key here is this stage too because this is our interpretation of other attitudes. So, there's also a risk that we're not getting it right. But this is all we've got to work with is how we think others are experiencing us. Now. What's important here is to understand into adulthood. Maybe you want to look at your mirrors and see if some of the mirrors are reflecting back things to you that are feeling toxic and hard in ways that are unfair. And sometimes we look in mirrors and They show us hard things, and that's fair. But sometimes it isn't. Can we take some power away from some of the mirrors and give greater power to some of the other mirrors in our lives? Here's a great visual example of this. Okay. So, you can see on the far end there, you know, with the halo, this is how my mum and dad see me. And then the second picture, well, this is how my girlfriend sees me with the you know, with the muscles. But this is how my older brother sees me as kind of lame, right, without the muscles here. And the third frame. And then here's how my ex-girlfriend sees me, you know, with the horns in the mirror. So here we have a whole series of different mirrors that show something different. So which mirror is going to have the most influence in your life? That's really the question. A second theory is Mead's taking the role of the other. Mead works a bit with English grammar here, so, if English isn't your first language, this might be a little harder to grasp. But then again, it might not be. I mean, so the idea is that there's I and there's me. Hey, so I, when I speak, I, I want to do this or I want to do such and such, whatever that might be. I'm clearly the subject here. I am talking about me and what I want. But when I say yes, but if I do that, then they will laugh at me. Well, now I'm the object of that and I'm not looking at myself through the eyes of my own desire for what I want to do. I'm looking at myself through the eyes of how others will perceive what I'm going to do. So, the I is just me and my own volition. And the me is me thinking about how the how others might perceive me. So, what happens is you have this conversation going on all the time between the I in the me, and you're doing this all day long. These are the things you want. These are the things you want to enact, but you pause to consider. And how will that be perceived by others? In my world, whether it's strangers or those closest to me. And so that conversations constantly go on. And that is what Mead calls the internal conversation between the I and the me. There's always what I want, but how will you know? Will they laugh at me? Will they think I'm silly so that I and me are always in a conversation with each other? And this is another one of the ways that the self develops. There's this internal conversation going on and we bring significant and generalized others into this conversation. We are a face made up of lots of faces. And in general, when we think about socialization and lots of the things, I've already taught you in this course, this image represents in many ways a significant theoretical vantage point of sociology that every face is a collection of faces and that we're all a collection of faces. So, these theories also play that out, right? Because the me, the I and the me is thinking about other faces and how they perceive me. The looking glass self is about the other faces that perceive me. So, we have all these generalized and significant others. This is another word that I would use or framing. And if you look here, here's your identities and rules and we'll talk about that in an upcoming lecture. But for now, this is the self that is, you gain all the rules. You play these little orange people here and your family influences that, right? They are one of the Me’s in your I and me conversation. They're one of your mirrors, your colleagues, your current friends, your interest groups are one of your mirrors. So, if you think about that other image I was talking about, right where we have the boyfriend, the parents, etc., etc., all those mirrors old friends might be a mirror, an interest group. Perhaps you're an athlete or an artist or you're a musician. So that's another interest group. All of those influence your identity in the self that you are. Thirdly, we have what's called stages of development of the self. We have the pre-play stage, and this is basically just meaningless imitation. So, this is the little child who if you go, will imitate you with their face and go, and you can try this with little babies, even if you, if you hover above them with your face and you change your mouth, the baby will probably try to imitate you. But it's meaningless. It's not meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but it has no symbolic meaning. The meaning is that the child is trying to imitate other humans. That's what's meaningful there. But the act itself is meaningless at this point. Children eventually reach a play stage where they can learn to take on the role of a single known other. So, when a little one decides that he or she wants to be a firefighter and starts to pretend in an act what a firefighter would do, or pretend to be a mum or a dad, which kids often do, they are imagining themselves in the role of someone else. A single known other. But that's only one role at a time that's not interactive. As they develop, they can do the game stage role, which is understanding a set of rules in a complex system. So now they're