How Socialization Affects a Person

Socialization
Typical socialization agents that most people are exposed to from a young age include family—mother, father, brothers or sisters, grandparents, cousins, uncles, aunts and so on—then there are neighbors, teachers, peers at school. Other socialization agents include people at church, people on the TV that the children watch—even if they are cartoon characters, they still represent a socialization agent in a way. Over time these socialization agents will change. The individual will stop relying so much on family and start focusing more on technology or mass media or peers or school or religion for socialization. Family is probably the most important agent of socialization in the younger stages of development, but once the individual begins to have a sense of independence, that socialization process kicks over into a different direction and the individual wants to be more accepted in other groups than just one’s family. So a church group or a school group or a work group or a street group or any other kind of group might be more appealing to the person and so they become a more powerful socialization agent for the individual.
Some of the things people learn through the socialization process across their life span include what to believe about religion, what to think about politics, how to view gender roles or how to view different races or ethnicities. They develop tastes in music based on socialization in many cases. They develop a taste for sports or for movies or for books through a process of socialization. Their career choices could be influenced through socialization and their state in life could be too—i.e., whether one chooses to get married or not may depend upon socialization. People learn how to dress, how to talk, how to think, how to act—all by a process of socialization. They also learn how to feel, how to express feeling, how to interpret feelings. They learn to laugh, to cry, to be happy, to be sad. They learn social, human feelings. They obtain social and emotional intelligence by being around others. They experience feelings of fear or anger or frustration and surprise. As they grow they are able to understand these feelings and how to use them or manage them effectively. For people who do not have the opportunity to be around others very much, they learn different things: they might learn more from books or media and therefore have less social or emotional intelligence because they are unable to see themselves through the eyes of others, which is an important way for people to understand themselves. By seeing how others feel about us, we can gain understanding of ourselves. We can read faces and see what people are thinking when we behave a certain way or say a certain thing. We learn to see what impression or impact we are having on others.
What feral children reveal about the importance of nurture when considering the nature vs. nurture debate is human beings are social creatures and have an innate need to be around other human beings. When they are cut off from other human beings, they do not develop in a way that is distinctly human: they are not afforded the opportunities to socialize and be a functioning person. Thus, that is why it is so important that families be there for young children as they grow and develop: families can nurture and provide that socialization that children need to be formed adequately. Children who are raised in the wild do not obtain that nurturing characteristic of human love and affection so they lack a certain degree of humanness that is needed in socialization.