Gender Socialisation through Religion and Family

Introduction

In this essay, I will be explaining the process of gender socialisation from a conflict perspective and will be discussing it in two socialisation agents. Which are Religion and Family. Gender socialisation is the process of learning the social desires and attitude related to one’s sex. Through gender socialisation, sociologists clarify the behaviour of human males and female and how they act or conduct themselves in various ways and how they learn different roles.

Conflict theory

From a conflict theorists point of view of gender socialisation is a process of a young male to become a dominant gender to maintain power and privilege in society, however, females are a subordinate group which means men are higher than females. Conflict between parents and the children is very normal for a family. Many times, children have these feelings that their parents do not really understand them these days. In every generation, there are everyday struggle between parents and children, which is when parents tend to push their children too far and expecting too much from them, and the child is blamed for not trying he’s/her best. So looking at this the parents are the dominant (men) and the kids are the subordinate (female)

Two socialisation agents

Religion

One socialisations agent that is introduced is religion. Religion is a belief system, in which individual praise or worship a supernatural being. This has a major influence on a child’s gender because it gives a pre-conceived set of rules of a person of a specific gender is supposed to act. according to Carl Marx he saw religion as a ‘class divided societies’ (Gidden & Sutton 2014), for instance, how Roman Catholics believed that they should hold on to the traditional ways by being in church praising and worship in God and that they were guaranteed a road to heaven, but some other religion disagrees to that like the Protestant beliefs system believes in encouraging members to embrace changes (Hendslin et al. 2013). But for most family’s religion was not just holding the belief to faith in communities and religious activities. But also, meant putting religious beliefs into their everyday lives. It was recognised that parents have a huge part in shaping children’s beliefs in religion, like having their children pray every day, before and after their meals and mostly talking about religion itself to children at a young age, as parents they consider it as part of their parenting responsibilities to pass on the faith to their children as sometimes following rules as stated in the bible for example Leviticus chapter 20 verse 13 says: “And if a man has sex relations with a man, the two of them have done a disgusting thing: let them be put to death; their blood will be on them”(Leviticus 20 n.d.).

Family

Another socialisation agent is family. A family is a group that consist two parents and their children living together. This agent has a major impact on a child’s gender socialisation because as new parent they will begin to create an environment for their boys and girls. Also, Parents will tend to treat their girls and boys differently by encouraging different gender stereotype activities. This include the toys that parents purchase for their children for example the boys are usually given toy vehicle, action figures and sports equipment for them to play with and for girls they were usually given a baby doll, dress-up toys and make up. not only do they purchase toys but they also dress up in gender-specific colours for instance how girls colour is usually pink and for the boys it blue (Berryman, Power & Hollit n.d.).

REFERENCES

1. Gidden, A & Sutton, WP 2014, Essential concept in sociology, Polity Press, United Kingdom.
2. Hendslin, MJ, Possamai, MA, Possamai-Inesedy, LA, Majoribanks,T &Elder, C 2013, Sociology: a down to earth approach, 2nd edn, Pearson Australia.
3. Leviticus 20:13 n.d.,Viewed March 2017, http://www.biblestudytools.com/leviticus/20-13.html
4. Berryman, K, Power, R & Hollit n.d., viewed March 2017, http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/education/DLiT/2002/family/gender.ht