According to Macionis , J.J and Plummer,K in their article “ Social forces that shape our lives” in Sociology, there are four significant effects that form children’s lives : family ,schooling, peer group and the mass media. Family has core role to shape social behavior of children because they teach their children about customs, beliefs, values and way of thinking and behavior. In addition, Schooling expose children a wide range of information, abilities, cultural differences such as gender and race and informal things such as being on time, cultural values of society and being assessed in schools. Children in schools can discover the third important effect on their social development, which is peer group. Peer group allows children to break from adult’s control and not share some topics with parents, but its dominance is for a limited time in comparison to parents’. The last major impact in social development is mass media such as TV, newspaper and radio that are easily accessible for all people. Therefore, they are dominant way of communication and affect children’s behavior and thoughts. By taking all of these parameters into account, we are still humans with free will and we can act on our own.
Analysis:
It is obvious that the social behavior shapes in childhood. One of the most important elements in shaping a child’s character is peer group. In school, children can communicate with their classmates and find some close friends. By the passage of time, each child can form a group of friends that have same interests, age and social position. They affect each other, share their own ideas, and break from adult’s control. They prefer to spend most time with their group of friends for recreational activities, because they feel free and do whatever they want. The author mentioned that the effects of friends are short term in comparison to family. I think this cannot be completely true. For example, I have a friend from elementary school (for 16 years)