Question

Describe how a person's gender impacts development from toddlerhood through adolescence. (You can approach this question through the lens of U.S. culture or globally.) Provide five (5) examples to illustrate this impact. You must provide at least one example from each chapter (chapters 4 - 8). Explain how each example impacts development.

Answer 1

• When children are able to express themselves, they will declare themselves to be a boy or a girl, this is their "gender identity." Around two-years-old, children become conscious of the physical differences between boys and girls.
• By age four, most children have a stable sense of their gender identity. During this same time of life, children learn gender role behavior—that is, do­ing "things that boys do" or "things that girls do."
• Before the age of three, children can dif­ferentiate toys typically used by boys or girls and begin to play with children of their own gender in activities identified with that gender. For example, a girl may gravitate toward dolls and playing house. By contrast, a boy may play games that are more active and enjoy toy soldiers, blocks, and toy trucks.
• While a child's gender-specific behavior seems to be influenced by their identification with the males and females in their lives, the sense of being a girl or a boy (i.e. gender identity) cannot be changed.
• Children develop stereotypes about physical aggression at an early age, and by age 41½, children believe that girls show more relational aggression than boys .
• Children's growing awareness of membership in a social group (i.e., male or female) becomes an evaluative process through self-identification and thus affects how positively children regard the ingroup relative to the outgroup.
• Children as young as 6 years understood that jobs more likely to be held by men (e.g., business executive) are higher in status than female-typical jobs, but only older children (11-year-olds) associated fictitious “male” jobs as being higher in status.
• Because preschoolers have strong beliefs that boys and girls do different things, they would be expected to respond negatively to gender norm violations. Several early studies found support for this prediction (Huston 1983). For example, when 3- to 5-year-olds were videotaped while playing with either a male- or female-typed toy (e.g., soldiers; dollhouse) in the presence of a same-gender peer, children were punished (e.g., ridiculed) by the peer when playing with cross-sex toys (Langlois & Downs 1980).
• One of the first stages of gender development in adolescence involves establishing gender identity, or what it means to be part of each gender. For example, a boy developed the idea that a man is tough and likes cars and sports. In early adolescence, people tend to be very rigid about gender roles. Boys sometimes act very hyper-masculine and macho and girls sometimes act very girly and lady-like. Many adolescents conceptualize masculinity and femininity in very rigid, differentiated ways.
• As adolescents develop, most of them begin to understand gender roles differently. For example, the boy eventually understood that men can be gentle and like cooking instead of sports.
• Later in adolescence, many people conceptualize genders roles as more flexible than before. For many people, thinking about gender identity is all that they ever have to think about, but some adolescents, like the boy, discover that gender identity is more complicated than that.
• The parental influences during childhood of treating a daughter differently from a son does impact later adolescent age of the teenager.And as teenager,they get exposed to more social influences which makes gender roles more rigid and have an impact on their development.For example,as a child the parents told their son to be strong and not to cry and not become sensitive as a girl will start reflecting in the adolescent's personality and would develop gender roles with stereotypical characteristics of a male or female.