gender development / notes

Gender Development by Susan Golombock and Robyn Fivush is an extremely useful book covering a wide range of factors that affect children's gender development. Key areas of this book talk about stereotyping, parental influences and social learning theory which was mentioned also in Understanding Children's Development. It is important that these sources are linked together within the essay to form a complete argument.

Stereotypes - 

It is quite clear that adults have gender stereotypes and use these stereotypes in interpreting behaviour of other adults and even of young infants. But when and how do children learn these stereotypes? (…) Perhaps not too surprisingly, children learn about gender in very early development. Children begin to consistently label themselves and others as male or female sometime around the age of 2 years, and very soon after this, they begin to associate particular behaviours and traits with one gender or the other. Even more interesting, young children, between the ages of 3 and 6 years of age, are even more strongly sex stereotyped than adults. 

Preschool children not only know what the culturally defined gender stereotypes are; they believe very strongly that they are true. 

Interestingly, children stereotyped other children more than adults; when pictures of adults were used, children at all ages were more likely to say that both males and females could engage in that behaviour when pictures of children were used. 

So, it seems that the content and structure of children’s stereotypes are similar to adults’. However, very young children’s gender stereotypes are more rigid than adults’, and information about someone’s gender overrides any other information about that person. Further, children seem to believe that gender stereotypes apply more to their age-mates than to adults.