Human infants are born without any culture.  They must be transformed by their parents, teachers, and others into cultural and socially adept individuals.  The general process of acquiring culture is referred to as socialization. 

During socialization, we learn the language of the culture we are born into as well as the roles we are to play in life.  For instance, girls learn how to be daughters, sisters, friends, wives, and mothers.  In addition, they learn about the occupational roles that their society has in store for them.  We also learn and usually adopt our culture's norms through the socialization process.  

Norms are the conceptions of appropriate and expected behavior that are held by most members of the society.  The term enculturation is also used for the process of being socialized to a particular culture.  The acceleration of technology allows people, nowadays, more opportunities to enlarge their social circles, either by face-to-face encounter or via the internet.

The ability to socialize gradually takes the pivotal position in terms of social progression. No doubt that proper training in socialization is essential in both one's healthy mental development and his potential capability to make contribution to society. This can be explicitly reflected in school activities.

Children learn about the importance of listening politely to his opponents with an open mind; they know how to negotiate in proper way; they find out the bad outcome by solving problems with violence. All that provides the interpersonal skills needed in the surviving in this society.

Socialization takes place during one's entire life; it is the process that one learns the physical, mental and social skills one needs to survive in their culture. It is important for one's well-being and it is also important for the protection and constancy of one's society. Two major forces that socialization depends on are heredity and the environment.

Heredity determines one's physical make-up, while environment affects how one develops and behaves. Development is obtained by interacting with people. It strongly influences what kind of person one becomes, and it begins in very early childhood. There are four major agents of socialization are family, school, peers, and mass media.

Many people today live on the guidelines of these elements.  The family probably has the strongest influence on a person's life. It is a primary agent of socialization. Family is the grounds by which an individual learns most of the basic or primary norms and values of society, such as the difference between right and wrong, social manners and proper behavior and gender roles.

Other ways parents enforce socialization is by seeking out playmates for their children, joining play groups, or joining organizations. They do this because they usually want their preschool children to learn how to interact with adults and children outside of their family. The role of a parent is very important to influence the child's development of all the other agents.

The school and peer agent is also important because it helps a child learn social friendship, loyalty, values, and patriotism skills with other peers. I think these two agents are very similar due to the fact when you go to school and get peers and this is where you learn about peer pressure at school and many other places. Peer groups serve as reference groups.

Peer groups teach individuals how to share, handle conflict, participate with others, and see how capable their mental, physical and social abilities are. Peers help as adolescents go through their identity problems when they are not sure what they are doing and who exactly they are.

The way people dress, behave and their attitudes are encouraged by peers, while others will be ridiculed, rejected, or modified by them. Having the mass media as one of our major agents of socialization could be very hard on our society today.

Watching TV could be a good thing when an actor or actress is on TV in different shows or music it could bring many good things like being a role model for an adolescent teenager who wants someone to looks up too. They are unsure about how influential it is and if it is harmful.

The report says, starting at the age of 12, an average child watches 17,000 hours of television by their high school graduation; while they only spend 11,000 hours in school. Television wins the popularity contest hands down among other forms of media, such as radio, magazines and newspapers.

Reasons why television is more popular are the continuous rapid movements and loud sounds which cause the viewer to be completely oriented to the screen, the interactions between people and events that are vivid and short causing several senses to be stimulated by the bombardment of sights and sounds. Another aspect, television influences children is because they have not developed the capacity to distinguish fantasy from reality, they are unable to distinguish between a story line and a commercial, and they do not know what is true and what is fictional .

Too much violence in children's programs is a concern because children may come to believe that the fantasy violence they see on T.V is commonplace and acceptable in order to resolve problems in society. Media also has been guilty at times for stereotyping racial minorities, as well as young people and old people, among other groups.

Thus, young children may think it is okay to discriminate and demonstrate/exhibit prejudice. Marketers are also guilty of often using the media as a way to sell their product because they can brainwash children to want their products and create a fantasy for them.

To avoid falling into confusion and disorder, societies must have ground rules that most of its members will accept without question. Waiting one's turn in a line-up at a store, and saying, "please," and "thank you", are society's social norms and values that people must be willing to obey. This is why it is important that individuals learn how to socialize appropriately.

They can establish this with family, peers and the media. Successful socialization can result in uniformity within a society.  If all children receive the same socialization, it is likely that they will share the same beliefs and expectations. This fact has been a strong motivation for national governments around the world to standardize education and make it compulsory for all children.  Deciding what things will be taught and how they are taught is a powerful political tool for controlling people. 

Those who internalize the norms of society are less likely to break the law or to want radical social changes.  In all societies, however, there are individuals who do not conform to culturally defined standards of normalcy because they were "abnormally" socialized, which is to say that they have not internalized the norms of society and are usually labeled by their society as deviant or even mentally ill. Henceforth we have to ratify socialization of children and youths aiming at cultural and social uniformity and harmony, cultivated in our society.