Children's preferences are guided by socialization agents, primarily mothers, who have their own preferences regarding children's preferences. The crux of the problem of socialization is that whereas infants come into this world with the apparent assumption that all of their preferences will be satisfied by aligning reality to their preferences – and on demand – mothers are not neutral with respect to their infants’ preferences; they have an interest in their infants having certain preferences rather than others. They see the task of socialization as having children acquire those preferences that they want them to have. In this chapter, I discuss parenting in general, and outline approaches that have been used to account for the relationship among parenting, language use, and social class. In the following four chapters, I address the strategies of socialization themselves.

EXTERNAL PREFERENCES IN SOCIALIZATION

The philosopher Ronald Dworkin (1978) distinguishes between personal preferences and external preferences. A personal preference is a preference for a person's own enjoyment of goods or opportunities, whereas an external preference is his preference for the assignment of goods or opportunities to others. In other words, one's personal preferences are about what he himself would like to have or do, whereas his external preferences are about what other people should have or do. Viewed in this light, socialization reflects the interplay between children's personal preferences and parents’ external preferences for their children.