Agents of Socialization Throughout life, people experience several agents that engage them in socialization and factors of communication. Socialization is essential to help people interact with one another and develop into individuals that are proficient, beneficial and essential components in society. The most common agents of socialization are family, school, friends and peer groups, and mass media. However, there are many other factors that also contribute to human socialization. There are two main groups of agents of socialization to divide the different factors: social group agents and institutional agents. Social group agents include peer groups and family. This group encompasses the physical human to human interaction that people have with one another, whether it’s with a friend, family member, or teacher. The most important individuals that are agents for socialization for young children are their parents. Parents are the first people to start teaching their children societal norms and ways of life. They are essential in starting off their children on the road to adulthood and maturity. What a child is taught in the earliest stages of life will follow them for the rest of their lives, therefore this is the most important social agent in a person’s life. Followed by parents, peer groups are important as well; they help to engage people in interactions that are outside of the home. These interactions help to show new customs and habits that other people have. Blending these different backgrounds accounts for a well balanced mix between home and outside of the home values for people. Children need exposure to other people to understand that diversity and societal differences exist. They will be more successful as time goes on if they are presented these new viewpoints early on in life. Institutional agents focus primarily on non-living, non-human factors that can be considered catalysts to socialization for humans. School is a great agent to humans since it is the perfect breeding ground for new interactions and exposure to new methods of socialization. Children need outside communication with people other than their parents and family circle. School consumes most of a child’s time. Most students spend 6-7 hours a day, 5 times a week in the school setting, so it is obvious that they will experience contact with hundreds of other people throughout their time there. This is the perfect way to engage humans in socialization. Other considerable institutional factors are the workplace, religion, the government, and mass media. In the workplace, humans get to interact with other coworkers and individuals that are working in a similar field as one another. This is an agent of socialization and a good teaching method to show humans the side of labor in life. Religion is a key factor because it interacts people with similar beliefs together and exhibits people’s culture in a less vague way. The government socializes people by establishing factors like the legal and and basing laws and consequences off of age. 18 years old is the age where people are viewed as “adult.” 21 is the established drinking age in the United States. Agents like this force people to behave and act in a certain way. Someone at the age of 15 will not behave and to the same things a 22 year old would do. Finally, mass media impacts people tremendously. It is the informal way of communication that people use as an alternative to faceto-face communication. Over the past few years, technology has grown to almost control people. It consumes so much time in a person’s day, therefore it is easily considered an institutional agent of socialization to people. For this case study, I chose myself. In my life, the agents of socialization that impact my life the most are my friends, mass media, school, and my family. My family, especially my parents, were the first agent of socialization for me. Like most people, I was guided for many years of my early life by my parents. They helped me to grow and flourish in the right direction. Their strong foundation that they taught me was essential for me to grow into the person I am today. I am only 18, however I am mature for my age mentally because of my strong morals and independent mindset. My college and friends take up most of my daily time. From class to socializing with them after and in between classes, I am surrounded by people for the majority of my day. I interact with my classmates, such as in Sociology when we have group activities or during peer review sessions in my writing class. Outside of the classroom, me and my friends interact very often. My roommate and I often have our friends come to our room for movie nights or we all go to parties together on the weekends. Interacting with other people is something I do for practically the whole day here at college. Mass media, in particular social media, makes up a big part of my day as well. I have two main social media platforms that I use: Instagram and Snapchat. I communicate with my friends back at home through Snapchat, and on Instagram I post photos to update my friends on how my life here at college and away from home is going. I also get to see how my friend’s lives are going through their posts and what they send me through these apps. Although I prefer in person socialization, I do take advantage of these platforms to socialize even more with my friends. A situation in which these agents weren’t “on the same page” is when I went away to college. As I transitioned from high school to college, the agent of socialization through school changed for me. I no longer socialized with people in the classroom as much as I used to. I noticed that I focused more on myself and paying attention deeper to the teacher than to integrating myself with other people. My habits and priorities changed as I moved away from home and I seemed to break away from society as I absorbed into an independent bubble. All the changes in my life resulted in difficulty for me to follow societal norms and behave like this agent of socialization typically causes people to behave. The way I responded to these situations is by setting time aside for just myself and my personal needs, then I balanced everything out by dividing my day into different intervals so that I socialize, get my work done, and have alone time in equal amounts instead of having one category overpower the other. Issues that may arise as an individual explores these new alternatives are: the possibility of these new solutions of falling through and not working for the extended period of time they’re supposed to. Humans are individuals that are very adaptive and will have the ability to overcome these obstacles as time progresses. Clinicians can assist by providing guidance or a subsidized plan specific to the individual to guide them on the correct path to stay on track with their plans and goals. With or without guidance, these obstacles are overcomeable and will teach the person to persevere and become stronger mentally.