Socialization in adolescence

Broadly, socialization refers to the process by which youth are helped to acquire the skills necessary to function competently and successfully as members of their social group or culture. Much of the theorizing and psychological research on socialization has focused on early and middle childhood because, depending on one’s theoretical predilections, this is when children are seen as most malleable in response to environmental influences, when innate predispositions are manifested, or when, through biopsychosocial processes, trajectories toward different developmental endpoints are firmly established. But socialization continues in the second decade of life and in ways continuous with childhood on many dimensions. At the same time, and as we elaborate below, there are unique aspects to socialization during adolescence. Particularly, parenting increasingly occurs at a distance as children become more independent, as new forms of peer relationships emerge, and as different developmental issues assume prominence. Before turning to these issues, we address several conceptual and methodological issues. Early theoretical models viewed socialization as a largely unidirectional process whereby parents transmitted cultural norms and standards to their children, with the goal of reproducing them in successive generations. Thus, assessments focused largely on children’s compliance with parental expectations or their acquisition of culturally valued goals and behaviors (see Smetana, 2002, 2011). However, most researchers, including those from different theoretical vantage points, now agree that socialization is considerably more complex than this model suggests. There has been an increasing emphasis on bidirectional processes and children’s active role in their own development. For instance, Kuczynski, Parkin, and Pitman (Chapter 6, this volume) have focused on socialization as a reciprocal dynamic process and on cHaPter 3