Broadly speaking, childhood is defined as the developmental years between infancy and puberty and adolescence is defined as the years between puberty and legal adulthood. Both stages in human life as considered fundamental for, including but not limited to: building self-identity, parental and guardian bonding, establishing interpersonal relationships, observing and acquiring communication styles, language acquisition, academic learning, understanding patterns and routine, developing hobbies and ultimately fulfilling autonomy and independence.
In the lens of communication and culture, childhood and adolescence are viewed as a time of acquisition. Children will view patterns of behavior in their physical surroundings and develop accordingly into their own identity. Non-verbal communication, language and meanings (culture) are passed down through acquisition.
What is acquired will always depend on contexts: cultural, environmental, temporal, social, psychological and physical. Therefore, raising a child looks different in every case. For example, a child born to a family that is residing for five years in a refugee camp will have a vastly different set of contexts surrounding their upbringing than that of a child born into a traveling military family, a suburban family or a celebrity family.
Two ideas that tend to overlap are the ideas of nature vs. nurture and individual vs. society. In my Reel from many moons ago, I asked “Which came first: individual vs. society?” and I concluded that it was the wrong question to ask. The better question is, “What’s more important (in the contexts)?” Ultimately, what makes up a person is both connected influences: nature and nurture.
For example, if parents have twins, the twins are still two separate identities- even if their upbringing is exactly the same. Ultimately, it’s important to acknowledge both instead of focusing on one singular reason for communication style, behaviors, perceptions, etc. I often see on social media a lot of folks using “one” thing from childhood (i.e. traumatic experience) to justify reasoning behind their “raison d’etre” without acknowledging other important contexts.
With that all said, the most important piece to understand is that, while every childhood and adolescence experience is unique, there are shared and overlapping styles and contexts that shape and perpetuate communication and culture- as a whole. As time passes and technology evolves, it’s inevitable that the communication and culture will change with each generation.