That's a Boy's Toy: Gender-Typed Knowledge in Toddlers as a Function of Mother's Marital Status

ABSTRACT

A child who is highly gender schematic readily uses gender when processing new information. In the current study, we examined whether and how family structure predicts a child's level of gender-typed knowledge (as assessed by a gender-stereotype sorting task) once the category of gender is in place (as assessed by a gender-labeling task). It was predicted that children from more “traditional” family structures (married mothers) would have more gender-typed knowledge compared to children from less traditional families (unmarried mothers). Moreover, we explored if this relationship would be related to, at least in part, the greater frequency of androgynous behaviors (i.e., both masculine and feminine household activities) an unmarried mother performs. Twenty-eight children (age 2 to 3) were tested at local childcare centers. The mother of each child reported her marital status as well as how often she engaged in stereotypically masculine and feminine behaviors. As expected, mothers’ marital status was associated with children's level of gender-typed knowledge, such that children with unmarried mothers had less gender-typed knowledge, in part due to the unmarried mother's greater frequency of androgynous behaviors. Implications for children's acquisition of gender-related stereotypes and the possible benefit of having mothers model both masculine and feminine behaviors are discussed.

Keywords:

• androgyny
• children
• gender
• gender-typed knowledge
• schema
• stereotypes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Preliminary results from this Experiment were presented at the 2005 Conference of the Cognitive Development Society.

The authors thank Jennifer Combs for her significant contributions to the project, and they would like to thank Dan Rempala and Amber McLarney-Vesotski for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. The authors also wish to thank the parents, children, and research assistants who made this research possible.