Gender In Childhood

Gender identity has become a prominent topic in today’s society as people are becoming more aware of personal identity. Gender awareness is fundamental for self-assessment and predominant in our perception of others. Social pressures also influence gender as they create stereotypes that people are expected to follow. These societal definitions of male and female greatly impact childhood development as they create restrictions and regulatory mechanisms that guide conduct relating to one’s gender and sex throughout the course of life (Bussey and Bandura 1). Societal perceptions of gender play a fundamental role in childhood development; gender conceptions and roles are the product of a network of social influences operating on the basis of a
In Bussey and Bandura’s analysis of the gender schema theory, they noted that the ability of children to identify themselves as males or females is essential for gender schema development. Once formed, the schema expands to include knowledge of personality, interests, and social attributes associated with gender (5). Therefore children are expected to behave in ways that are consistent with gender roles. Gender identity is present in school and thus affects children greatly. The expectations and attitudes linked to being a male or female that children develop for themselves and others influence their school performance and social behavior (Burke 160). Peter J. Burke researched a sample consistent of 1,688 sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students from 58 classrooms in 15 different schools and distributed questionnaires (161). He found that children with “‘cross-sex’ gender identities were more likely to have been ‘criticized’ for inappropriate gender-role behavior” and to have experienced name calling (161). Burke established that significant changes occur between the sixth and seventh grade in students and their performance in science, social studies, and math; by the eighth grade, sex differences have emerged in all subjects. Gender identity reduces the female advantage by the following percentages: math, 40%; science, 25%; social studies, 25%; English, 25%; and foreign
Kohlberg argued that “children pass through a series of stages” in fully understanding the concept of gender (qtd. in Martin and Little 1427). Children show sex-typed preferences at an early age as their understanding of gender as a social category relates to their acquisition of the anatomy of sex. Even two and three year old children have developed a mild understanding of gender stereotypes such as those which associate sex with activities (Martin and Little 1429). A research was led by Martin and Little which involved measuring children’s understanding of gender using gender labeling, consistency, and stability tasks (1429). Many conclusions were drawn from their experiment as they discovered, upon analyzing matrices and statistics of the sample, that as children got older, they are less likely to think that both girls and boys could use certain toys and that “even the youngest children could reliably label and discriminate the sexes, understood group membership, understood the situational constancy of gender…and had some stereotype knowledge of toys and clothing” (1434). This delineates how childhood development is affected by gender identity and stereotypes as children learn to associate toys and clothing to sexes as well as distinguish the sexes. A developmental progression was found in Martin and Halverson’s research as children learned to