Poster #190 - The Influence of Daycare on Ethnic Minority Children’s Gender-Typed Behaviors and Knowledge

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Sex, Gender

Integrative Statement

Children’s gender development is shaped by the social interactions they have with others, as well as by the contexts in which those interactions take place (e.g. Martin & Ruble, 2002). Outside the home, many U.S. children now spend a significant amount of time in center-based care (i.e., daycare) prior to entering preschool (Grafwallner, Fontaine, Torre, & Underhill, 2006). From the perspective of cognitive developmental, and developmental intergroup theories (Bigler & Liben, 2006; 2007; Halim, Ruble, & Tamis-LeMonda, 2013), daycare settings offer ample opportunities for gender socialization. In daycare, children are surrounded by gender-typing information sources such as peers, adults, toys and activities (Chick et al., 2002). While some research has documented the prevalence of gender-typing information in daycare settings, there has been little research on the relation between being in daycare and children’s level of gender-typing. In the current study, we investigated whether daycare enrollment status influences the level and timing of three aspects of children’s gender-typing: gender segregation, gender-typed toy play, and gender-typed appearance.
Data were drawn from a larger longitudinal project on culture and school readiness conducted in a large, urban city in the Northeast of the United States (e.g. Halim et al., 2013). Our sample (N = 232; 33% African-American, 36% Dominican-American, 31% Mexican-American) included interviews with low-income mothers and their children, followed from the age of two through five. Daycare enrollment status (the predictor of interest) was measured from mothers’ responses at each wave to whether they had any center-based childcare arrangement for the focal child. Gender-typing assessments consisted of mother-reported gender of child’s friends (gender segregation) and frequency of child’s gender-typed toy play. Children’s gender-typed appearance was observed and coded during lab or home visits at each age.
For gender segregation, as expected, (see Figure 1), we found that children who were enrolled earlier in daycare showed higher current and subsequent levels of gender segregation than children enrolled later or not at all F(4, 533.5) = 3.00, p = .018. Similarly, early enrollment was associated with higher levels of gender-typed toy play than later or no enrollment (see Figure 2), F(4, 488.83) = 4.83, p = .001. There was, however, no relation between daycare status and children’s gender-typed appearance.
Results suggest that the presence and timing of daycare exposure is associated with some of children’s subsequent gender-typed behaviors, specifically, peer gender segregation and toy play. Findings correspond with established gender developmental theories suggesting that children are both active and selective in attending to, and processing, social category information, as well as subject to the influence of environments outside the immediate household context. We speculate that gender-traditional daycare culture, staff and peer socialization might all contribute to our findings. The null effect on gender-typed appearance could be due to external influences such as the “pink frilly dress” (PFD) developmental phenomenon (Halim et al., 2014) or family-based practices of dress overriding daycare socializers. The poster will further discuss processes behind, as well as implications of findings for daycare policy and pedagogy, personnel training and future research.

Authors

• Anna Bennet, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Yana Kuchirko, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• May Ling Halim, California State University Long Beach
  Non-Presenting Author

• Philip Costanzo, Duke University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Diane Ruble, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author