Effects of Child Socialization: Erikson and Bronfenbrenner

Socialization occurs in any child’s life on a daily basis no matter where he or she lives or the places that he or she attends. Children are socialized by many people that they are surrounded by, including other children and adults that have various relations to them. Through knowing all of this one could come to the conclusion that socialization is an ongoing process throughout the lifespan. In order to fully understand the socialization of a child, observations have to be made and compared to different theories.

The observation recorded here will be compared to both Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological theory and Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Behavior. Bronfenbrenner speaks of a child’s socialization as an interaction of that child’s microsystem (immediate interactions), mesosystem (interactions between microsystems), exosystems (interactions that indirectly affect the child), and macrosystems (subculture and society in which the child interacts) (Berns 17). Erikson doesn’t talk about the different situations in which children’s socialization develops, but instead talks about the different stages that the children move back and forth throughout in the process of socialization.

Erikson’s theory focuses on the different stages of psychosocial development. There are eight stages within his theory, but given the age of the child observed the focus will be on his bottom three: Infancy-Trust vs Mistrust, Early Childhood- Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt, and Play Age: Initiative vs. Guilt (Berns 38). In the situation found below, the child that was observed is approximately 3 years old and was observed in what some would call children’s church.

Upon looking around the room the little girl looked at everyone sitting down, and did the same. Th...

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...ht process, one has to think about Erikson’s chart when dealing with a difficult child. If that child is siding on mistrust in that moment then he or she is not going to tell you what is really going on. If the child is feeling a lot of inferiority, shame, and guilt, he or she may believe they are already in trouble so why behave? When thinking about a child you have to think about the saying that “you can take a boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy”. In our case you can take a child out of a situation but you can’t take the situation out of the child. Even if they are not currently in a problematic environment does not mean that the problem is not running through that child’s mind.

Works Cited

Berns, Roberta. Child, family, school, community: socialization and support. 9th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2013. Print.