Trajectories of parents’ gendered play judgments during early childhood and implications for children’s gender development

• In Event: Gendered Play and Development

Abstract

Children’s play is a target of gender stereotyping in the United States, and children show consistent patterns of gender-differentiated play. Parents and caregivers figure prominently in the discussion around children’s gendered play because they are the primary curators of early-life play environments. Recent work has examined parents’ explicit attitudes toward their children’s gendered activities and play (e.g,. Kollmayer et al., 2018), but little remains known about how parents’ attitudes toward their children’s gendered play emerge and fluctuate across their children’s early developmental years, and whether these fluctuations are linked to children’s emergent gendered understandings. We examined trajectories of mothers’ and fathers’ evaluative judgments of girl-typed and boy-typed play across the first four years of their child’s life, and whether these trajectories were associated with two key aspects of early gender development in their children: gender constancy and gender stereotyping.

We drew a sample of 501 families that had infant children (average age of 6 months) from a large city in the Western U.S. (501 mothers, 388 fathers; 69% White, 16% Latinx, 8% African American). We followed these families for four years between 2017 to 2021. Parents completed survey measures of their evaluative judgments about their children’s engagement with boy-typed and girl-typed play each year. When children were approximately age 4 (at Wave 4), we administered observational assessments of their gender development, including their gender constancy and their gender-stereotyped preferences for peers, toys, and clothing.

Results generally showed a trend of parents’ overall stereotyping of their children’s play, evidenced by greater support for gender-typical play (e.g., a boy playing with tools) compared to counter-gendered play (e.g., a boy playing with dolls). However, this overall stereotyping was highly contingent on child sex and parent gender, with father-son dyads being the most gender-rigid. Furthermore, parents (especially mothers) did show systematic increases toward greater approval of their child’s counter-gendered play across the first four years of the child’s life. These trajectories were then associated with observed indicators of children’s gender development at age 4. This was particularly true in father-son dyads as well: fathers who showed greater trends toward approval of girl-typed play for their sons had boys who scored lower on objective assessments of gender constancy (thinking that gender was fixed and stable) and scored lower on all indices of gender stereotyping (toys, clothes, peers).

These findings underscore that parents’ attitudes toward their children’s gender-typed play are not fixed, but are malleable across a key period of their child’s development. Parents of young children may be particularly responsive to education and programs that inform them on non-stereotyped play environments. Such efforts may be aided by an increased awareness and emphasis on boys’ play environments, which may reflect particularly rigid and entrenched attitudes reinforced by patriarchal systems. These efforts may have important implications for the gendered messages that children uptake and imbue on their social worlds.

Authors

• Adam Rogers, Brigham Young University
  Presenting Author

• Jane Shawcroft, University of California - Davis

• Laura Stockdale, Brigham Young University

• Sarah M Coyne, Brigham Young University

• Ashley Jimenez Fraser, Brigham Young University