12.1: Functions of Parents

"No matter what happens in this life or the next, I will always be his mother."

I heard this from a 56-year-old mother who lost her son to a drunk driving-related accident. Her feeling was that once a person becomes a parent, they are parents for life. Parenting is the process of nurturing, caring for, socializing, and preparing one's children for their eventual adult roles. Parenting is a universal family experience that spans across the history of the human family and across every culture in the world.

Newborns are not born knowing all the nuances of proper behavior, how to meet expectations, and everything else needed to become a member of society. A newborn, while interacting with family and friends, typically acquires their needed socialization by the time they reach young adulthood.

Parents serve many functions that play a crucial role in a society's endurance and success at many levels. Parents function as caregivers to the children in their families, thereby providing the next generation of adults. They typically protect, feed, and provide personal care for their children from birth through adulthood.

Parents function as agents of socialization for their children. Socialization is the process by which people learn characteristics of their group's norms, values, attitudes, and behaviors. From the first moments of life, children begin a process of socialization wherein parents, family, and friends establish an infant's social construction of reality which is what people define as real because of their background assumptions and life experiences with others. An average U.S. child's social construction of reality includes knowledge that he or she belongs, can depend on others to meet their needs, and has privileges and obligations that accompany membership in their family and community.

For the average U.S. child, it is safe to say that the most important socialization takes place early in life. Primary socialization typically begins at birth and moves forward until the beginning of the school years. Primary socialization includes all the ways the newborn is molded into a social being, capable of interacting in and meeting the expectations of society. Most primary socialization is facilitated by the family, friends, school, and various forms of media.

Parents function as teachers from birth to grave. They teach hygiene skills, manners, exercise, work ethic, entertainment, sleep, eating patterns, study skills, dating, marriage, parenting skills, etc. Parents usually teach their children at every age and mentor them through examples and actions into successful roles of their own.

Parents function as the guardians of their children's lives. They select schools, medical care, teams, daycare, and a myriad of other services for their children. The law considers the parents to be simultaneously accountable for the nature of their parenting efforts and legally entitled to rights and privileges that support and protect them. Parents are not at liberty to treat their children beyond the bounds of state and local laws, but within those laws they have tremendous freedoms to parent according to their conscience and values.

Parents function as mediators between their children and the community at large. They act as the adult decision-maker in many matters for their children. They also act in defense of their children if misbehaviors are an issue in the community, schools, and other organizations. They act in the role of advocacy to ensure the best opportunities for their child.

Over the last few decades, nearly four million live births were recorded in the United States per year. About \(40 \%\) of those are first births to a mother. About \(60 \%\) of all births in the U.S. are to mothers ages 15-29. \({ }^1\)

One of the more recent trends in the U.S. over the last three decades has been the increasing proportion of births to unmarried women, which is about \(40 \%\) of all U.S. births. Nearly two out of three of those unmarried births are to White mothers. \({ }^2\)

The U.S. has over 40 million children ages 0-19. Figure 1 shows the age groups with numbers in each group. The preschool ages of \(0-5\) have \(10,258,000\) children with slightly more boys than girls (about 105 boys per 100 girls are born every year). The 5-9 year olds only have 9,806,000 children which represent kindergarten through 4th grades. The 10-14 age group, pre to early teens, has 9,792,000. And finally the \(15-19\) age group has \(10,487,000\) children in it. These numbers reflect birth trends that transpired years before.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\). Numbers of U.S. Children in Various Age Groups, 2008.³

Most women and men in the U.S. become parents at some point in their adult lives. This might include being a parent to a birth child, adopted child, step child, or unrelated child that the adults raise as their own. All of these parents who care for children parent according to their parenting paradigm. Parenting paradigms are conceptual patterns or ideas that provide the basis of parents’ strategy in the parenting role. These paradigms can be habitual, based on how the parent was parented (or not parented) as a child. They can also be formal, being derived from self-help books or formal education. These paradigms also tend to come from how parents define their roles, what they are trying to accomplish in the long run, and how effectively they perform their parenting role.

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Footnotes

1. http://www.census.gov/compendia/stat...es/10s0091.pdf, Table 91 Women Who Had a Child Last Year By Age: 1990 to 2008

2. http://www.census.gov/compendia/stat...es/10s0085.pdf Table 85 Births to unmarried Women by Race, Hispanic Origin, and Age of Mother: 1990 to 2006

3. Retrieved 9 March 2010 (www.census.gov)