taking lots of other others into account as they play. Probably the best example of this, and this is Mead's work that I'm continuing to speak about and that Mead uses is the notion of the game of hide and seek. So, if you take a little child and you play hide and seek with them, let's say a three-year-old and you say that child to go hide, you may get this. This little boy in the image is hiding. And now this is an image. It's not someone I know, but let's just pretend this is my nephew. And so, this little boy is covering his eyes and saying, "ha, auntie, cannot see me because I cannot see her.” He has not yet been able to look at himself through the eyes of others and realize that he's still standing right there. And this is a significant stage of development for kids, and this is typical for little ones when you play hide and seek with them. If any of you do that sort of thing right, they'll hide. But then they'll shuffle in the corner where they're hiding, or they'll giggle because they don’t, they cannot yet completely enter this game stage and see themselves fully as all the others might see them. So, these are just a few theories, probably some of the most succinct and powerful ones from inside of sociology about how our self develops. Eriksons’ Psycho-Social Stages of Development We're going to continue talking about theories about, you know, how we develop into our personhood and human hood. And this video will deal entirely with Erickson's psychosocial stages of development. The Erickson's were a husband-and-wife team who developed this theory together. Few things to note It's developmental. One stage follows the next, and you'll see that as I rule it out, where each challenge and each stage, if it's not met, affects the next stage in a negative way. If it's not met in a positive way, if it is met. Historically, my students have been very drawn to this theory because it helps them make sense of their own childhood experiences, particularly the difficult ones, and helps them to understand how that might have affected them moving into the next ages and into adulthood. It's going to start with ages one 0 to 1.5 years. So as the baby is interacting with their caregiver at these very young ages, they begin to take in the things that they need, right? They need food, basic physical care, lots of cuddling, etc., etc. And they start to trust their caregivers, reliability, and trustworthiness that they will be cared for. They are learning to trust their world. That they're not going to go hungry, not going to be left cold for long periods of time and they will not be left alone when they feel frightened. And that begins to show in their behavior as they are drawn very much towards their caregivers because these are the people, they know that they can trust. So, at a very young age is what we have is the basic challenge of establishing trust in a child that's well cared for, not perfectly cared for, but well cared for is going to develop trust like the fish in the water. The child doesn't realize that there's any other way that the world might be if the world handed to them as a trustworthy one. They just accept that. So, the desired outcome here is hope. Hope can emerge inside that little human spirit because there's lots of reasons to hope. Every day is good for the most part. Some days might have more fun activities than others. But I'm fed, I am cared for, I'm bathed, my diaper is changed. I am loved. There's lots of good reasons to hope for the next day. If, however, a child is not cared for and these things very unfortunately happen. A child's needs are not tended to in the way they should be, or that child is physically harmed intentionally. That child cannot develop trust. In fact, what happens is that a child develops mistrust. The world is not safe because bad things happen. So, at a very young age, this child is already psychologically broken in some ways. And part of the horror of early childhood abuse is that it happens in this pre-memory stage. So as an adult, you may not even have clear memory of this, of this neglect or actual intentional abuse, although neglect is a form of intentional abuse too. Yet it profoundly shapes who you become. But you don't remember these early phases, which makes it very hard to figure out why it is that you have this basic distrust of everything around you. We know that this can create permanent anxiety disorders and can also create physical health challenges in the child because an inability to trust your world interferes with the health of long-term relationships and self-esteem to take care of oneself. The next stage is age is 1.5-3 years, and here the child is learning to stand, talk and walk, dress themselves, control their bowels and join the world of language and thought, begin to enter the social world and we start to expect some independence from children at this age. You know, I'm not a baby. I don't need a diaper anymore. I'm separate. I'm a separate entity from mom and dad. Think back to Mead and how we talked about the development of the self and Cooley's looking glass self, how we develop the sense of the self. So, they now start to birth this sense of control that they can choose to be a separate self. And here is where a sense of autonomy should hopefully begin to develop. And if the child is succeeding at those tasks continues to be cared for in good ways, then what we're going to get is the development of a will and what we like to call this, the terrible