American Status Systems and the Socialization of the Child

Abstract

IN MOST human societies, the instigating symbols and socially defined goals of children, as well as of adults, are ordered to systems of appropriate age, sex, and kin behaviors. These roles usually exist within a hierarchy of privileges. There is great variation between societies as to the complexity and rigidity of age and sex stratification. Usually, however, male adults in their prime have the highest rank; in religious or political councils, aged males frequently are accorded precedence. Along with the definition of roles and ranking of privileges by age and sex, our Western society includes a third type of hierarchical relational system, which limits and defines the approved responses and goals of the child. This is a type of hierarchy which ranks people in defined subordinatesuperordinate relationships, without regard for their age, sex, or kinship roles. Listed in order of increasing degrees of in-marriage, the status groups of this third type include (i) social classes, (2) minority ethnic groups, and (3) castes. The aim of this paper is to call attention to the fundamental importance in America of age, sex, and class instigations and goals in the socialization of the human organism. It must be admitted immediately that the psychological reinforcements of appropriate status behavior, that is, the nature of the striving instigations and prestige responses which apparently motivate the child's internalization of social controls is not understood. What prestige, approval, acceptance, and mastery are in terms of biopsychological dynamics we do not yet know. Indeed, the physiologist has not yet satisfied himself concerning the nature of the processes underlying the primary eating, sexual, and pain responses of man. It seems clear, however, that even these so-called biological drives reach their psychological threshold only in socially determined form. Although they are less complex functions of social training than is competition for status, nevertheless eating, or sexual behavior, or even reaction to postoperative shock certainly includes psychosocial determinants. These cultural formants differentiate between variously socialized men with regard