The Affect of Nurturing on Socialization
In the 1990s an increasing amount of research points to the fact that children who are raised in environments lacking nurturing often experience psychosocial issues later in life. What is unique about this new body of evidence is that it suggests children are affected by such factors much earlier than previously assumed. While attachment and bonding theories have long suggested infants and pre-school children are affected psychologically by early interaction with parents and other care-givers, new evidence suggests pre-school children are not only more prone to later psychosocial problems from ineffective interaction but that they are also much more capable of learning and understanding at this age than traditionally thought. What is more disturbing is that most of the lack of nurturing is prompted by various social conditions that are prevalent in modern times. Poverty, lack of parental education and single-parent (primary care-giver unavailable) have been shown to affect the degree of psychosocial development in young children the most. Studies have been conducted which show these contributors to an environment that lacks nurturing make children at risk for poor psychosocial development, “More than 20% of all children are currently growing up in poverty, over 50% of children will live at some point in a single-parent home, and 26.3% of parents are dropouts” (Harleen 1). This analysis will discuss the affects of lack of nurturing on psychosocial development in children five and under.
Many of the above social conditions create an environment where the primary care-giver is unavailable or unaware of how to foster nurturing and attachment between parent and child. Research has shown that during the early months of life infants require the nurturing of both parents to complete the bonding process to an optimal level. The fact that many children are born to single parents does n...