SOCIALIZATION

SOCIALIZATION

Let’s break it down. Socialization is the process by which humans, over time, learn how other humans behave in individual and group settings. It describes the process by which people understand cultural and societal norms and expectations defined by “what is okay and what is not okay” in society – which represent, on average, a society’s beliefs and values. When many parents say socialize or socialization, they often mean play or playdates – it’s all tied together, and covered below.

One quick note – the term “socialization” has recently gained stigma in various groups when it comes to pushing back on government control or certain types of schooling. Those may be described better by indoctrination vs socialization – so we won’t be discussing it in that context. That said, socialization does have some challenges with it – and a keen eye by parents certainly helps with navigating those waters.

Back to socialization, as intended here. It comes in two flavors – primary and secondary.

Primary socialization starts at birth on DAY 1 (technically it starts in the womb, but let’s keep it simple). Primary socialization typically comes from the individuals in the primary caregiving environment – parents, immediate family and caregiving support. What shapes babies earliest perceptions of those around them are the patterns of behaviors they observe. Do the parents yell a lot? hug a lot? interact with other people? talk positively/negatively about others? take turns? eat together or apart? watch a lot or a little TV? talk about feelings? manage stress well? what are norms of movement? say please/thank you to others? etc.

During primary socialization babies observe and take in social cues in order to learn how other humans behave (primarily via the parents/caregivers). They use this information as a starting place for the journey of being a human amongst other humans. Primary socialization is a main mode from birth through about 15-18 months, more on that shortly.

Secondary socialization happens outside of the primary care setting and amongst other groups of humans that are more diversely connected to society at large. This happens when a child starts to learn from other children (who have learned from other parents) to model from or imprint on others what “more acceptable” behavior looks like in a group or community. We are all both teachers and learners in any given social situation. Secondary socialization comes from peer groups, institutions, books, work, religion, government, and media -> advertisements, commercials, marketing, even the design of toys. This is why knowing how you are being marketed too is useful. This type of socialization ramps up around 18-24months, although socialization as a whole is a lifelong process – adjusting and adapting to new people, places, things, roles, etc. 

Note: Regarding toys – barbie dolls, for instance, can indicate or send social cues that beauty/wealth are pillars of importance and worth. Regarding media – companies like Disney have been making strides to pivot away from the “princess culture” of movies past, where women were placed in vulnerable, more shallow roles. They are now aiming to tell stories of diverse heroic female characters – and also male characters that have more emotional depth. The messages in a society shape a society… who’d of thunk it?

AGES AND STAGES OF SOCIALIZATION

Many parents fret about the play aspects of socialization, especially in pandemic times. Hopefully the following can ease those feelings a bit.

There are two major stages that the developing brain goes through which have a significant impact on socialization. These changes also contribute directly to how children perceive others in the social world and find their initial place in it – including how they socialize and play.

The first is the development of self-awareness around age 15 months. As shocking as it sounds, your baby doesn’t actually realize they are the baby they see in the mirror until this time. One way you can test self awareness is to put a small sticker on your child’s forehead and let them look in a mirror and watch if they have become self-aware enough to reliably know it’s on their own head and can pick the sticker off. Again – knowing you are not part of everything around you and are an individual – this doesn’t start to emerge until around 15 months of age – shown by numerous incredible studies [see it in action -> YouTube, 2min 46sec] – and complex awareness of self becomes much more developed by approximately 18 months of age. This unlocks new ways to learn, play, view and interact with the social world in a more meaningful way.

The second change, which is kicked off by self-awareness, is called “theory of mind”. The self-awareness around 15 months is just the start of them piecing together identity and the early days of being able to “think about oneself” (relative to experiences to date). This will develop over the next 3-5 years, at which time perspective taking will come online. Theory of mind (ToM) is what enables us to predict the goals of others by separating our own mental perspective from that of others. It’s the ability to distinguish self from others. Theory of mind is the ability to understand how someone else thinks. This is when kids start to learn that other people have different thoughts and feelings than they do and that we all act based on what we are thinking and feeling.

