2. The first people you interact with for quite sometime in the early years of your life are your family. Therefore, family is primarily responsible for your socialization. Socialization concerns the language, norms, and conditions of the cultures that you are a part of. I believe that my family situation has shaped who I am throughout my development and continues to influence me today in both positive and negative ways. As a child I was loved unconditionally. I’m an only child and looking back on my youth I was definitely punished when I did something wrong but I was never scolding in a way that made me fear the authority of my parents. However, I was not the kind of kid that was going to test my boundaries. My mother works for the Department of Education, and is a very intelligent woman so I was always encouraged to read books, do arts and crafts, and play with toys that were not only “girly”. Yes I had Barbies and okay my favorite color is pink but I also played with Legos and action figures. I joined many after school activities and played sports. At the young age of 3, I started playing soccer and immediately found a niche. Everything I’ve mentioned thus far has depicted my childhood as pretty picture perfect. I grew up in an upper-middle class white suburb; I had 2 loving happily married parents and a structured environment. However, looking back I can begin to have negative memories of things that upset me as a child but I never understood the true meaning of until I was older. Let’s begin with soccer: I excelled in this field greatly. But this excel allowed for a lot of pressure to accumulate on my back. Girl’s soccer is an extremely competitive field and parents more often then not negatively contribute to this environment. My dad would stand on the sideline screaming at me, and expressing his dismay when I would make a mistake. Once I started playing travel soccer this escalated rather quickly. I remember one game I was playing and I twisted my ankle, the sidelines heard my ankle crack and I came out of the game crying. My dad stormed to the other side of the field and handed me 2 Motrin and said something along the lines of “take these and tell Lenny (my coach at the time) you’re fine to go back in the game, I didn’t drive 2 hours to watch you sit the bench.” So I did. Around the same time I started devoting a lot of my time to soccer, I also started taking up musical theatre and acting. This was my mom’s forte, she was never really good with sports but she’d gladly take me to theatre rehearsal or dance lessons. This created an inner conflict because all these extracurricular activities usually occur on the weekends. I wasn’t able to devote what was deemed an appropriate level of commitment to certain activities. My parents would feud over whether I was to attend a soccer game or a play practice. This conflict led to my decision to quit dance. I remember parents on the sidelines at soccer games and practices saying to my dad “she’s not that good at soccer she should just focus on theatre.” This was extremely hard for me to deal with because both were so important to me yet neither activity could see the importance of the other activity. Going back to my education for a moment, Kindergarten- 3rd grade I went to a very progressive elementary public school in the East Village of Manhattan. Both of my parents worked in the city (my mom worked at the school I attended) and we all would carpool to work. Once again, perfect happy family. I was encouraged to have friends of all different shapes, sizes, religions, colors etc. My mom received an opportunity to work as a principal on Staten Island. This was a promotion for her and I was too young to really have a say in my education, so I was uprooted from my liberal and open-minded public school and enrolled in catholic school. St. Joseph “Hell” as I like to call it was where all my negative experiences really began. I entered in the 4th grade and was