twos, and threes. The development of a will is actually a very healthy sign that that child's developing in ways that are important for that child's well-being long term. So, here's where they start experimenting with exercising their free choice and self-restraint. This is the age where we can now ask a child to be self-restrained about something developmentally. They're ready for that. No, you can't hit your sister just because you're annoyed. You can express your annoyance, but you can't do it by hitting. That's a form of self-restraint. We would ask of a child, and they're very ready for it at this age. But if the child struggles with these tasks and is made to feel ashamed of themselves, their learning attempts are made to feel inadequate to them, then they don't develop an adequate sense of self. So, take a busy child who's constantly being made to feel bad about their business or a shy child who is made to feel insignificant because they're not bold enough, and so they're often ignored, that might be neurodiversity that the child is born with. Then the child does not feel good about themselves, does not feel like they're developing into the kind of healthy human that it seems that everybody wants them to be. And still, what happens instead is the child begins to feel shame and doubt. Already at these young ages, we begin to internalize these messages. They are different, not the same as everybody, not as successful as other children. If we move to the next age, which is 3-6, if this child has gone through these previous two stages in reasonable, healthy ways, we then have a secure, confident child who's going to make plans and start setting goals for themselves. This is when kids really start to develop into the imaginative play area of life, and they create story days and events, and they live their way into them, and they play them. They set plans for their play. They have little projects that they want to work on, ideas for activities, etc. And so, the challenge here that we want met in this stage is enacting initiative that they do all those things, that they start taking charge of their day and their own activities. They don't need to be entertained anymore. They can begin in some ways to entertain themselves. Now that doesn't mean that all their dreams and goals are realistic. So, the challenge of caregivers is to ensure, encourage a child with their ideas and guide them into what are doable and observable goals, not unrealistic ones. You know, the child may decide that they want to jump off the dock and swim across the lake because Uncle so-and-so does that, or he owns or does that. Well, that's not actually an achievable goal for a child between the ages of three and six. So, we do still have to help them moderate their goals. If this goes well, then what we have is a child who develops a good, strong sense of purpose. If the child is controlled at this age, not allowed to explore their ideas, not encouraged to seek out new activities in the world based on their own initiatives and ideas or their ideas are sometimes childish or silly, then that child is going to start internalizing a sense of guilt like, I never seem to get anything right. My ideas are never good ideas. So, the boy who wants to cook and who's constantly shooed away because that's not a boy thing, or the girl who wants to learn to change the oil or drive the tractor but is discouraged because that's not a girl thing. Or the kindergartner who wants to put on a play for the family and no one is interested because that seems boring to them. So, she doesn’t, or he doesn't get an audience. Those are things that get in the way of that child developing a good sense of purpose because their ideas are not being affirmed in any way. This next age category is large ages 6-12, and they will get larger as we continue. This is a big age range and there's lots of nuance of development here. Bear in mind that the Erickson's are doing sort of a sweeping, broad stroke across all of development in their theory here, children must master important cognitive and social skills. This is when children begin to recognize that, I'm not going to live at home my whole life and I'm not going to marry Mommy or daddy, which children often think they're going to do because they just think life will go on here in the home that they're in now. They can think about helping with household chores. They can participate in planning and hosting their own birthday party. They can get a game ready to play with their friends. What we want here is the development of a sense of industriousness. If a child's industriousness is rewarded, valued, and nurtured, then what they start to feel is a genuine sense of competence. Yeah, yeah, I can do this. I'm a competent person. I can do this. If a child does not experience some degree of success, then what we have instead is a sense of inferiority developing, which is not what we're looking for at all. Now, remember, if a child has struggled with the hope stage, hasn't developed a healthy will, not developed a strong sense of purpose. These later and later stages get more and more difficult because things have misfired in some of the earlier stages. This is a large category for ages 12 to 20. So, some of you might be on the tail end of this. This is the crossroad between childhood and maturity. And this is where adolescents start to grapple with the question like, who am I? Early adolescents are grappling with changing bodies and later