To put it bluntly, as kids develop from age ~ 2 years, they tend to have less emotional range and less ability to actually understand or even really “care” about the feelings of another until closer to 5 years of age, despite what we adults might think. The main test of ToM is the Sally Anne task [see it in action -> Youtube, 2min 35sec]. Three year olds tend to be fairly terrible at this test but 5 year olds, on average, are pretty good at it. It requires a lot of perspective taking and an understanding that personal experiences are unique to the individual. This block of 2-3 years, as emotional range is slowly expanding, is also when kids develop their initial sense of what is right and what is fair (very different from EQUAL), which are the initial building blocks of morality.

This is why trying to teach babies/young kids to SHARE (usually forced sharing) can be frustrating and fruitless. Their brains literally don’t understand the concept because of limited self awareness and limited perspective taking. “What do you mean someone else wants to use the things I’m using”. Taking turns, however, is a social cue and social dynamic that is much easier to understand – like a serve and return.

One fascinating aside – an insight from an old colleague of mine, Dr Eric Potterat, was how secondary socialization is what often creates a shift from a challenge mindset to a threat mindset when faced with new situations. Not knowing how to manage the social world actually creates many of the social fears which hold us back, and hinder hardiness.

All of the above coincides with patterns of play. Many parents I know often set up play dates to socialize their babies and then wonder why the kids didn’t really seem to want to play with each other. Knowing the “stages of play” can help with managing expectations. Parten “Stages of Play” is the most widely used model (taught to most early childhood educators/preschool teachers) to explain how social play changes as kids develop. The main stages are:

– Solitary Play (Birth – 2 years) – not particularly interested in playing with others just yet.
– Onlooker Phase (2 years) – prefers to watch other children playing but does not often play with them.
– Parallel Play (2+ years) – child plays alongside or near others but does not play directly with them.
– Associate Phase (3 – 4 years) – child interacts in same activity as others with others, but might not interact directly with others.
– Cooperative Play (4+ years) – child plays together with others and has interest in both the activity and other children involved in playing. -> Right when Theory of Mind is ramping up!

The above are general guidelines for “typical” play skills by age, but every child is different and comes from different experiences and temperament. These individual differences will put you down a unique path on “how” they socialize and how much guidance/support they might need to navigate it.

What Dads Can Do

Don’t fret too much about secondary socialization just yet. Instead…  

1. Take advantage of having the ability to make a plan for the months ahead to set everyone up for success, as your family might define it. Sit down with your partner and make a list of things that you would like to teach your kids at home. Things that have meaning to you. Things that you believe are important. Things you value. Post the list on the fridge or wall. Work the specifics into your communications, language, and actions when you can – things like manners, greetings, what is more desirable behavior at a dining table, etc. This will all come up again in about a year – but it’s never too early to lay a foundation or have a preliminary plan.

2. Continue to talk about and use words (“happy”, “sad”, “frustrated”, “mad”) to label emotions in self, in baby, AND in others. Make the connection to why as well: “you are grumpy because you are tired” or “you are mad because I ate the last berry, but that’s the dad tax, kid”. Every time you interact with your child – it’s an opportunity to put into words what you might both be thinking and feeling. Note: Kids at the preschool age that don’t have words/labels for emotions/ big feelings may be more likely to bite or hit other kids around them as a physical outlet for what they are feeling. Teaching babies about emotions and feelings isn’t widely practiced, but has a big ROI when done in early primary socialization (0 to 3 years).

3. Keep up the facial expression A-game. Facial expressions, body posture, and tone can send powerful messages of approval and disapproval. Babies, as part of building social awareness, will often look to their father to gauge their reaction to a situation – be it a new person, a new place, or a new behavior. This is called social referencing and Dad’s response to the event influences how the baby responds. If you have ever heard the advice to be upbeat and reassuring when saying good-bye to baby at child care or when departing – it is because it sends the message that “this is a safe place” and “you will be okay.” via a form of social co-regulation. Babies use this kind of “checking in on a caregivers reaction” in new situations to help understand the world and the people around them. Watch for the check-ins and shoot back the appropriate look/gesture.

In summary – socialization is a critical part of each person’s journey. It’s complicated and involves a wide expanse of experiences in early life. The best place to start is to consider the primary impact – what behaviors you would be happy to see your child exhibiting in the world. Chat with your partner, make a list, then give it a go at modeling those behaviors – or even at “breaking the chain” of behaviors you would prefer your child not embrace. Easier said than done, but with a little awareness, you may just be proud of how great a little human being you can help build. We only get about 1800 days with them before they start getting the bulk of their learnings from the world. Make the most of the primary socialization phase if/while you can. All of this builds foundational skills needed to have a well working theory of mind. And in the big picture – finding the tribe, the community, the village of great people with similar values – that’s the ultimate goal, regardless of whatever the process if called.

