Family as the Most Important Agent of Socialization

Families
Name
Institutional Affiliation
Families
Family as the Most Important Agent of Socialization
Human beings are social creatures justifying the significance of socialization and its underlying aspects, including agents of socialization. Pescaru (2018) defines socialization as a collaborative process of communication involving individual development and personal influences, namely the individual reception and interpretation of all social messages and the dynamics and content of social influences (p. 18). On the other hand, social organization structures and techniques influential in controlling an individual's behavior are referred to as socialization agents. In this case, a family is regarded as the most important socialization agent considering its role in the upbringing of its infants and young children.
Since socialization is a lifelong process, how people uphold their social expectations and interactions with other people is highly predicated upon their family teachings. The family is quite effective in this role because of its primacy in an individual's experience (Barni et al., 2017). In the end, it is the institution with the best opportunity to make its pattern felt. Families are very intimate, which is an element that guarantees deep impressions in a person. Besides, when a person is young, they are more sensitive to stimuli than adulthood, and thus, experiences register more deeply.
Further, the family has a significant influence here because it constitutes a small child's complete world experience. In this process, there are many uniform and consistent set of experiences that ultimately become ingrained in the child. Eventually, most children turn out to be like their parents; they have been their primary caregivers in their formative years and have had lots of contact with them than any other adult.
Causes of Dramatic Changes to the American Family
The family institution has experienced significant changes and continues to do so since the '50s. Changes in the family institutions is a major concern because it determines society's strength. Interested stakeholders have aired a couple of causes in these dramatic changes. The most straightforward cause is the rise in divorce rates and single-parent households. According to McDowell (2019), the US witnessed approximately 782,038 divorces in 2018, which means that a significant number of children are highly affected. It is a spell that evokes possible dangerous situations, given that children from these families are highly likely to divorce, too (Anderson, 2014). Divorces have been a frequent thing in the American culture to the extent that it is regarded as an ordinary thing. Even worse, it is gradually to other cultures that have adopted Western culture significantly.
Cohabitation has been another popular dynamic recently. Relatively young adults have a widespread perception that marriage is archaic and constraining and that open cohabitating relations offer a healthier opportunity that is more favorable to personal development (p. 378). The emergence of working mothers and daycare has changed the ordinary functioning of the family unit. Initially, women were much more likely to be working outside the home. In recent times, they have steadily ...