adolescence must start establishing basic social and occupational identities. You can start figuring yourself out at this point, and there's lots of conflicting views. Remember that picture that we were looking at? All the different looking glasses? Well, by the time you're, you know, at the ages of 12 to 20, you've got a lot of mirrors that you're looking at to reflect to you who they think you are. What do mom and Dad think of me? What do my friends think of me? What do my teachers think of me? What do my youth leaders think of me? What does my professor think of me? Who am I and who do I want to be? And do I have any control over that? There's a need to integrate the past with the future. These are all my mirrors. Remember the picture? These are all my mirrors. That's what I've been told about myself historically. In the past. Who do I want to be moving into the future? I'm going to Am I going to take all those ideas with me? Can I leave any of them behind, etc.? If the child emerging as an adult is growing towards a sense of self that is unique, separate, and somewhat continuous, then self-centeredness begins to develop, an assumption of taking responsibility for the self. And what we have now is the development of identity. But if social conditions and personal relationships get in the way of this, then developing identity becomes very difficult. But if things are healthy, then yes, a desired outcome is a development of fidelity. In other words, the ability to be committed to freely choose loyalties. This is my friend who I will be loyal to. This is an idea that I like that I be loyal to. So suddenly deciding well, not suddenly deciding that you want to go vegan, even though your family isn't being committed to that because of your own values and ideas, developing your own emerging sense of self separate from your family, when that isn't there, when there's high self-consciousness. Then we get sort of a bit of a work paralysis, and instead of developing a sense of fidelity, being able to choose the things you care about and be committed to them. Instead, a child faces role confusion, like who am I and where do I fit in? And I just feel left out everywhere I go etc. And that's hard. A child who really struggles to fit into their peer group or child is pressured to believe exactly what their parents believe, otherwise they're being disloyal to the family. And this is often a challenge in religious families when their children want to think about things other than their own religion and families who then say, no, you're not really, you're not really part of us unless you believe exactly everything we believe. And that becomes a very difficult space developmentally for a young emerging adult. If there's real confusion, they may struggle with anxiety, they may be confused, they may be rebellious without room to flex their own mind, to explore their own opinions and ideas. Chances are something less than good is likely to happen. And this is a hard stage for parents letting our children go, letting them differentiate from us and you get to make choices about whether you believe that too. That's not easy for parents. And then we have ages 20 to 40. So, this is probably what most of you are going to be entering. According to Erikson's, the adolescent is very necessarily self-focused because that's the work you're doing. You're developing an identity. So, for those of you who might be parents listening to this, if your teen seems very self-focused or a bit narcissistic and using that word like in a cheeky sense, but, you know, just really focused on themselves, that's very normal. That's the work they're supposed to be doing developmentally, the work they must do requires it. They are concerned with who they are moving into potential intimacies of adulthood requires an established identity. If you haven't figured out who you are yet, you are not ready to start making long term commitments in a relationship. You know that live in partner or possibly a marriage partner, willingness to risk, deep friendship, life partnering and marriage, all those sorts of things can happen. Well, if there's a deep sense of self that's developed in those teen and young adult years and you've developed this capacity to commit and share deeply without losing your identity, without just becoming one half of a twosome. And so here is where the basic challenge is to develop the skill of intimacy. By that I do not mean sex. And intimacy can be between two friends, between two romantic partners, etc. Just intimacy to know and be known by someone else. And if that intimacy is possible and develops well, then you have acquired the capacity for a deep, rich form of love and loving. That's the desired outcome here. If there is no secure sense of self present, if the self is not well enough known to you, then there is a risk of starting to feel isolated. That could mean avoiding intimacy; like not letting anyone really see the real you or promiscuity that could be sexual or that could be just, you know, TMI, too much information sharing, that sort of thing. But if you don't know yourself, then you don't really have a self to give in to more meaningful, deeper friendships or romantic or sexual relationships. Accept knowing yourself first before you can start exploring those things in ways that are healthy. The next stage is age is 40 to 65. This is clearly where I am. The challenge now is to recognize that you must move beyond your own ego. It's important