Warning: Heavier Science Ahead. I’m working on simpler ways to explain this concept. Reach out if you have a suggestion 🙂

Socialization is an important part of human development. Many researchers argue that it’s a lifelong process that just happens to have a lot more going in the first 5 – 10 years.

Researchers have long been fascinated with what the brain “does” when it’s doing social tasks, problem solving, and even… not doing anything really. Sensing technologies have unlocked the ability to look at and measure brain activity during these kinds of tasks to see what areas of the brain (often called networks) are active or inactive in these tasks.

The first findings were about what the brain does at rest – when we are awake but not really thinking about anything external or doing any particular task. This resting state, identified in 2001 and confirmed in 2008, was coined the “default mode network”.

As these findings began to cross pollinate into social neuroscience – the field that leverages brain imaging technologies to study and try to understand the social brain – it was discovered that the resting state overlaps the social networks in the brain. While there are many unknowns (such is science), we now know (2012-2014) that, at least in part, the brain acts socially when at rest. When we are awake and not involved in any specific mental exercise the resting state has been found to be associated with the social brain networks.

These same networks also partially activate during theory of mind and play a large role in perceiving and interpreting the emotion status of others. This area of the brain that does social processing, alongside the default network, has been shown to be active in 2 day old infants. It’s on for about 3 hours a day in small bursts. An interesting thought, as described in the book Social, by Matthew Lieberman, “if we compare to the 10,000 hours rule for mastery, then we would be experts in social aspects of being human by about 10 years of age”. Turns out this network in the brain is fully developed by age 9 – 10 years, which also coincides with the ramping down of the proposed sensitive period for development of “behavior patterns”, from age 5 years to age 10 years. While there are open questions – it’s hard to ignore that the brain tunes our behavioral tendencies from shortly after our social ToM is online until the time our social brain reaches its first major maturation point, around age 10 years.

Core to the social brain is something called the “mentalizing system” – the specific brain network that appears to be responsible for our capacity to understand ourselves and others in terms of mental states – such as feelings, desires, wishes, attitudes, and goals. The study of the mentalizing system has shown that while typically developing people all have it in the genetic plans – it is built mostly with early life experiences. It is also now considered, since 2014, as a core component to healthy human development.

Mentalizing is also a core skill on which empathy is built. Empathy is a social construct that comes from the 1850’s German word Einfühlung, which means “feeling into”, which described the ability to “get into” art and nature – or getting inside an object and feeling it. Empathy, as it currently sits in English, has only been around since ~ 1909. Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, needs the ability to mentalist or “mindread”, to match emotions, and to then feel motivation to act. Empathy, to a great extent, is based on emotion perception -> being curious about and understanding the why/perspective of the cause of someone else’s emotions/feelings – and mentalizing plays a role in this.

Note: Everyone is different in their ability to read into and feel into others. Some people feel that the thoughts of others are a total mystery, while others find it easy to figure out what someone else is thinking or feeling. Some people always know what they feel and others don’t always know why they do what they do or may get confused about what they are feeling. Some people are better guided by reason and others are better guided by their gut/intuition. Regardless of where someone is from one extreme to the other – a well working theory of mind can be trained at any age and is associated with more successful regulation of emotional perception and responses. It also helps with navigation of the social world, including creating buffers against depression and risk taking coping strategies to compensate for depression.

What’s most interesting about the social brain is that we start to get a primary idea of who we are based on our experiences and the words used by our primary caregivers, primary socialization (birth to 3 years), but then as secondary socialization takes over we use social references in order to reinforce or alter our perceptions of self – such at how other people treat us, talk to us, etc. In this case, the way people treat us is a proxy for what we should believe about ourselves. This is why the way others treat us can impact our sense of self and self worth. The implication is that kids who are able to build a strong mentalizing system and sense of identity can learn that cues from others don’t have to define us. This helps in developing healthier relationships with the social world. We’ve got you covered along the way!