The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Social Development

Children’s socialization is a temporal but also a spatial process because it happens within specific localities, helping children to develop a sense of place and rootedness and feelings of belonging. Children’s socialization is inextricably linked to physical spaces not only as biophysical entities but also as sociocultural constructions that can function both as a driver for and an expression of changes in children’s sense of place and the social and emotional experiences that define it. Raymond et al. (2017) coined the phrase “embodied ecosystems” to highlight the dynamic interactions between mind, body, culture, and physical places. Children’s sense of place as a web of interconnected social, cultural, and affective experiences is the cornerstone of socialization. A sense of place is often defined by the childhood memories of interacting with family and the wider community in a specific location. Play and peer interactions are fundamental in the development of these experiences.

Children’s play, as a socialization process, supports their social and emotional development and wellbeing (Pellegrini, 2009; and Chapter 29, this volume). Free play (unsupervised by adults) appears to be particularly beneficial for the development of sociocognitive skills and self‐regulation in that children feel supported to use language to negotiate and express emotions, follow social rules, and apply social skills to solve conflict, all thought to support resilience. It also promotes physical activity, mental wellbeing, and capacity for risk management and organizational skills (Whitebread, 2017). Children’s play can be indoor or outdoor. Outdoor play relates to a healthy lifestyle and has been recently capitalized upon by public health campaigns to address concerns about child obesity. It offers restorative experiences and authentic opportunities for exploration of rural or urban landscapes, a sense of adventure, taking and managing risk; developing social bonds and rites of passage; imagination and aesthetic appreciation of the natural world, as well as the development of a sense of place and belonging (e.g., Lester & Maudsley, 2007; Moss, 2012).

Increasingly, public spaces become corporate and privatized, contributing to the shrinking of the world as experienced by both parents and children who find it difficult to locate meaning in places whose boundaries are in a constant flux. As Badiou argued, individuals and social groups increasingly experience social places as “wordless” in that they are deprived of meaning normally generated through public assembly, interactions, and dialogue. As such, diminishment of social places means reduction in the flourishing of political spaces “which transcend the particularity of the individual or group, a place of persuasion and action” (Conroy, 2010, p. 327).

In an era of mass migration, the dramatic changes in children’s physical geographies and also families’ public and political spaces impact on socialization significantly in terms of peer interactions, a sense of place and community, a place of refuge. Technology, globalization, and mass migration have redrawn these experiences bringing to the surface feelings of rootlessness, a sense of alienation in how children relate to their neighborhoods and communities but also in the interactions with each other and in finding solutions to common problems. If one of the goals of socialization is to support children to grow up as citizens capable of coming together with a shared vision of society then diminished social and political spaces are likely to present challenges in achieving this goal.

On both sides of the Atlantic there is a growing recognition of the effects of poverty and disadvantage on children’s social and academic socialization, and the need for systemic changes to reduce socioeconomic disparities. In their 2017 report, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH, 2017) in the United Kingdom found that poverty impacts upon children’s developmental, cognitive, educational, and long‐term social, health, and behavioral outcomes. Socialization is directly shaped by financial inequality. This is particularly relevant considering that 1 in 5 children in the United Kingdom live in conditions of poverty and this figure is projected to rise (Hood & Waters, 2017).

We live in an era of austerity, as a political project, when health care, affordable housing, and food security, clean air and water are compromised. The market has monetized human interactions and has created unbridled inequality in that the state is no longer the guarantor of people’s social, political, and economic rights. For the last decade, in the United Kingdom and other postindustrial societies, we have seen a shift in public debates on social class and poverty from being tied to societal structures to being attributed to individual choices and behaviors. In the same vein, social problems have mostly relocated in the private sphere of families. Poverty and disadvantage are seen as lifestyle choices and cultural practices rather than structural problems. The language of moralization in family policy, such as “Every Child Matters” or Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), has privatized social problems by locating them within the family and has also shut down debates about inequality and the role of social class in defining patterns of child development and socialization. With ACEs, for example, defined along the lines of childhood abuse and household dysfunction (i.e., physical, verbal, and sexual abuse; parental separation; exposure to domestic violence; and growing up in a household with mental illness, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, or incarceration) no references are made to their original sources, such as food insecurity, unaffordable housing, societal marginalization, and a decrease in living standards (Hartas, 2019). It is thus accepted that child socialization and its future outcomes are shaped by these adverse experiences which are thought to emanate from lack of care and nurturing within the family (Bellis et al., 2014) while socioeconomic differences in health across the life course are systematically ignored.

The shifting of social policy focus on what parents do at home to ameliorate the effects of poverty and marginalization sets a worrying trend by suggesting that child socialization is just a matter of parent behavior changes and parents doing the “right” thing. Children are approached not as active agents but passive recipients of adversity who are not adequately protected by their family. This promotes a culture of blame for parents for exposing their children to intergenerational disadvantage, essentially, blaming them for systemic inequality and reduced social mobility (Hartas, 2019). Adversity goes beyond household and socialization is the product not only of children’s immediate environment but also of material resources and opportunities, particularly reduced in the era of the “gig” economy. Child socialization should not be confined in families but supported through collective efforts such as social networks (e.g., friends, extended family members, civic/faith groups) and fit‐for‐purpose public services (e.g., child care).

Inequality shapes the institutions and agents of child socialization. Deficit assumptions about families, especially those in poverty, disrupt patterns of child socialization in terms of how confident parents and other family members are to raise children, build emotional bonds with them, and offer them linguistic, cognitive, and social opportunities for enrichment and learning. They also disrupt family privacy which has been redefined along socioeconomic lines in that families in poverty are more likely to be subjected to scrutiny about their parenting and child socialization practices. Families’ structural problems become privatized and the onus is placed on individual parents to overcome inequality and tackle child poverty. As Furlong and Cartmel (2007) reflected, the perception of personal agency has increased, while perceptions of social structure and social class barriers have become diminished or obscured, resulting in placing unrealistic expectations on parents and children, leading to frustration and disappointment. It has become apparent that socialization practices and choices remain bounded by families’ social background and access to social and cultural capital and this requires political solutions to change.