now to promote ego development of the younger generations, to share one's wisdom and life experience through parenting, political action, community, volunteerism, vocation, mentoring, all those sorts of things. And if you've gone through the other stages successfully, then you are in a position to be highly generative, to offer lots of good stuff to your families, your friendships, your relationships, your community, your country, all those sorts of things. If there's a healthy self-love there and a faith in humanity, then you develop the capacity to offer profound forms of care into all the different places that your world intersects. But if you've been compromised in previous stages, you've been harmed by others, and that's gotten in the way of you developing, well, then there's a real risk of stagnation at this age. You just kind of stall out and you don't offer generative productivity into your relationships and your community because you can't. And then the final stage, 65+, that the Erickson's have is integrity. So, this is when you are now transitioning from that highly generative time in your life into a slower paced life, less focus on vocation, spending time reflecting more on the life you've lived. And yes, the challenge here is to develop a very deeply rooted sense of integrity, sense of yourself, being with a whole history that's gone through all these stages and ways that for the most part have been healthy. And if that can happen, if you can appreciate the past and if you can inhabit the present and not fear the future, accept the life cycle, accept the fact that at some point you will die, that you're satisfied with the life you've lived, then real wisdom can develop. In this stage, you're able to express concern for life itself beyond yourself, even in the face of death itself, and inspire others to live well. If your other stages haven't gone well or some of them haven't gone well, the risk here is despair that you just feel like you're unraveling, that you never really got life totally figured out. And now here you are looking at the last stretch of your own life. And you haven't reached a place of calmness or peace or wisdom or any of those things. What you're feeling instead is despair and fear of your own death. So, as you think about these things, something I also want you to apply this to is you don't know the other people in your life. You don't know the stages in their life where they might have struggled, where others might have harmed them, and how that might have affected who they are, stages that might have been in the very young years where they themselves can't really even identify exactly what happened to them and the kind of harm it did to them that turned them into the people they are. Until we have someone's history, we don't really know who the person is in front of us, and we don't even always know our own history. So, one of the profound effects of this theory in this application is just building in a little bit more grace for each other, making space for who that person is and how they've experienced life. I love this quote. This comes from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. And Erickson's psychosocial stages of development help us to do that in a very particular, precise kind of a way, helping us to understand what the journey of that person’s life is, in which were the stages that were particularly challenging for them. This also applies cross-culturally because what might be a successful challenge in one culture, what it looks like will be very different in another culture. So also understanding what cultural values are different in each of those stages and that needs to be thought about too. So, I welcome you to think about your own life through this lens and to think about the lives of people you care about through this lens and see if some wisdom might emerge for you. Agents of Socialization We're going to talk about what are some of the agents of socialization in our lives. Who are the folks or institutions or collections of people that do this socializing? Now, obviously, family and school are huge because we spend so much time in those places when we're little and their task is very clearly to intentionally socialize you. That's their goal is to socialize you. Whereas two other very powerful agents of socialization in our lives, our peers in media and peers are not setting out to socialize you or you them, nor is media trying to socialize you. And yet that is unintentionally happening. Nevertheless, there are lots of other agents of socialization, religion, sport, the workplace, etc. etc. But yes, family is the most important, is the most powerful. It provides you with your basic sense of self. Remember we talked about Erikson in the previous left in the previous video. It's how we get a sense of what our dreams are, what we deserve in life, who are most significant. Others are. It's also often the things we learn unconsciously. So, the role of a female. You internalized whatever you saw in your own family context, the role of a male. You internalize whatever you saw there. So, if you saw Mom and Dad shared the cooking, Mom and dad shared the household responsibilities. That's what you internalized. If you saw that mom did only specific things and dad did only specific things, then that's what you internalized. You don't even realize you're internalizing that's what men do and that's what women do because it's not talked about. I mean, that's the