Chapter 9 Child Socialization and Personality

• The concept that periodization of the human life span or life cycle have changed drastically in this century.
• Rapid increase in industrial productivity and medical technology extended the human life span.
• Philippe Aries (Social Historian): childhood did not exist until the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Europe when industrialization accompanied the formation of a middle class and the established of formal educational institutions.
• Charolotte Bühler (Austrian psychologist): Divided the human life span into five age periods and each group has a personality development:
• Childhood – birth to age 14
• Youth – 14 to 25
• Adulthood I – 25 to 45-50
• Adulthood II – 45-50 to 65-70
• Aging – 65-70 and over

Parental Behavior and Child Personality

Parents behavior has an affect on how a child’s personality turns out.

• There are many types of American families, the diversity of families has grown throughout the years.
• Ronald P. Rohner (Anthropologist): Parental warmth (acceptance-rejection) and parental control (permissiveness) have shown to be the two major dimensions of parenting in all human societies.
• Both parental warmth and parental control have an association with a number of distinct personality characteristics with other aspects as well such as individualism and culturally organized expressive behaviors.
• Warm and permissive parents tend to facilitate the environment in which the child grows in. Such as being active, creative, independent, and sociable.
• Warm but restrictive parents will have children who are more submissive, dependent, obedient and less creative children.
• Parents who are hostile with permissiveness can have children who are more non-compliance and aggressive.
• Parents who are hostile and restrictive have children who have serious neurotic problems such as social withdrawal, antisocial behavior and self aggression.

Parental Absence and Child Personality

Parents absence has a negative affect on a child’s personality.

• Absence of a parent in a child’s life will affect the child’s personality, such as problems with sex-role socialization, psychiatric disorder, impairment of intellectual growth, delinquency, and homosexuality for father absent male children.
• One and three American children (32%) about 71 million under the age of 18 experience parental absence at one time or another.
• Father Absence and Child Personality:
• White children: 6%-8%
• Black children: 21%-52%
• Hispanic children: 20%-27% (1980-1997)
• Majority of parent-absent children are father-absent children in the United Sates.
• A child that has a father-absent in their lives tend to have effects on their personality and sexuality especially those in male children.
• Male children whose fathers are not in their lives have masculine identifications problems, since they don’t have that father figure in their lives.
• There is a bigger effect on children’s whose father left them due to separation or divorce compared to a father’s death.
• Academic, physical activities, and aggression get effective after a father’s absence.
• Mother Absence and Child Personality:
• Children who have a mother absence in their lives for at least the first five years of their life are prone to delinquencies in their characters and have bad behaviors.
• Children need warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his/her mother.
• Lack of the presence of a mother in a child’s life can have an effect on their mental health and personality development.
• Insufficiency: when a child is separated from his/her mother or mother figure.
• Discontinuity: when a child is separated form his/her mother on and off.
• Distortion: when a child’s mother gives the child insufficient maternal care, the mother is present but is not mentally present for the child.

Television and the Child

• According to American Psychological association now estimates that a typical child will watch 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence before finishing elementary school.
• Television is the “baby sitter” for many American children.
• Positive effects on personality development of children watching television:
• Facilitation of prosocial behavior
• Imaginative
• Activity
• Moral messages
• Learning languages and math skills
• Negative effects on personality:
• Televised violence
• Aggressive behavior
• Facilitation of race/ethnic stereotyping
• Inhibition of reading skills
• Dysphoria
• Fatigue
• Children who watch a lot of violence later on have a higher chance of developing an aggressive behavior.
• Even watching violent scenes for a small moment increases the chances a child will develop an aggressive behavior.
• There is a correlation with children who watch violent television shows and having an aggressive or eventually having an aggressive behavior.

Birth Order and Personality

• Exploring is there is a correlation between the order a child is born and their intelligence.
• There has been a lot of research on this.
• Some popular assumptions and recurring research on this topic is:
• The first born are more intelligent
• The first born have higher sense of responsibility
• The first born are cooperative and capable of leadership
• The first born are risk takers and sociable
• But in reality socioeconomic background and family structure are more powerful predictors of the child’s intellectual development than the birth order effect or even sibship size.

Minority Children and Socialization

• Hispanic Americans are somewhat better off than African Americans but both minorities are still suffering.
• Asian Americans are doing the best from other minority groups, and they are referred to a “model minority”.
• Asian Americans pay a higher price for the same luxuries or White Americans, “equal pay equal work” is a myth.
• African American children are under pressure to live two lives of “Afro-American” and “Euro-American”
• Children of minority groups are caught between two different cultures and/or races and experience a sense or marginality.
• The visibility problem is the different physical appearance from the dominant group members.
• Children are young ages are experiencing the stereotypes and or micro aggressions.
• Ethnic Socialization is the developmental processes by which children acquire the behaviors, perceptions, values, and attitudes of an ethnic group, and come to see themselves and others as members of such groups.
• Children of minority groups notice the differences of minority and majority groups such as skin color, food, and language.
• Minority children are more aware of their own ethnicity than majority children.
• Majority children are more likely to be ethnocentric, meaning they know they are the majority and have different attitudes and their values are different.

Bilingualism and Personality Development

• Minority children can be provided with “a double cultural opportunity” meaning children increase their flexibility and competence to function in a pluralistic society.
• At first children who were bilingual were thought to be less smart, or labeled as linguistic handicap but later proven that there are no negative effects on children who speak two languages.
• Although, being bilingual can cause some stress on minority children but can enhance their personality growth.