Page 117 - Essencials of Sociology

90 CHAPTER 3 Socialization

Socialization through the Life Course
Identify major divisions of
3.7
the life course and discuss the
You are at a particular stage in your life now, and college is a good part of it. You know
sociological significance of the life
that you have more stages ahead as you go through life. These stages, from birth to
course.
death, are called the life course (Elder 1975, 1999). The sociological significance of
the life course is twofold. First, as you pass through a stage, it affects your behavior and
orientations. You simply don’t think about life in the same way when you are 35, are
married, and have a baby and a mortgage as you do when you are 18 or 20, single, and
in college. (Actually, you don’t even see life the same way as a freshman and as a senior.)
Second, your life course differs by social location. Your social class, race–ethnicity, and
gender, for example, map out distinctive worlds of experience.
This means that the typical life course differs for males and females, the rich and
the poor, and so on. To emphasize this major sociological point, in the sketch that
follows, I will stress the historical setting of people’s lives. Because of your par-
ticular social location, your own life course may differ from this sketch, which is a
composite of stages that others have suggested (Levinson 1978; Carr et al. 1995;
Quadagno 2010).
Childhood (from birth to about age 12)
Watch on MySocLab
Video: Socialization on the Job Consider how remarkably different your childhood would have been if you had grown
up in Europe a few hundred years ago. Historian Philippe Ariès (1965) noticed that in
European paintings from about A.D. 1000 to 1800, children were always dressed in adult
clothing. If they were not depicted stiffly posed, as in a family portrait, they were shown
doing adult activities.
From this, Ariès drew a conclusion that sparked a debate among historians. He
said that Europeans of this era did not regard childhood as a special time of life.
life course the stages of our life They viewed children as miniature adults and put them to work at an early age. At
as we go from birth to death
the age of 7, for example, a boy might leave home for good to learn to be a jeweler

From paintings, such as this one of
Sir Walter Raleigh from 1602, some
historians conclude that Europeans
once viewed children as miniature
adults who assumed adult roles early
in life. From the 1959 photo taken
in Harlem, New York, you can see
why this conclusion is now being
challenged, if not ridiculed.