Socialization: The Creation of Meaning and Identity
As soon as a newborn baby is born, he or she is characterized by gender. As quickly as leaving the hospital, a newborn is dressed in clothes that aid friends, and family members to identify the sex of the child. Baby boys are typically dressed in blue, while baby girls are dressed in pink. As the boy starts to grow, he might be given a baseball and a glove. The girl is given dolls and a dollhouse to play with. All of this is somewhat normal to the average American, that’s because gender socialization starts so early in life.
Gender commonly refers to the distinctions between masculinity and femininity. Presently, anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists say that gender is a social construction, that is, it’s something that’s socially acquired. What does this mean? It means that gender is something that is socialized by the current culture at hand. Likewise, stereotypical things such as baby boy blue and baby girl pink help to identify the sex of a child. Proud parents make it simple for everyone to distinguish their newborn by using these socially established stereotypes.
Some people find it hard to accept that gender identity is socially acquired. For them, distinguishing a child between genders is more about the physical sex of male or female. This on the other hand is strictly biological, and what is referred to as the sex of a child. While accepting that children are in fact born with the biological features of one sex or another, it is also important to realize that children are assigned to a gender identity at birth and learn over time what this means in their society. Children do not have an inborn understanding of what it is to be masculine and feminine; they acquire this understanding through their interactions with others.
As children grow older, and become teenagers, they socialize into appropriate gender roles and identities. Most of these are purely...