Socialisation

A newborn infant knows nothing at all about society or how to behave within it. Socialisation is the process through which that helpless infant gradually becomes a self-aware, knowledgeable person who is skilled in the ways of the particular culture they are born into -- and it is genuinely essential: without it, a person would not develop what we recognise as ordinarily human behaviour at all, a point starkly illustrated by real-world reports (such as the widely cited case of the 'wolf-children' allegedly found in a den near Midnapore, Bengal, in 1920) of children raised with almost no human contact, who moved on all fours, ate raw food, and had no speech. Socialisation is not a one-way process either -- the arrival of a child also reshapes the lives of the adults who raise it, as parents and grandparents take on new roles and relationships across generations, and even an older sibling's world changes with a new baby in the house. …