Gender, Parenting, and the Resourcing of Early Learning

• In Event: Roundtable Session 52
  In Roundtable Session: De/Colonizing Gender and/in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

This paper focuses on the role of gender in parents’ access to, selection of and use of goods and services which claim to offer some educational benefit to young children. Gender is defined as a complex of three integrally related aspects: symbolism, structure and identity. Individual interviews with forty parents (including 10 fathers) were employed to collect information on the kinds of resources they accessed, their reasons for seeking out these resources, their views on the usefulness of resources and any difficulties experienced in accessing resources. I compare mothers’ and fathers’ standpoints in relation to the resourcing of early learning as well as parents’ orientations to resourcing girls and boys.

Author

• Sue Mary Nichols, University of South Australia