ABSTRACT
The persons who care for the newborn infant have three characteristics that are of particular importance to the infant's socialization, since the child will develop these characteristics during the course of socialization. First, the adult is able to know that the infant needs care because the adult has the ability to experience empathy, to place himself or herself imaginatively in the situation of the baby and to understand what needs to be done. The child's self initially consists of these initial appraisals; the ideas he has of himself are, at first, ideas he gains from others about himself. Mead thus presented an early conception that helps guard against what Dennis Wrong has called "the oversocialized conception of man in modern sociology". A full study of socialization always requires that author consider the process from two complementary perspectives.
