Socialization Growing upFrom an early age and throughout my adolescence, I was socialized by those around me. Starting with the first people who socialized me, my family, I then moved to school and then to a peer group. As I got older, I began to develop roles, each different depending on who I socialize with and how my past socialization taught me to be. Based on the influence of each of these groups in my life, I am shaped and molded by belief in certain ideologies, by a certain perception of myself, and by the fact that I have developed ways that allow me to function in society. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get an Original Essay Growing up with a police officer as a father and a massage therapist as a mother, contrasting values ​​were instilled in me. On the one hand, I had to obey authority, follow rules and laws, and live with the knowledge that drugs and alcohol (in excess) would lead to negative results. At the other end, thanks to my mother, I acquired the freest aspect of my personality. She taught me about my own spirituality, how my muscles work with a focus on meditation, self-care and peace. Looking back, I was raised to be both obedient and free-spirited, two aspects of my personality that remain with me today. I was fortunate to have parents with successful jobs who were middle class. According to Thio, “various forces, however, influence the way parents socialize their children. The most important of these forces is social class” (93). When I was growing up, my brother and I were never hungry, and we always had new shoes if we lost our old ones. We took vacations every summer, but just went to local beaches rather than faraway beaches. My life as a child was balanced between getting everything I needed and even wanted, without the excessive amount of toys and lavish vacations that some of my friends' families took. This balance in my life helped me understand the value of money better than some of my friends and develop a better sense of who I was, without stifling myself but never needing the basics. My parents taught me to express myself. when it came to a girl who bullied me in elementary school. They taught me to solve my own problems if they knew I was capable and to use my resources. This may be because they wanted me to become a stronger person as I grew up, but according to Thio, "the middle class encourages independence, assertiveness, and reasoning (93), perhaps be because the social status of my parents was higher.” effect on me than just the number of vacations we took or the label of the clothes I wore. Their status gave me enough space to grow and reason for myself, because I neither needed nor lacked many things. It allowed me to think, create, and explore because my family had the means to support my brother and me in this way. My mother, more than my father, had a greater impact on how I viewed myself and how I viewed myself. I thought a woman should be. At the age of six or seven, I began to take ownership of what she was doing, with this type of director following me into my later years. This act is normal and explained by Thio as follows: “The children pretend to be their mother and father, examples of their loved ones” (85). My mother wasalways up to date on the latest diet trends, from the Paleo Diet to Weight Watchers to the South Beach Diet. She hated her body, pushed it to extremes by working out, and restricted calories, sugar, and carbs. Observing her as a child, I remember that she considered this a “healthy” way to live. The exact habits she practiced began to become mine only a few years later. Even in high school, I had adopted unhealthy eating habits, only eating baby food for lunch, and working out excessively. The idea of ​​being overweight, even in my underweight body at the time, terrified me. My mother would always make encouraging comments in my birthday cards about how she could finally see the gap between my thighs. To me, all of these behaviors were normal. I didn't realize that my mentality was just plain unhealthy until I got to college. Because of the way I was raised, seeing food as your enemy and your body is never good enough, I considered myself never good enough. With this reasoning about my body, nothing else in my life could be enough. Thio would describe “self-image is what emerges from the mirror process and can affect our personality and behavior” (85) and for me, it does. I identified with such negative traits because people who loved me taught me how to act. I criticized others who disagreed with me for being lazy people who just weren't trying hard enough. My thoughts and behaviors began to mirror those of my mother when I was in high school. Although, being the free-spirited person that I am, school was difficult in that “schools are more likely to contribute to uniformity” (Thio, 94), which I had hated. Making the transition from being unique and talented in my parents' eyes to being part of a peer group and being treated as an equal has been difficult, especially in my youth, when I was stubborn and unwilling to listen to the rules. As I grew up in high school, I began to accept that this was simply how school worked and that "in fact, schools provide children with early training in how to behave in secondary groups" (Thio , 94 years old). It was a pivotal time for me to begin to understand socialization better, which made me realize how much I could thrive in a secondary group. I was able to feel competent enough to get a job at fourteen and gradually move up the ranks in that position faster than those hired at the same time as me. I recognized that I had aptitude for the workplace and a strong work ethic. However, school can provide an environment full of peers where uniformity is encouraged, which can be difficult for a teenager already extremely hard on herself with developing body image and eating disorders. Being from a wealthy town with the majority of the residence being white like me, the diversity I saw around me was small, which made any "flaw" I saw in myself seem bigger. The more uniformity, the worse I felt about myself. Being part of a peer group had its benefits in helping me improve myself and improve my socialization. Being as rebellious as I was in high school, it was the people I associated with that allowed me to grow socially. As Thio describes: “By freeing themselves from the influence of parental and school authorities, peer groups often develop distinct subcultures.