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RE: Do Parents Stereotype Their Children's Gender?
I always get to the end of your articles forgetting what the initial subject was and unsure of your conclusion(s). Which is more a critique of my reading of it vs the article itself.
Maybe I don’t fully understand the hypothesis: do parents stereotype their children’s gender? Because the answer is ultimately, historically, yes. So maybe I’m in need of a more detailed description of what you’re looking for in your hypothesis and research. And then a more detailed conclusion based on that.
I’ll re-read and try again to answer this for myself from what you’ve written before you actually respond.
Great article yet again.
Nice double, bust allusion.
Well I try to keep the titles snappy, instead of "Do Parents Stereotype Their Children's Gender, and if yes, how much? Or does most of the stereotyping happen by the peer group?"
The answer to the title question is "yes, parents stereotype the gender of their children, but not as much as we'd think; in fact, it might be negligible; most of the stereotyping happens in playgrounds, by children themselves."
It's not a be-all-end-all answer: I haven't read the entire literature on the subject. But it's an educated and informed answer. It's likely the "peer group" translates as "the entirety of the society that is found outside the home". But there's research that shows that teens go out of their way to label themselves in ways that will signal to others "I am definitely not an adult, I'm not with them". They do this via language, clothes, music, etc. There's research that shows that slight initial gender differences get more and more pronounced in some kind of natural process directed by the youngsters themselves. It's like when, because a male bird has a tail that is, on average, bigger than a female's tail, the males start exaggerating this difference by taking dropped feathers from larger birds and sticking them into their own plume. So we end up with birds with tails that are quite big: but it's all bird culture, not bird biology (although the behavior is biological, in that it would be repeated even without imitation). So something similar happens with children and teens: the boy sees the girls as X, so as a boy he must definitely move away from X as much as possible (lest he be ridiculed)... and if boys on average are more Y, then he must move toward Y as much as possible (to ascend the hierarchy and, at the end of the day, get more females). None of that is enforced by the adults or by the patriarchy as some would have it.