Primary Socialization Essay

1048 Words3 Pages

The Significant Socialization Socialization is a never ending process that continues to change our perspectives to help us learn and adapt to a social reality. This lifelo.ng process can be split up into two different parts; primary socialization, the first socialization an individual undergoes in childhood, and secondary socialization, when an individual adapts to a specific group within society. Although one may believe that secondary socialization has more power over primary socialization since it is current and therefore more relevant, primary socialization has more authority considering that it lays down the foundation for all future socializations. Our initial values, attitudes, and actions are more important since we internalize them …show more content…

As Berger and Luckmann said, “secondary socialization is the internalization of institutional or institution-based sub-worlds” (Berger and Luckmann, 158). As a teenager, most of my life revolved around skateboarding. I skateboarded every day, all my friends skated, my main role models were skaters, and it gave me so much joy and satisfaction in my life. Skateboarding became a sub-world to me and began to influence and change my “behaviors, rights, obligations, beliefs, and norms” (Miller, 4/12). Before I knew it, I was internalizing all of skateboarding as I surrounded myself with skaters, dressed like them, listened to the same music, and overall had the same values and attitudes as them. Fitting in and adapting to skateboarding was very easy for me since I basically had a role with a script to fulfill. Although seen as a stereotype of skateboarders, drug use did have a correlation with skateboarding in my personal experiences growing up. Internalizing this was very hard for me since it was conflicting with my attitude towards drugs learned through primary socialization as a child. This became a major problem for me since I wanted to fit in and play my role as a skater within this sub-world, but my initial value for drugs was very strong since it was placed in my mind and internalized for so long. In the end, the secondary socialization wasn’t …show more content…

Like many would guess, I believed that secondary socialization would be more effective since it was happening exactly and the moment rather than primary socialization which happened early in my childhood. However, my attitude for drugs learned in childhood was created from scratch and was perceived as the attitude of everyone in society. This idea was in my mind my whole life so even though I was being socialized secondarily in the moment, it just felt so foreign and wrong to me. Another important fact to touch upon for primary socialization is that I was being socialized by significant others while secondary socialization “does not require emotionally charged attachments” (Miller, 4/12). This is very important idea to think about because as a child, I was trying to imitate my emotionally attached parents, while as an adolescent, I was only trying to fulfill one role within a huge community of skaters. Trying to imitate my parents was a lot more significant in my life since it came with intimacy and the fear of letting them down rather than a large sub-world of skaters that I didn’t have emotional attachments to. Also, we are given a family when we are born, we don’t get to choose who our parents and that’s why they are so meaningful, whereas in secondary socialization we can pick and choose our agents of socialization. Overall, all the

Open Document