Socialization Growing Up From an early age and throughout my adolescence I was socialized by those around me. Starting with the first people who socialized, me, my family, then I went to school and then to a peer group. As I grew up I started to develop rolls, each one different depending on who I am socializing with and how my past socialization has taught me to be. Based on the influence of each of these groups in my life, I am molded and shaped to believe in certain ideologies, to feel a certain way about myself, and to have developed mannerisms that allow me to function in society. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay Growing up with a police officer as a father and a masseuse as a mother, I had conflicting values ​​instilled within 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) will lead to negative results. On the other hand, from my mother, I acquired the more spiritual aspect of my personality. It taught me about my spirituality, how my muscles work with an emphasis on meditation, self-care and peace. Looking back now, I grew up to be obedient and free spirited, which are two parts of my personality that I still carry with me today. I was fortunate to have parents with successful jobs who were middle class. According to Thio, “various forces, however, influence how parents socialize with their children. The most significant of these forces is social class” (93). When I grew up, my brother and I never went hungry, and if we left our old ones behind, we always had new shoes. Every summer we went on holiday, but we only went to local beaches rather than distant ones. My life as a child was balanced between getting everything I needed and even wanted without the excessive amount of toys and the 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 had and to develop a better sense of who I was without suffocating but never needing the essentials. My parents had taught me to speak up when it came to a girl who bullied me in elementary school. They taught me to solve my problems if they knew I was capable of doing so and to use my resources. This may have to do with the fact that they wanted me to become a stronger person as I grew up, but according to Thio, "the middle class encourages independence, self-assertion, and reasoning (93), perhaps because my parents they had more social status effect on me than just the number of vacations we took or the label of clothes I wore. Their status allowed me enough room to grow and think for myself, because I didn't need or do to less than many things. It allowed me to reflect, create, and explore why my family had the means to provide for me and my brother the way they did. My mother, more than my father, had a greater impact on how I perceived myself and how I thought I did. a woman should be. At the age of six or seven I began to take what she did as my own, this kind of principle has followed me in recent years and is explained by Thio as: "Children pretend to be their mother and father, examples of their others significant" (85). My mother was always up to date on the latest trendsdiets, from Paleo, to Weight Watchers, to the South Beach diet. He hated his body, pushed it to the limit by training and limited calories, sugars and carbohydrates. Watching her as a child I remember seeing this as the “healthy” way to live. His exact habits that he practiced began to be my habits just a few years later. Even during high school I had practiced unhealthy eating habits, eating only baby food for lunch, and had worked excessively. The idea of ​​being overweight, even in my underweight body at the time, terrified me. My mother always made encouraging comments in my birthday cards about her ability to finally see my thigh gap. For me all these behaviors were normal. I didn't realize my mindset was just unhealthy until I got to college. Because of the way I was raised, seeing food as the enemy and your body as never being good enough, I never saw myself as good enough. With this reasoning about my body, nothing else in my life could be good enough. Thio would describe “self-image is what emerges from the mirror process and can influence our personality and behavior” (85) and for me this was the case. I had identified with such negative traits because I had been taught by people who loved me that way how to behave. I criticized others who disagreed with me as being lazy slobs who simply didn't try hard enough. My thoughts and behaviors began to mirror my mother's while 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 was something I had hated. It was difficult to go from being unique and talented in the eyes of my parents to being in a group of my peers and treated as an equal, especially as a young person, 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 the way school worked and that “in fact schools provide children with their first training in how to behave in secondary groups” (Thio, 94). This was a crucial time for me to start understanding more about socialization, which made me realize how well I can thrive in a secondary group. I was able to feel competent enough to get a job at fourteen and consistently move up the ranks in that job faster than those hired at the same time as me. I recognized that I had an aptitude for the work environment and a strong work ethic. However, school can provide an environment full of peers where sameness is encouraged, which can be difficult for a teenager who is already extremely hard on herself with a body image attitude and developing eating disorders. Coming from a wealthy city with mostly white residence like me, the diversity I saw around me was small, making any “flaws” I saw within myself seem larger. The more uniformity there was, the worse I felt about myself. Being in a peer group has had its benefits in helping me improve myself and my socialization. Being as rebellious as I was in high school, it was the people I associated with who allowed me to grow socially. As Thio describes, “Freeing themselves from the grip of parental and school authorities, peer groups often develop distinctive subcultures with their own values” (95), which is what I had done mostly in college. I had learned that my mother's way of life was destructive and sad and that my peers did not have such eating habits or negative ways of perceiving their own.