The role of parents in the socialization of children: An historical overview.

Abstract

The history of research on childhood socialization in the context of th e family is traced through the present century. The 2 major early theories—behaviorism and psychoanalytic theory—are described. These theories declined in mid-century, under the impact of failures to find empirical support. Simple reinforcement theory was seriously weakened by work on developmental psycholinguistics, attachment, modeling, and altruism. The field turne d to more domain-specific minitheories. The advent of microanalytic analyses of parent-child interaction focused attention on bidirectional processes. Views about the nature of identificatio n and its role in socialization underwent profound change. The role of parent as teacher was reconceptualized (with strong influence from Vygotskian thinking). There has been increasing emphasis on the role of emotion s and mutual cognitions in establishing the meaning of parent-child exchanges. The enormous asymmetry in power and competence between adults and children implies that the parent-child relationship must have a unique role in childhood socialization. The American Psychological Association's centennial is a propitious occasion for taking stock of psychology' s progress in the study of human development and to consider where developmental psychology has been, where it stands, and where it is going. Attempting to understand the socialization process has been a long-standing enterprise in both social and developmental psychology. When broadly conceived, the outcomes of interest have not changed greatly over time. That is, students of socialization continue to be concerned with the cluster of processes that lead to adults being able to function adequatel y within the requirements of the social group or groups among whom they live. Therefore the target or outcome behaviors of interest have continued to be some aspect of adequate func