Gender Roles and Development

Gender

• As we talked about before, “gender” refers to the cultural and social meanings that are associated with maleness and femaleness.

Gender Roles

• Behaviors and traits that culture designates are male or female

• Examples?

Gender Identity

• A person’s psychological sense of being male or female

• Between 2-3 years, a child can identify themselves as either boy or girl– However, they only can categorize this by

hairstyle, clothing, and activities

Dolls

• What gender?• Why?

Trucks, dirt, aggression

• What gender?• Why?

Social Worlds

• Girls play with other girls• Boys play with other boys• They find the other gender “icky”• Boys are far more rigid in their stereotypes

– Is this true even as they get older?

Social Learning Theory

• Posits that gender roles are learned through reinforcement, punishment, and modeling

• How might that work?

But…

• They found that parental reinforcement really only plays a small role—parents treat their boys and girls rather similarly.

Soo… what’s the dealio?

• Books• Television• Observation of role models

Gender Schema Theory

• Children actively develop mental categories for masculinity and femininity.

• “Trucks are for boys and dolls are for girls.”

• Tend to make students like their own gender better

• Labeling objects as boy or girl objects completely influenced their memory and perception of the object

Cognitive Development in

Infancy and Childhood: Piaget’s

Cognitive Stages

Question to ponder

Do Kids think differently than adults?

Do freshmen think differently than Seniors?

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

• Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist who became leading theorist in 1930’s

• Piaget believed that “children are active thinkers, constantly trying to construct more advanced understandings of the world”

• These “understandings” are in the form of structures he called schemas

Piaget’s Approach• Primary method was to ask children to

solve problems and to question them about the reasoning behind their solutions

• Discovered that children think in radically different ways than adults

• Proposed that development occurs as a series of ‘stages’ differing in how the world is understood

Cognition•All the mental activities

associated with thinking, knowing, and remembering

•Children think differently than adults

Stage 1- Sensorimotor Stage

• From birth to about age two• Child gathers information

about the world through senses and motor functions

• Child learns object permanence

Sensorimotor Stage (birth – 2)• Information is gained through the

senses and motor actions• In this stage child perceives and

manipulates but does not reason• Symbols become internalized through

language development• Object permanence is acquired

Object Permanence• The understanding that objects exist

independent of one’s actions or perceptions of them

• Before 6 months infants act as if objects removed from sight cease to exist–Can be surprised by

disappearance/reappearance of a face (peek-a-boo)

Object Permanence

•The awareness that things continue to exist even when they cannot be sensed

• “Out of sight, out of mind”

Object Permanence

Stage 2- Preoperational Stage

•From about age 2 to age 6 or 7

•Children can understand language but not logic

•Fantasy Play

Preoperational

1. Symbolic functioning – is that a child uses to represent something that is not physically present like the use of mental symbols, words, or pictures

Find the two doors that are alike

Preoperational - Egocentrism•The child’s inability to

take another person’s point of view

• Includes a child’s ability to understand that symbols can represent other objects

Conservation• An understanding that

certain properties remain constant despite changes in their form

• The properties can include mass, volume, and numbers.

Conservation

Conservation

Conservation

Conservation

• Number

In conservation of number tests, two equivalent rows of coins are placed side by side and the child says that there is the same number in each row. Then one row is spread apart and the child is again asked if there is the same number in each.

Conservation

• Length

In conservation of length tests, two same-length sticks are placed side by side and the child says that they are the same length. Then one is moved and the child is again asked if they are the same length.

Conservation

• Substance

In conservation of substance tests, two identical amounts of clay are rolled into similar-appearing balls and the child says that they both have the same amount of clay. Then one ball is rolled out and the child is again asked if they have the same amount.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRF27F2bn-A

Concrete Operational Stage (7–12 years)

• Understanding of mental operations leading to increasingly logical thought

• Classification and categorization• Less egocentric• Inability to reason abstractly or

hypothetically

Concrete operational

1. Decentering – this is where a child considers all aspects of a problem to solve it

2. Elimination of egocentrism – kids can begin to see the others point of view

Formal Operational Stage (age 12 – adulthood)

• Hypothetico-deductive reasoning• Adolescent egocentrism

illustrated by the phenomenon of personal fable and imaginary audience

Stage 4- Formal Operational Stage

• Child can think logically and in the abstract

• Can solve hypothetical problems (What if…. problems)

Critique of Piaget’s Theory• Underestimates children’s abilities• Overestimates age differences in

thinking• Vagueness about the process of

change• Underestimates the role of the social

environment• Lack of evidence for qualitatively

different stages

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective

• Vygotsky—children learn from interactions with other people– Zone of proximal development—what a child

can do by interacting with another person, but can’t do alone.

– Critical thinking based on dialogue with others who challenge ideas

• Piaget—focused on children’s interaction with the physical world

Scenarios

• Although the parents spent $300 on holiday toys for their 1-year old daughter, she spent more time playing peekaboo by sticking her head in and out of the box that one of the toys came in. Why should the parents have kept their money?

• What activity might interest a 1 year old?• A 5 year old?• A 9 year old?• Is there anything that might interest them

all at once?