Child Care Socialization

Child care programs have become an overwhelming popular way for parents to raise their children. With both men and women leaving the household to work and provide for their family, that correlates into their children being sent to secondary child care. This trend has raised questions on which choice is better, and how it affects the child in his or her development. The reason this issue is important is because of socialization, which is the “lifelong process of learning to become a member of the social world, beginning at birth and continuing until death” (Ballantine, Roberts, and Korgen 2017:92). Socialization, as the definition states, is important because it shapes how we develop as humans and learn the prevalent values of our society. It

Socialization as I stated earlier is a very important process in the child’s life since they are learning the appropriate attitudes, values and behaviors to fit into their culture. While the nature argument doesn’t apply to this situation, the nurture argument plays a huge role in the debate between raising a child at home or sending them to child care. The nurture argument claims that a child’s socialization is determined by the environment the child is in and the social interactions within that certain environment have the biggest impact on how they develop. The differences in the environments and interactions are a very broad and endless list. But if we focus more on the most familiar differences we will observe some variance between how parents may teach their children in contrast to child care. The first that comes to mind is punishment. The way a parent may decide to discipline their child will vary from how a child care may do so, which will lead to differences in how the child will perceive certain behaviors and actions. Another way is how the child interacts with others. A child would only be socializing and learning from their family if raised at home but if they were to be put in child care, they would have many different interactions than just with family. That would include the caretaker at the child care service and other children. In my experience, I developed much more being around other

If they were to only be in contact with their family for their early years, they would miss out on many different experiences and interactions with other children, people, and environments. This could lead to the child being too “sheltered” and unfamiliar with new surroundings. This leads to the argument made that this could also result in the child becoming shy, apprehensive, or even develop antisocial behavior when introduced to changes throughout their life. This scenario would lead to the child possibly becoming verbally abusive, commit crime, and/or display overt and covert hostility and intentional aggression (this is merely a worse case scenario, but does happen to some). Allowing children to broaden their view of the world and learn new things is beneficial to allow the child to develop even