"The Transcendent Child" written by Lillian B. Rubin
...ticular situation. According to Peter Berger, the concept of seeing the general in the particular helps us to see the general patterns in the behavior of particular people. Although every person is unique, society will treat different groups of people differently. For example, in this book people could look at the mistakes the eight individuals made in their adult lives and justify them because of their abusive pasts. While, at the same time they can analyze adults with non-abusive pasts who have made similar choices in their adult lives and punish them for their actions. Since sociology was first discovered there has been an ongoing debate between nature versus nurture. There are always valid points that support the notion of biology as well as the notion of environment, but the argument has yet to be resolved. Naturalism says that human beings are driven by our biology, while behaviorism states that most of whom we are is learned from the environment. In Rubin’s book, biology seems to play a very large role in the adults who have overcome such an abusive childhood. These individuals obviously did not have much nurturing in their childhoods and definitely did not live in a healthy environment. Yet, somehow they seemed to have transcended from such awful lifestyles to live very normal, successful lives. While there were some problems, such as rather ambivalent relationships to authority figures, the children demonstrated a high level of interpersonal intelligence. They understood what was going on around them and found ways to protect themselves against it. They also stayed away from easy explanations for their experience and kept searching for their own ways of understanding themselves. The key was their determination to avoid falling into being passive victims. They searched for ways to experience an internal locus of control rather than letting external forces control them. There are many key points in this argument that undoubtedly point to the fact that The Transcendent Child supports the biological side of the nature versus nurture debate. The agents of socialization (family, school, peers) played a very important role in the lives of the abused children. Family was one agent that had a large impact on their lives. Each individual interviewed in this book was from a different social class. Sara Mikoulis was raised in an extremely rich family where she never had to work; she had everything handed to her. Chris Lydon was raised in a poor, black, urban ghetto. Ana Guttierez was born into a family of migrant farmworkers. The family agent has a lot to do with the nurture assumption. Even though each of them were born into different social classes all of these individuals received either none or very little nurturing from their families, as discussed earlier. Because of this, each person was able to withdraw from their families and seek relationships and consolation elsewhere. That is where school and peers come in. Because the only other place the children were able to interact with people was usually at school, that’s were most of the relationships were made. The abused children turned to their peers for surrogate siblings and teachers for surrogate parents. This is where they could escape from their reality and create their own perceived one with their “new” family. The fifth sociological concept shown in this book is individualism. Each person was able to take a step back from reality and realize their own ambitions through the lives they were stuck in. None of them wanted to grow up to live a life like their families, they wanted to change themselves, to be different. They were all able to see this early enough in life where the steps to overcome were right there in front of them, even though they all knew it wouldn’t be easy. In order to overcome an extremely troubling childhood like these eight individuals did, they all had to have individualism and do everything they did for themselves. They had no one there to appreciate the things they did nor did they have anyone to show their accomplishments to. There wasn’t even anyone there to care when they didn’t do something right. So in essence everything they did and everything they overcame was for their own social gratification and they were able to see everything that needed to be done on their own. In Lillian Rubin’s book, The Transcendent Child, there are many sociological theories that can be applied to the material written in it. Three theories represented in the book are social constructionism found within the symbolic-interaction paradigm, Merton’s strain theory, and the Davis-Moore thesis, both found within the structural-functional paradigm. There are two parts within social constructionism found throughout the book. The first one is the social construction of reality, defined as the process by which people creatively shape reality through social interaction. The individuals in the book created their own separate reality from the one they grew up in. This has helped them tremendously to overcome the abusive childhood they lived in and look towards the “new” reality that they have made through the social interactions of others outside of their families. The second part is ethnomethodology, or the study of the way people make sense of their everyday surroundings. Many people would not be able to understand how these eight amazing individuals were able to put up with their childhoods, let alone transcend so far as to living successful adult lives. We must study what the common factors are that seem to make the difference. The first seems to be a distancing from the family early in childhood and the ability to see alternatives to their family. Next is an ability to tolerate loneliness. An interest or activity filled the gap and the children built an alternative life. For some, this was a fantasy, but all showed an imaginative power to envision a different future for themselves....