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and general gender values, with the dissimilarity between personal goals and
public beliefs, choice and approval, what is personally desired and desirable in
general (Hakim, 2003b, p.341; 2003c, p.70). General gender values often seem
inconsistent with people’s own personal plans, and their answers to questions
about their general values are prone to social desirability (Ajzen and Fishbein,
2005, p.176; Hakim, 2003c, p.63; Marks and Houston, 2002b, p.322; Smithson
and Stoke, 2005). Inconsistencies may be explained by the fact that what people
think is appropriate for others may not be the best choice
for themselves in view
of their particular circumstances (Marks and Houston, 2002b, p.322). Marks and
Houston (2002a) found, for example, in a study among 114 mothers living in
Kent, UK, that different personal attitudes towards work and motherhood were
significantly related to their actual labour market behaviour. But most mothers
agreed that, in general, motherhood is more important than work (see also
Johnston and Swanson 2006, p.517). Nonetheless, overall there is some
correspondence between general values and personal preferences, and often
significant relations are to be found (Ajzen, 1991; Hakim, 2003a). Ajzen (1991)
argued that broad values have only an indirect impact on specific behaviours, by
influencing some of the factors that are more closely linked
to the behaviour in
question, such as personal attitudes towards specific behaviours (Ajzen, 1991,
p.181, also argued by Becker et al., 1983; Van Deth and Scarbrough, 1995).
Subsequently, I view general values as some underlying basic elements that guide
a mother’s ideal family life. The main goal of this study is to examine the diverse
social origins that have contributed in shaping mothers’ heterogeneous general
gender values and ideal family lives, based on socialization and social learning
theory (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Bandura, 1977).
5.5 Socialization
theory
Socialization theory focuses on the social relational
context in which specific
normative standards and expectations are socially transmitted. People make
societal norms and values their own, internalizing them, by learning from others
what is to be expected of them in the social system (Wallace and Wolf, 2006,
p.28; also Berger and Luckmann, 1967). When full internalization has occurred,
the presented norms and values exist, and are easily accessible within the person
herself, so that they no longer need to be presented by the socializing agents.
According to Bandura (1977), most modelled behaviour is learned through the
medium of imaginable (visual imagery or mental associations with, for example,
the person who was modelling the behaviour) and
verbal coding, referred to as
mental and verbal symbols (Bandura, 1977, p.33). If the association with specific
symbols to behaviour is firmly built and stored in memory, observing the
association will be strong enough to recall the ‘learned’ behaviour, which will
happen automatically and outside of their awareness. Subsequently, one exhibits
imitative behaviour without considering the underlying processes (Bandura,
1977).
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Childhood is viewed as the most important formative period in life, in which
the basic structure of the individual’s social world (base-world) is built, with
which it will compare all later situations (Berger and Luckmann, 1967;
Everingham et al., 2007). Socialization is only possible when the parents or
others who
take care of the new-born, have an interest - whether automatically or
enthusiastically - in developing the child. This interest can be expressed through
various kinds of emotional appraisals, like ‘good child’ or ‘good behaviour’ and
‘bad child’. These initial appraisals construct the beginning of the self: the ideas
a person has of himself are, at first, ideas an individual gains from others about
himself (Handel, 2006, p.15). Primary socialization is a particularly influential
process, because a child experiences no problem of emotional identification,
necessary for internalization, since the parents are the
only significant others in
the world of a child and the parental daily practices are taken-for-granted and feel
‘natural’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1967, p.154)
.
Socialization theory has a somewhat distinct view from the literature on the
subject of stratification or intergenerational social mobility. Stratification theory
in essence points to
resource transfers from parents to children. Parents transmit
social statuses via their educational levels and occupations, and subsequent
similarities in social structural position may generate attitudinal correspondence
between parents and their kin (Bourdieu, 1984; Glass, Bengston and Dunham,
1986, p.686; Liefbroer and Dijkstra, 2007). The main focus of this
chapter is
however on the transmission of values and attitudes by parental verbal and mental
coding during childhood, which is also the main concern of socialization theory.
Not many empirical studies have addressed the influence of parental
socialization during childhood on adults’ later attitudes. Even so, Strauss (1969)
already stated that intrafamilial continuity is likely to become more apparent as
the younger generation moves into full adult status, which includes major life
transitions such as marriage, parenthood and occupation (in Inman-Amos,
Hendrick amd Hendrick, 1994, p.460; also Ryan, 2001). Once people become
parents they use their childhood experiences while
taking on their new role
(Biddle et al., 1980, p.1072; Kossek and Lambert, 2005).
Related empirical studies in Western societies have shown that children and
adolescents of parents with ‘modern’ values appear to have more egalitarian
perspectives on work and family roles themselves, compared to those of parents
with more traditional values (Barret and White, 2002; Cunningham, 2001; Moen
et al., 1997; Trent and South, 1992;
Van Wel and Knijn, 2006). On the basis of a
large cross-sectional survey of Dutch, Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese, and
Antillean adolescents living in The Netherlands, De Valk (2008) describes how
various characteristics of the parents coincide with adolescents’ attitudes.
Adolescents tend to have a more egalitarian gender attitudes if they had a
working mother and grew up in a non-standard family arrangement (with a single
parent or foster family) (De Valk, 2008, also Marks and Houston, 2002b, p.333).
Weinshenker (2006) has shown, with a study among 194 middle class North
American families, that the expectations of female adolescents (aged 12 to 18)