Agents of Socialization

Agents of Socialization: The agents of socializations are the one who have the greatest impact on you and changes the way you think, act and behave.

1) Family: Family does play a very important role as agents of socialization. Being an Indian I was told since childhood that I will have to get married in my own caste and was not allowed to go for inter-caste marriages. As I reached puberty my mom used to educate me about this norms each and every single day. She used to give me her own example of how she got married by arranged marriage and is having a happy married life right now.

India has rigid caste system and marrying into a different caste leads to lot of problems after the couple has children. It is always a question which religion the child will follow if both the parents are from different caste. Furthermore, depending upon the religion few caste refrain themselves from meat, onions and garlic. Due to the rigid norms my parents always taught me that arranged marriages are the best marriages and there are not many problems involved. During arrange marriages parents look for a better educated groom or bride depending upon their son or daughter’s education. This further releases the ego problems associated with more educated individuals marrying less educated ones. Walking on my parents norms I got married to the guy my dad selected for me and I am pretty happy today that I listened to my parents. Me and my husband share the same religious beliefs, have same living life style, we both have good education and share the same culinary habits.

I think I did the best thing about hearing to my mom’s advice about arranged marriages.

2) School

My primary basic schooling was in India. According to the Indian school norms were always taught that books are to be worshiped and treated like Idols. Although being a Christian I never treated books like idols. However, the school practised this norm that your feet should never touch the books that impart you education. So even though it has been years now I make sure that my feet don’t touch the books and I always keep them high on shelf rather than leaving them on floor.

3) Religion

Coming from a christian orthodox family and being raised a protestant christian I remember that I always went to sunday school and never missed the church on sunday. Also my dad always taught me to pray before eating and we still follow those norms today. The other religious belief that exist in Indian christian church is to never eat the offerings given by the Hindus after their hindu ritual worship. As a child I went to a hindu school and I remember that I always used to deny the hindu ritual offerings which included fruits and custard. I think that religion comes from heart and I was really silly to deny food just because it was offered to the idols. Food is food and nothing changes its form after idol worship offering.

4) Peers

Peers are indeed a very special part of socialization. My parents always taught me that a person is known by the company he keeps. Therefore, when I was in school I made sure that my friend circle is studious. After changing to a different school during my high school this concept still remained in the core of my heart. So after I got in a new school I made sure that I have nerdy friends who help me to get good grades and we share the same competition in studying. I find that this always worked for me and good that I was in good company. This has really helped me to deviate from the path that would have lead me to bad company and future failure.

5) Workplace socialization.

I must say that this has worked wonderfully for me. When I started working as a physical therapist at my first job I was pretty naive. Each and every colleague told me some new stories about the boss and I was naive to believe it. I acted as my colleagues wanted me too and that resulted in putting myself in a bad situation. Slowly and gradually all the colleagues who gave me a bad advice got fired. Later on my boss gave all the new colleagues including me a training about workplace environment. I came to know how naive and how wrong I was. The training that I took 5 years ago has really helped me to shape my work place future better. I am so thankful to my first boss who didn’t took me wrong and corrected me and helped me. I think workplace socialization is a hit/mis situation.