ABSTRACT
We now utilize the sketch of the American family and its functions presented in Chapter I, to approach a more intensive analysis of the relations between its structure and the processes of socialization of the child. Our primary attention will be focussed on this relationship. But we must not forget that the nuclear family is never, most certainly not in the American case, an independent society, but a small and highly differentiated subsystem of a society. This fact is crucially relevant to our interests at two points. First the parents, as socializing agents, occupy not merely their familial roles, but these articulate, i.e. interpenetrate, with their roles in other structures of the society, and this fact is a necessary condition, as we hope to show, of their functioning effectively as socializing agents, i.e. as parents, at all. Secondly, the child is never socialized only for and into his family of orientation, but into structures which extend beyond this family, though interpenetrating with it. These include the school and peer group in later childhood and the family of procreation which the child will help to form by his marriage, as well as occupational roles in adulthood.
