Gender and Sex Roles of development. Through rewards and punishments, they induce in children gender appropriate and inappropriate behaviours. Parents often use rewards and punishments to teach their daughters to be feminine and boys to be masculine. Peer influence is also considered to be a major contributor to gender socialisation.
Parents restrict school-aged girls more than they restrict school-aged boys, and assign boys and girls different types of chores. In everyday interactions, parents give their daughters a kind of ‘dependence training’, and their sons a kind of ‘independence training’. Media, including cartoons and commercials are known to perpetuate gender stereotypes. Research on gender stereotypes in commercials shows that across cultures authority figures in commercials were males, and women were more likely to be shown in dependent and domestic roles, or women were more likely to sell body products, and men more likely to sell sports products.
Once children learn the role of male or female, they organise their world on the basis of gender also. Children’s attention and behaviour are guided by an internal motivation to conform to gender based socio- cultural standards and stereotypes. Children also actively socialise themselves according to the gender mores of their culture. Once they have internalised gender standards, they begin to expect gender appropriate behaviour from themselves.
Young boys may refuse to wear feminine clothes in a fancy dress competition. When playing house (ghar-ghar) , girls may refuse to play the father’s role. Once they have identified with their own gender, children may model after a powerful cultural figure of the same gender. The “gender typing” occurs when individuals are ready to encode and organise information along the lines of what is considered appropriate or typical for males and females in a society.
such as references to social groups like being a member of school’s music club, environment club, or any religious group. Children’s self- understanding also includes social comparison. Children are likely to think about what they can do or cannot do in comparison with others. For example, “I got more marks than Atul” or “I can run faster than others in