Socialization and Parent-Child Dynamics

Socialization is the process by which children are prepared to become successful members of society. This requires the acquisition of skills, behavior patterns, ideas, and values needed for competent functioning in the society in which a child is growing up. More broadly, socialization is the process by which culture is transmitted or reproduced in each new generation. Socialization is a lifelong process of change that not only encompasses the various stages of childhood from infancy to adolescence but also continues throughout adulthood. There are many causal agents in the socialization process, including family members, peers, ecological setting, social institutions such as schools and religions, and print and digital media. This article will focus on socialization processes occurring in the context of parent-child relationships. Influence processes occurring between parents and children have long been considered as the first and most important locus of socialization that lays the foundations for later changes as the child interacts with the wider world. Socialization in the context of the family has been a topic of scientific research from across the human sciences since the early twentieth century. Historically, there have been two divergent theoretical perspectives on socialization, a unidirectional perspective that considers parents as the principal causal agent in the socialization process and a bidirectional perspective that includes the active role of children not only in their own socialization but also of their parents. The earliest and still-dominant perspective guiding socialization research is characterized by terms such as “intergenerational transmission,” “parenting,” “parental practices,” and “child-rearing” and focuses on the parent’s role in the socialization of children. In this traditional view, children are blank slates who enter a social world with preexisting meanings, values, and expectations, and the role of parents was to teach or transmit this cultural knowledge to children. The implication for theory was that parents were viewed as active causal agents and children are considered as passive recipients and mere outcomes in the socialization process. The implication for empirical research is that most empirical studies focus on the products of socialization—correlations between parental variables conceived as causes and child variables conceived as outcomes. Beginning in the 1960s, scholars in disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology began to criticize the traditional view as simplistic, static, and overly deterministic. In developmental psychology, this critique focused on recognizing the active role of children not only in their own development but also on the lives of parents. In the current era, interest in the active role of children have been subsumed in dynamic bidirectional, transactional, and relational models emphasizing parents and children both as agents and sources of mutual influence in a lifelong process of socialization. This article introduces readers to the vast topic of socialization in the context of parent-child relationships. This is a complex literature reflecting not only differences in theory but also a growing knowledge of the dynamics of parent-child relationships and the complexity of parenting for the optimal socialization of children. The focus is on the process underlying socialization rather than its products and outcomes. We begin with an overview of general sources to the topic. Next, we look at classic and modern perspectives that emphasize the parents’ role in influencing and shaping children. The next section considers critiques of the traditional parent-to-child view of socialization and examines research and theory on children as influential agents in the socialization and attempts to incorporate children’s influence as part as a bidirectional causal model. These perspectives on process are important because they implicitly and explicitly shape the way researchers and practitioners think about parents and children, the way researchers frame their questions about socialization, and the resultant nature of the empirical literature. Also in this article are sections on developmental change in socialization processes, children’s effects on parents’ adult socialization, and the cultural context of child-rearing.