Sociologies (Nov 2015)
L’impératif de « socialisation » : points de vue de parents sur la vie en collectivité des tout-petits
Abstract
Far from the theoretical debates about the concept of socialization, the notion is now an objective and a norm in early childhood education. With a visual methodology that shows excerpts from the life of their young child in different collective settings, we analyze the parents’ representations of what constitutes for them the idea of socialization. We show that it makes sense at first by its differences with the domestic space and it means primarily interactions between children. It also focuses on staff’s interventions and the importance of the collective rules of life in the setting, while it refers also to the question of the autonomy of the child. Parental representations of toddlers’ socialization highlight different theoretical conceptions: some are related to the relationships between the children, the others are marking the place of the adults’ transmission of rules. We emphasize also how the expression of these representations goes hand in hand with a large of varieties of emotions provoked by the films.