power of family socialization. Children learn what is caught more than what is intentionally taught. You can teach a child all kinds of things about kindness, but if they live in a context where lack of kindness or unkindness is constantly present, that's what they'll absorb. Far more so than anything, you overtly try to teach them about kindness. Some of the reasons why family is so powerful in terms of socialization is the condition of the child's exposure to the family. You are under the total control of your family, your parents when you are at your most impressionable. And that's happening in the context of what we hope are very close, healthy, emotional bonds. So, the child is also the socializing of the parent. And we don't often think about this piece, but who that child is, how they come to the parents, the way they enact their personality inside of the nurturing that they're going to receive is unique. And so, the child also socialized. The parents partially because you're just being re-socialized into the world of being parents. Remember, we're also socialized by our siblings. We don't get to pick our siblings. We might love them; we might really dislike them. But there are siblings and living beside of them in the rubber that also socializes us in some ways. And yes, there's lots to talk about in the world of how the oldest sibling socializes the rest? How does the youngest sibling socialize the rest? There's lots of interesting studies done on that sort of thing. And then, of course, your social class occupation of the parents, of course, is the best indicator of social class and economically marginalized families have less money. Therefore, not the fancy clothes. They don't get to shop in the fresh food sections and fresh meat sections of the grocery store. They're buying the cheaper processed foods that are on sale. As much as we want our comprehensive Canadian health care to treat everyone equally, often the places they're in the clinics aren't as good, there aren't as many doctors available, etc. so, they are limited in that way. They would live in more crowded conditions. They can't afford large square footage homes and all those kinds of extra pressures that aren't present in a middle class or upper-class family typically. Ethnicity. Canada retains a significant mosaic in terms of ethnicity, but you're going to be connected to a particular culture, which in Canada there's a wide variety of them, and that too has very specific socialization in it. So, if you come from a collectivist culture in which you take care of your elderly, you're going to be socialized into thinking that you will need to live with your parents or very near them as part of just being a good human, a good family member, because that's what your ethnicity teaches you. And if you just look at these pictures here, I mean, just look at the differences in the way these two families present themselves. One is obviously on a holiday or a day trip out to beach. So, you know, it's what we would think of as the typical Canadian family. The other family is clearly not on a holiday. It looks like they're outside of their living space in some way. And notice how they stand together with the male further apart. And the other members of the family are more to one side. That tells us lots of things. Just in looking at the pictures about different ways of being socialized into the world, family peers are also socializing agents. For us, peers are the second most important, most potent socializing agent next to family. They are our first experience with equality of power. We're equals with our friends, which is very different than our parents. I mean, we're all equally human, but parents have the task to raise you, and that inequality difference must function to protect you, to feed you all those sorts of things. But here you get to choose, but in this case, you do get to choose, and that peer influence is going to be there throughout your life. It's not limited to childhood. I'm still being influenced by peers. It is, however, at the peak of influence during adolescence and there's always like I've already said it when I was talking about Eriksson's a difficult time for parents because you're now starting to let your friends influence you as much as you let your parents or your family influence you. That's significant. That might be in the way you talk in your attitudes, about things, your friendships, your fashion choices, the music you like, the activities you want to do etc. Those are all now increasingly powerfully shaped by your peers. It's not that adults are vulnerable to all of this too. We care about all those things too, but we're doing so past the very vulnerable developmental stages of those coming, you know, middle school, junior high, high school. And of course, the content of that peer socialization is significant. And in the early years when you're young, a lot of that has to do with appearance and ability. It's straightforward. How do you present yourself to your peers and what are your skill sets? What can you impress them with? It's not that it totally changes with adults either, but it's much more powerful in those vulnerable developmental stages. They become sources of information. Lots of kids learn more about sex from their friends than they do from their parents because their parents, for a variety of reasons, feel uncomfortable talking to their kids about it. Values attitudes toward authority. What's fair? What's