In the summer of 2005, police detective Mark Holste followed an investigator from the Department of Children and Families to a home in Plant City, Florida. They were there to look into a statement from the neighbor concerning a shabby house on Old Sydney Road. A small girl was reported peering from one of its broken windows. This seemed odd because no one in the neighborhood had seen a young child in or around the home, which had been inhabited for the past three years by a woman, her boyfriend, and two adult sons. Who was the mystery girl in the window?

Entering the house, Detective Holste and his team were shocked. It was the worst mess they’d ever seen, infested with cockroaches, smeared with feces and urine from both people and pets, and filled with dilapidated furniture and ragged window coverings. Detective Holste headed down a hallway and entered a small room. That’s where he found the little girl, with big, vacant eyes, staring into the darkness. A newspaper report later described the detective’s first encounter with the child: “She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. She was curled on her side…her ribs and collarbone jutted out…her Black hair was matted, crawling with lice. Insect bites, rashes, and sores poked her skin.… She was naked—except for a swollen diaper.… Her name, her mother said, was Danielle. She was almost seven years old” (DeGregory, 2008).

Detective Holste immediately carried Danielle out of the home. She was taken to a hospital for medical treatment and evaluation. Through extensive testing, doctors determined that, although she was severely malnourished, Danielle was able to see, hear, and vocalize normally. Still, she wouldn’t look anyone in the eyes, didn’t know how to chew or swallow solid food, didn’t cry, didn’t respond to stimuli that would typically cause pain, and didn’t know how to communicate either with words or simple gestures such as nodding “yes” or “no.” Likewise, although tests showed she had no chronic diseases or genetic abnormalities, the only way she could stand was with someone holding onto her hands, and she “walked sideways on her toes, like a crab” (DeGregory, 2008).

What had happened to Danielle? Put simply: beyond the basic requirements for survival, she had been neglected. Based on their investigation, social workers concluded that she had been left almost entirely alone in rooms like the one where she was found. Without regular interaction – the holding, hugging, talking, the explanations and demonstrations given to most young children – she had not learned to walk or to speak, to eat or to interact, to play or even to understand the world around her. From a sociological point of view, Danielle had not been socialized.

Socialization is the process through which people are taught to be proficient members of a society. It describes the ways that people come to understand societal norms and expectations, to accept society’s beliefs, and to be aware of societal values. It is how we learn the norms and beliefs of our society, and societal values and expectations. Socialization begins in our family and play experiences with friends. It can be in the form of a smile to acknowledge good behavior or a raised eyebrow when a mom is conveying that you are too loud while they are on the phone. Socialization is not the same as socializing (interacting with others, like family, friends, and coworkers); to be precise, it is a sociological process that occurs through socializing.

As Danielle’s story illustrates, even the most basic of human activities are learned. You may be surprised to know that even physical tasks like sitting, standing, and walking had not automatically developed for Danielle as she grew. And without socialization, Danielle hadn’t learned about the material culture of her society (the tangible objects a culture uses): for example, she couldn’t hold a spoon, bounce a ball, or use a chair for sitting. She also hadn’t learned its nonmaterial culture, such as its beliefs, values, and norms. She had no understanding of the concept of “family,” didn’t know cultural expectations for using a bathroom for elimination, and had no sense of modesty. Most importantly, she hadn’t learned to use the symbols that make up language, through which we learn about who we are, how we fit with other people, and the natural and social worlds in which we live.

Sociologists have long been fascinated by circumstances like Danielle’s – in which a child receives sufficient human support to survive, but virtually no social interaction – because they highlight how much we depend on social interaction to provide the information and skills that we need to be part of society or even to develop a “self.” Sociologists are more likely to focus on how different aspects of society contribute to an individual’s relationship with the world. Sociologists tend to look outward to qualities of social context (social institutions, cultural norms, interactions with others) to understand human behavior.

Socialization is critical both to individuals and to the societies in which they live. It illustrates how completely intertwined human beings and their social worlds are. First, it is through teaching culture to new members that a society perpetuates itself. If new generations of a society don’t learn its way of life, it ceases to exist. Whatever is distinctive about a culture must be transmitted to those who join it for a society to survive. Socialization is just as essential to us as individuals. Social interaction provides us the ability to see ourselves through the eyes of others, learning who we are and how we fit into the world around us. As we saw with Danielle, without socialization, we have no self. We are unable to function socially.

