The Sociological Perspective


   
       For readers with some background in sociology it will be apparent that Charles Horton Cooley’s “looking-glass self” theory is
highly applicable here. The people in a child’s social field represent, metaphorically speaking, a kind of looking-glass or mirror. Human
beings are constantly seeing a kind of reflection of themselves in this social looking-glass--in the sorts of feedback reactions (good, bad,
and indifferent) that it provides. The problem, of course, is that impressionable minds internalize the messages that they are constantly in
the process of receiving from this social mirror. Parents, teachers and age-mate peers represent significant others--a salient and highly
influential part of the social mirror. In essence, when the social mirror feeds back consistently ego disparaging, caustically unkind
messages, the sense of self (self-image) rapidly becomes one with those messages. Thus, the child internalizes these consistent messages
and becomes intractably welded to an inferiority complex.