Final Blog for 2nd Six Weeks

Throughout this past six weeks, I have learned a truck load about socialization and adolescence. First, I have learned the difference between nature and nurture. Nature is what a person is born with, compared to nurture, which is the environment you live in as you grow. I believe nurture affects what you wear, and what sporting activities you are involved in. Take today for example, today I wore an aeropostale sweatshirt. This is the type of clothing that I prefer to wear. I was not born liking any brand. I developed what I like in the environment that I grew up in. I also think that the sports people play is from nurture. At a young age, my friends and I would start playing basketball and baseball for fun. This was the environment I grew up in...But what sports people play could be from nature too. For example, my neighbors dad played baseball in college. As his kids grew up he forced them to play sports. This would be nature because when the kids were born, they were born into playing sports with really no choice to if they wanted to participate in them. In my future profession, I want to go into business. My dad is in the business field, so this would be like nature...something I was born into. All in all, nature and nurture balance each other.

Adolescent social power is very important and consuming to adolescents. Social power to teens is what we have. We are limited to what we have through the restrictions from our parents. We are not able to fully make our own decisions until we are in college...or out. Teens social power is defined as who we hang out with, what clothes we wear, and what kind of music we listen to. Social status power to a teen is almost like their rank within their friends. Most teens feel that they need to be cool in their crowd. Teens may feel afraid that if they don't follow a certain trend, their peers may start to ignore them...because they aren't following the social norm, That's why most adolescents feel that social status power is important. And it's consuming because it takes a lot of time for adolescents to fit in a certain group.

The socialization process for children is a lot different today than in most previous generations. In the current generation, teens are brought up through technology. They are surrounded by gadgets such as phones, computers, television, gaming consoles, etc. As where in the past, children were more disciplined towards life. As studies have proved, today, children talk to their parents for approximately one hour each day. That is an astounding number!! Compared to in the 1950's or so children would be playing around the house with their mothers present. So there was more family time. The gap for the socialization process I believe is due to technology and mothers not being stay at home mom's anymore. They would get a job and little Johnny would have to stay home and find something else to do with no one around. That's where the technology come in. A concern with this change in the socialization process is children are starting to become less social due to technology. Little Johnny will start texting people instead of having face to face conversations with them. Or Johnny will start to stay in on weekends playing xbox instead of interacting with actual human-beings. This is a concern to our nation because people will start to lose skills that they need to succeed in order to make the country better.

We are surrounded by gender differences in socialization. It starts the second we are born; We are given a teddy bear, and depending on the color, whether its pink or blue, determines why we set a border between genders at a young age. We are programed to alter our activities based on gender. For example, lets say a girl wants to play football when she's in grade school, and she really feels a passion for the sport finds out that she will be playing with all boys. She will probably quit because the gender differences in socialization teach genders to divide a line in the things that they participate in. As a child to now I have played several sports including baseball and basketball. These have had a great impact in my life and they have taught me a lot of lessons. If our society wasn't brought up by our gender differences, we would see an increase in the number of the opposite gender participating in the other genders activities. Ex)More girls playing guys sports. This would be a good thing to provide a variety of people to divide this gender line that our society has created.