Socializing The Children

The nuclear family can teach a child when to shake hands or how to eat a meal, but it cannot easily teach the child how to read or to do complicated mathematics, particularly if both parents go out to earn a living. Two problems are at once raised. At what age should education outside the family begin and what alternatives should be available both at the start and later?

These are administrative decisions and here the important point is that, by the age of five or six when children in most European countries start at school, the family has already done a great deal of an educational nature. Much of the culture has by this age been transmitted. Also, during the next few years when the majority of children are very malleable the school works alongside the family which still has a very potent influence. There is the possibility of a partnership of or a clash between the two institutions that are socializing the child.

The danger of conflict is probably lessened by the fact that the school tends to stress the instrumental learning needed for future life in a complex industrial community, whilst the family on the whole stresses the expressive development of the personality and the emotions. A nuclear family is of one social class and mainly meets members of the same or almost the same social class. In industry, however, a manager or a workman must meet all social classes and know how he is expected to behave in each different social situation.

The school can provide experience of a wider range of adult roles in a less emotional frame of reference than the family. This opening of the world to the child is one important function of the school that is often forgotten by teachers in their stress on sheer knowledge and on the inculcation of moral virtues. Yet though the family cannot do everything and may clash with the school it does much more than teachers are sometimes prepared to admit.

Children come to learn what is expected of them and of others. 'You're a big boy now, you mustn't cry.' 'You don't do that to smaller children, do you?' They begin to learn how their family views adults of other social classes that impinge on them; the middle-class child who imitates his mother's telephone voice when she orders from the local grocer has begun to learn something of the social class system. Vocational aspirations may be mainly of an unrealistic type in very young children. 'I want to be a fireman.'

But, when the child is older, the family has been found to have a very strong influence on occupational choice, and often this power is exercised without the more precise knowledge that the school could give. Sex roles are learnt, as are views on modesty, the latter often in the process of toilet training. Nursery rhymes are the songs, first at home and then in early schooling, begin to stress the moral virtues .

The family teaches the child a great deal, both consciously and unconsciously, during the first few years. Later the school takes over part of the task, but few teachers come to influence a child as deeply as his parents do. This deep influence does not only extend to the transmission of the outward signs of the culture. It has already been pointed out that the child tends to become the roles that he plays. The connection between the family and personality therefore requires attention.

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