Stereotypes Of Children

Early in a child’s life, they begin to read. They read with parents, at school, and by themselves as a pastime. In the books, young children read are male and female characters stereotyped which hurts the child in the long run. Children learn from the world around them and what they read if a book is gender stereotyped children may think the world is as it is in their stories. A gender stereotype as defined by United Nations Human Rights is “a generalized view or preconception about attributes or characteristics that are or ought to be possessed by, or the roles that are or should be performed by women and men.” (United Nations Human Rights, ohchr.org). Gender schema is another term used frequently and that can be defined as “Gender schema
A random sample one hundred kids ages three to seven and have one group of all three to four-year-olds and another of six and seven-year-olds. The age groups being separated is to see how children view the world after they have something read to them as opposed to reading something themselves as well as seeing how age affects their view on the world and gender stereotypes, The books would be separated in two categories of sexist and non-sexist and assigned to the children without them knowing what category the books are in. Before the books were handed out all the children were given a pre-test to determine their views on each gender. The children would read all books over a two month period and then come in to take a survey about the books. The younger kids will be given simpler versions of the questions the older children will be getting. Questions on the survey would be yes, no questions and some requiring a short answer. Younger kids would be given the survey orally to make sure answers are able to be read and interpreted and older kids would be given the survey in a written format. Questions that would be asked would be. Do you think a female can be a mechanic? Can a male be a nurse? What is common role women take in the books you read? These questions would be asked during the pre-test and the post-test the exact same way to ensure the results would not be skewed. Yes, no questions are used to ensure answers are easy to categorize and the short answer questions are to give background on why the children answered the way they did. Another piece of information that would be recorded by the experimenters would be a number of females to male ratio of characters, female to male main title character ratio, and female to male image count. Though this is not an initial part of the study this could help add to