was far too late and she had major trouble adapting, only managing to pick up basic language
and not generally using what she had learnt, only coming out with the odd word, and being very
anti-social.
Then in theory a child with a wide range of stimulation should develop good social and
lingual skills.
Imagination is a huge way of learning social and language skills for a child. A child will
mimic the behaviour of those around them, so if a child has a number of people around them to
learn from it may take different pieces of information from each person, or may focus on one
person. This will usually be a caretaker of sum sort weather it is a parent, guardian or any
other. Jean Piaget says that development of children’s sociality is in eight stages.
1) Basic trust
2) Autonomy vs. Shame
3) Initiative vs. Guilt
4) Industry vs. Inferiority
5) Ego-identity vs. Role confusion
6) Intimacy vs. Isolation
7) Generativist vs. Stagnation
8) Ego-integrity vs. Despair
Giddens tells us that a child can distinguish its primary caretaker from as early as three
weeks old. Not so much distinguishing them as a person as recognising certain features such as
eyes, voice, and the way they are held by them. If this were the case it would be reasonable to
assume that this would be one of the people the child will take social skills from as well as the
society and culture that surrounds them. Bronfenbrenner believes that interaction between a
child and its family are he main focuses of human development, this assumes that the function of
children and families can be strengthened by the quality and quantity of relationships.
Relationships with family, friends, and people in the community. The socialisation of a child is
also developed by the cultures and sub-cultures around them. For instance a child has roles,
norms, values and customs to live up to and into, parents may pressure the young person into
fitting into these groups and being normal. Values and norms help a child to socialise normally in
day to day life, they will help define the way in witch it deems behaviour acceptable and in-
acceptable. An example of this would be Muslim attitudes towards alcohol. It would be
acceptable for a Christian man of age to go out and drink a sensible amount of alcohol, but for a
Muslim man to do this would be un-acceptable and completely against the Muslim values and
totally away from the norm.
This is contrasting to sociobiologists who believe we behave the way we do in society
because of an animal instinct that is ground in our genetic makeup. Sociobiology states that
genetics is the sole factor responsible for the behaviour in humans and animals. There are three
types of sociobiology. Broad sociobiology deals with general behavioural tendencies present in
animals and humans. Narrow sociobiology is based on the evolutionary theory and focuses on
the genetic aspects of behaviour in most animals and humans. Narrow sociobiology adamantly
rejects the notion that culture can affect behaviour. Pop sociobiology uses the argument of
Narrow sociobiology, and relates the evolutionary theory to human nature.
Most sociologists reject the arguments of
sociobiology using arguments and examples like Genie and the Wild boy of Averyon to back
them up. They had no contact and turned out primitive and unsociable, with no social skills. If
it was a basic animal instinct to be sociable then surely they would have done so as soon as they
had the chance to. This could be argued by sociologists to prove the theories of the
sociobiologists wrong.
Graeme Stewart
Graeme Stewart Sociology
09.09.2002
