Child Socialization through Social Change
Socialization is a dynamic process with institutions, as social formations, and agents of socialization being in constant flux. Children’s interactions with parents, schools, and friends shape and are shaped by significant social changes, locally and globally, whose rate has been accelerating over the last decades through globalization, inequality, and multiple crises (e.g., financial, mass migration, Covid‐19). Crises used to be points of rupture, deviations from the norm, but now they have become the “new norm.” External changes are reflected in the role of families in modern societies and the socialization process inside the family environment. From the 1950s to nowadays, the family’s functions and forms have been modified; despite (or because of) these changes, the family continues to play a fundamental role in children's socialization (Höppner, 2017; Rollins & Hunter, 2013).
Global social changes have affected child socialization patterns in a multitude of ways. Family structures have become more egalitarian over time where children are encouraged to take plural perspectives with an emphasis on child voice and centeredness. Learning has also moved from being socially guided to independent learning. Children are socialized to be more experimental and curious, more into self‐expression and independent thinking, interacting via technology, and spending more time indoors than outdoors. An increasing emphasis is placed on parents and children developing emotional bonds articulated in attachment discourses, with parents being actively encouraged to be attuned and responsive to children’s feelings (Chen et al., 2010) and raise their self‐esteem and self‐confidence (Harkness et al., 2000). Furthermore, changes in the ethics of care are seen in shifts from expectations of family obligation to expectations of individual development and achievement (Kagitcibasi & Ataca, 2005); and from in‐person social interaction to technologically mediated social interaction (Hartas, 2020). These general patterns in child socialization find different manifestations in diverse social and cultural contexts.
Political and economic changes in the last decades of the 20th century have challenged the state as the arbiter of social and economic rights and public services to families and schools with parents and teachers being increasingly viewed as consumers and investors. The neoliberal organization of society is reflected in discourses of individual freedom, personal responsibility, privatization, and outsourcing of public services and care, and a free market that escapes political regulation. It is also reflected in the commodification of care and the creation of new markets (e.g., parenting experts, family intervention programs) that permeate aspects of life that were thought to be non‐marketable. This restructuring has led to public sector reduction and social policy reforms that have implications for institutions (e.g., family, schools) and agents of child socialization by giving rise to the politicization of parents and new forms of accountability for schools and teachers.
Global social changes in general, and the transformation of the public domain into a quasi‐market in particular, have permeated and reshaped child socialization processes by scaling them down to the level of interpersonal interactions with the primary caregiver, mainly mothers (Rose & Abi‐Rached, 2013). As the “social” is being considerably diminished, its agents such as family, parents, and schools have been dismantled and reconstructed in accordance with market values and orientations. Socialization has become a process of acquisition of structures, behaviors and tastes, and cognition, language, and emotions within the family, with parent–child interactions playing a lead role in consolidating this process. It is thus fitting to view socialization through family policy changes and the politicization of parenting and ethics of care; the creation of partnerships and new forms of relating to schools and teachers; the shrinking of families’ public and social spaces, and children’s sense of place, as well as through social‐class lenses.
The Politicization of Parenting and Child Socialization
The neoliberal influence on family as a civic institution is seen in UK social policy engulfed by discourses of individual freedom, choice, and entrepreneurship, encouraging parents to approach child rearing and socialization as a project that aligns with the market irrespective of the social structures of their life. The rise of commodification and competitiveness across the social realm has propelled new understandings about families and the role of parents in socializing their children. Parents are increasingly expected to resolve what would otherwise be conceived as structural problems through “a double movement of autonomisation and responsibilisation” (Rose, 1999, p. 476). Parents are seen at once as autonomous in terms of being able to carve a destiny for themselves, regardless of the constraints of their life, but also responsible for their children’s destiny and life chances.
The individualization of social problems underpins the politicization of parenting, which relies on an assumed causal relationship between parenting, child socialization, and future outcomes with good parenting being key to upward social mobility (Gillies, 2008). Socialization as a political duty to enhance children’s future prospects has gained traction in family policy in the United Kingdom (Brown et al., 2015). Children are seen as future investment, perpetually accruing capital through self‐improvement, and parents are encouraged to make the “right” choices. As Wyness (2020) argues, creating the responsible parent becomes a matter of engineering the right attitudes and aptitudes, a sense of empowerment that aligns with the “aspirations of free citizens” (Rose, 1999, p. 49). This has implications for how parents relate to their children and transmit these attitudes and aspirations through socialization. In this context parenting and child socialization are transformed from a web of experiences and relationships to an act of competence, individual responsibility, and public accountability (Gillies, 2008).
Intensive Parenting and the Making of the “Responsible” Parent
Over the last two decades, family policy in the United Kingdom and other countries in the global north (e.g., United States, Canada, France) has taken a psychosocial, interventionist turn whereby parents and children’s social experiences are to follow predetermined paths calculated along how intensely parents care for their children, the quality of the emotional bonds and attachments they form, how often they engage with learning and other enrichment activities, and the support they offer for the development of language and social skills. Increasingly, child socialization is constrained within the private sphere of the family, within interpersonal relationships between parents and children that are managed through early intervention and risk‐reduction programs, especially designed for the “troubled” families. In this context, socialization has become a vehicle for social policy intervention, adopting an instrumental focus that alters the values that underpin socialization such as mutual obligation and ethics of care, with inequality being understood as a manifestation of bad parenting.
These shifts mean that a key focus in child socialization is to prepare children to function and capitalize in postindustrial economic contexts. Child socialization is rationalized in ways that promote new forms of self‐governance assisted by the tools of the “responsible” parent and family risk management through early intervention. Children and young people, especially those in poverty, are seen as either vulnerable or dangerous, with risk being directed at them or them posing risks to others; they are not seen as active agents but in need for remodeling. Parents are encouraged to approach child rearing and socialization as a cost/benefit exercise, a process of maximizing future investment to ensure their children function effectively as economic subjects. As such the focus of family policy in postindustrial