The family

Most individuals learn their social roles (the roles of being a son, daughter, brother, sister) and acceptable social behaviour in the family setting. This kind of informal learning enables children to change their behaviour from being at first self-centred, to becoming more being socially aware, and eventually to caring for the needs and rights of other family members.

At its simplest level, the family uses a system of rewards and  punishments, and from that the behaviour of the child is shaped until it is socially acceptable. It is at this level that parents or parent substitutes can use behaviourist tactics (e.g. ignoring bad behavior where possible, and rewarding good behaviour). However, the child learns much more than this from ‘observation’, ‘imitation’, ‘memorising’, ‘modelling’ and ‘participating’. Through these learning processes, plus the key one of taking on the roles of other family members, or through empathy with their situations, the child learns to understand the deeper levels of accepted norms in social groups, especially adult-child relationships, gender roles, and social skills and cultural values.

There have been significant changes in these processes as the extended family has been eroded through industrialisation, urbanisation, migration of labour and poverty. More recently, this process has broken down much further with even the nuclear family being threatened due to changes such as ease of divorce, the growth of single-parent families and the threats from accelerating global economic processes.

The good news is that the loosening of traditional gender role-taking means that gender stereotypes can be broken down. This must be seen as a precondition for involving men and boys in achieving gender equality. This is very important, particularly when we consider that the process of socialisation begins in the family. Thus, the new social attitudes and norms that are transferred to both boys and girls will influence their perceptions of their own roles, as well as the roles of others.

The contemporary home needs to become a more consciously educative environment. This is partly because of the need to support the learning of the young people who are faced with the challenges of making their way in a demanding adult world, and partly because the parents are facing more complex financial and occupational challenges which mean they need to keep upgrading their own knowledge. The home can also provide an important setting for the education of both boys and girls on issues of sexual and reproductive health, as well as alcohol and drug abuse. There is an urgent need for the family to increase the awareness of boys and girls of the consequences of uninformed sexual behaviour and the spread of HIV/AIDS.