Agents of Socialization

People or entities that provide socialization are considered agents of socialization. Family is the first agent of socialization. Mothers and fathers, siblings and grandparents, plus members of an extended family, all teach a child what he or she needs to know. For example, they show the child how to use objects (such as clothes, computers, eating utensils, books, bikes); how to relate to others (some as family, others as friends, still others as strangers or teachers or neighbors); and how the world works (what is real and what is imagined). As you are aware, either from your own experience as a child or your role in helping to raise one, socialization involves teaching and learning about an unending array of objects and ideas.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that families do not socialize children in a vacuum. Many social factors impact how a family raises its children. For example, we can use sociological imagination to recognize that individual behaviors are affected by the historical period in which they take place. Sixty years ago, it would not have been considered especially strict for a father to hit his son with a wooden spoon or a belt if he misbehaved, but today that same action might be considered child abuse. Sociologists recognize that race, social class, religion, and other societal factors play an important role in socialization.

A peer group is made up of people who are similar in age and social status and who share interests. Peer group socialization begins in the earliest years, such as when kids on a playground teach younger children the norms about taking turns or the rules of a game, or how to shoot a basket. As children grow into teenagers, this process continues. Peer groups are important to adolescents in a new way, as they begin to develop an identity separate from their parents and exert independence. Additionally, peer groups provide opportunities for socialization since kids usually engage in different types of activities with their peers than they do with their families. Peer groups provide adolescents’ first major socialization experience outside the realm of their families. Interestingly, studies have shown that although friendships rank high in adolescents’ priorities, this is balanced by parental influence. The social institutions of our culture also inform our socialization. Formal institutions such as schools, workplaces, and the government teach people how to behave in and navigate these systems. Other institutions, like the media, contribute to socialization by inundating us with messages about norms and expectations.

Racialized Socialization

An important part of growing up is developing a sense of self. One of the pioneering sociological theorists on self-development was Charles Cooley (1864–1929). Cooley asserted that people’s self-understanding is constructed, in part, by their perception of how others view them – a process termed “the looking glass self” (Cooley, 1902). The self or “self-idea” is thoroughly social. It is based on how we imagine we appear to others. This projection defines how we feel about ourselves and who we feel ourselves to be. The development of a self, therefore, involves three elements in Cooley’s analysis: “the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.”

Later, George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) advanced a more detailed sociological approach to the self. He agreed that the self, as a person’s distinct identity, is only developed through social interaction. He further noted that the crucial component of the self is its capacity for self-reflection, its capacity to be “an object to itself” (Mead, 1934). The self is always caught up in a social process in which one flips back and forth between two distinguishable phases, the I and the me, as one mediates between one’s actions and individual responses to various social situations and the attitudes of the community. Without others or society, the self cannot exist: “[I]t is impossible to conceive of a self arising outside of social experience” (Mead, 1934).

For adolescents of color, socialization and self-identity involve exploring and learning what it means to be part of their racial group (Rivas-Drake et al., 2014; Umaña-Taylor et al., 2014). Ethnic and racial identity during adolescence and into young adulthood often begins in the family. Racialized socialization extends the concept of socialization by focusing on the process by which parents transmit both implicit and explicit messages about the meaning of one’s race in a broader societal context (Coard and Sellers, 2005). As with any other form of socialization, racial socialization occurs when we receive information about the values and perspectives of our race from our parents, caregivers, and other influential people (Morin, 2022). Racial socialization is an important aspect of parenting among Black people (Hughes and Johnson, 2001), and centers on cultural socialization about one’s heritage and traditions and preparation for bias that may exist outside the home, such as interactions with police, and potential prejudice and discrimination (Hughes et al., 2006). The goal of racial socialization is to instill a sense of racial pride and cultural knowledge in children (Hughes et al., 2006). Research has found that parents who engage in more racial socialization tend to question the dominant culture’s worldview of Black people (Marshall, 1995) and appreciate their culture more (McHale et al., 2006; Stevenson, 1995; Wills et al., 2007). Other research has found that racial socialization develops higher levels of racial pride, self-worth, and preparation for biased messages (Neblett et al., 2009).

Check Your Knowledge

Licenses and Attributions for Socialization

Open Content, Shared Previously

“Socialization” is adapted from Socialization, Introduction to Sociology – 1st Canadian Edition by William Little and Ron McGivern, which is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Modifications by Shanell Sanchez and Catherine Venegas-Garcia, revised by Jessica René Peterson, which are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, include rewording and elaborating points related to criminal justice.

“Racialized Social Control” is adapted from “Social Control” by Lumen Learning, Cultural Anthropology. (Evans), which is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Modifications by Shanell Sanchez and Catherine Venegas-Garcia, revised by Jessica René Peterson, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, include rewording and elaborating points related to criminal justice.

Figure 3.2. “Bonner Springs Library Reads for the Record” by Bonner Springs Library is licensed under CC BY 2.0.