important? What's cool. Your peers now tend to dominate those sorts of thinking patterns inside of you, and this is a really important time in your life. You can surround yourself with lots of good folks or you could surround yourself with folks who are taking you down roads that are probably not long-term going to be healthy for you or give you the best life that you could have. So, you want to sort of be conscious about those sorts of things. And yeah, these are the kinds of roads that might take you down. It can be very positive; it can be a bit sketchy. It can be downright not great, you know, depending on which peer group you've chosen and how you allow them to influence you and how much influence you have over your peers. And then there′s school. Schools are assigned a really major role in preparing Canadian kids for adulthood because of the extensive knowledge and skills that schools are supposed to pass along to you and a school is a child's first formal encounter with a social institution, unless they've already been doing preschool where there's also been intentional socialization going on. Now the child is not treated as unique, but as a member of a cohort. So, you're being processed as a whole group of kids so that feels very different for the child, who's always been much more the focus of the family's attention. Now, you're just one of many, and schools are teaching you cultural literacy in all kinds of ways, everything from how to behave in a classroom to Canadian history. You're supposed to know your culture and they're supposed to equip you for that. There's lots of formal knowledge as part of that, lots of values to get passed along in school and of course, interpersonal skills, how to behave when you're with a group of people, which is where you spend most of the rest of your life in some kind of group of people. One could also say that schools have hidden curriculums because schools are also teaching discipline. Conformity, achievement, and individualism is being important. Those are not things being overtly taught, but the way that we set schools up and that we set education up, individualism, you know, is inferred in the way we deliver education. If you can get high enough grades to earn a bunch of scholarships, that's how we set things up. Then we are pitting you one against the other in a competition. So, we are in that hidden curriculum is that we're teaching individualism and competition. Our teachers also have a real say. I just want you to look here at the difference between these two schools and their environments and how this happens. One is inside, one is outside, in one. The students are all sitting in chairs at desks. In the other they're all sitting in the ground, out in the sunshine. Schools can have very different environments. Teachers are the first contact with adult authority outside of home. Typically, it's much less personal. You're no longer valued for who you are. You're evaluated for how you perform. That's a massive shift that kids undergo when they head to kindergarten. Now, that doesn't mean that teachers aren't good kind souls who try to do this in good kind ways. I know lots of teachers. But their job is still to evaluate your performance, that is, and to teach you things and then evaluate that is their job. That's what they're paid for. So here we're looking at control without any kind of affection present. And finally, your classmates, you're always comparing yourself to your classmates, particularly in a culture that is steeped in individualism and competition. Your classmates are also evaluating you and that affects your socialization as well. And then finally, our last one here is media. And this could be an entire course, but we are now facing an entire couple of generations by now who've been raised inside of the patterns of social media and all that it brings. So, a little one year-old can pick up a phone and already know something about scrolling because they see it happening all around them all over the place. And we put all kinds of devices in the hands. You can see here from this picture of our little ones, you know, they've each got their own individual iPad in this picture. And here they are, you know, snuggling in and being entertained for the evening and just take the time in any social context to look up from your own phone and look around and see how many people are face to face talking to each other and how many of them are spending lots of that time on the phone. It has profoundly shifted us, and the content of media has now become a dominant socialization. It's one of the most powerful socializing agents we have now, and it's beginning to compete in some ways with family socialization. You know, once you're past the three and four years of age. And what we are seeing are deeply concerning to us. What we're now seeing in the research that social media is deeply addictive and is causing significant forms of harm. It's really that there's sort of this partial attention syndrome where you can never pay attention to anything fully because you always must be checking your media. You're always looking to be liked, you know, to get the thumbs up or the heart or whatever the platform uses to indicate they like your idea. And suddenly we're creating identities online that aren’t even who we are in real life. So that's another kind of strange addiction. I could go on and on and we will talk more about this stuff in the media lecture, but there's a lot going on here.