The Family as Cultural Agent.

This article examines the role of the family as the primary cultural agent. Each individual child must be inducted into the culture and must be socialized if culture and social life are to continue. The child must learn to relinquish his naive biological behavior and physiological functioning and accept the socially sanctioned conduct and physiological requirements of the group. The growing child is also instructed in the use of and response to language, symbols, the institutional practices of money and credit, of voting and litigation, and so on and so on. The pictures of the world, of man, of social life, and of human nature, and the innumerable socially sanctioned practises of our group life are transmitted to the child by the family, guided usually in this by the church and the school. But in rearing the child and teaching these many and difficult lessons, each family presents its version or interpretation of the official culture, placing different emphasis and using different sanctions and explanations, often stressing some portions and neglecting others. Moreover, each family, being composed of individual personalities, each with peculiar emotional bias and feeling toward the world and toward each child, also gives this teaching an affective meaning, or emotional significance, that makes these lessons even more distinctive for each child.