Family

Family systems differ widely across cultures, which means an infant's earliest experience of socialisation is not standardised either. In a nuclear household, parents are typically the key socialising figures; in an extended family, grandparents, an uncle or a cousin may play just as significant a role. Beyond who does the socialising, the family's own position within the wider society matters too: in most traditional societies, the family a person is born into largely fixes their social position for the rest of their life, and even where social position is not strictly inherited in this way, the region and social class of a child's family still shape their socialisation quite sharply -- children generally pick up the patterns of behaviour typical of their parents, neighbours and community. …