Cultural Contexts

Social-learning theorists such as Walter Mischel have described mechanisms
of learning through which children come to exhibit sex-typed behavior. Boys
and girls often behave differently because they are rewarded and punished
for different behaviors. In other words, they receive different conditioning. In
addition, children’s behavior becomes sex typed because children observe
other males and females regularly behaving differently according to their
gender, and they imitate or model this behavior.
Parents are especially important in the process of learning one’s gender
role, both as models for gender-appropriate behavior and as sources of rewards
or reinforcement. Because parents become associated with positive
experiences (such as being fed and comforted) early in life, children learn to look to them and other adults for rewards. Parents and other adults such
as teachers often react differentially to gender-typed behaviors, rewarding
gender-appropriate behavior (for example, giving praise or attention) and
punishing gender-inappropriate behavior (for example, frowning, ignoring,
or reprimanding).
As children become more involved with their peers (children their own
age), they begin to influence one another’s behavior, often strongly reinforcing
traditional gender roles. The fact that children are usually given different
toys and different areas in which to play based on their gender is also
important. Girls are given opportunities to learn different behaviors from
those of boys (for example, girls learn nurturing behavior through playing
with dolls) because they are exposed to different experiences.
Using what is called a cognitive developmental perspective, Lawrence
Kohlberg described developmental changes in children’s understanding of
gender concepts. These changes parallel the broad developmental changes
in the way children’s thinking is organized, first described by Jean Piaget
and Barbel Inhelder. Children mature naturally through stages of increasingly
complex cognitive organization. In the area of understanding gender,
the first stage is the acquisition of a rudimentary gender identity, the ability
to categorize oneself correctly as a boy or a girl.
Children are able to apply correct gender labels to themselves by about
age three. At this stage, young children base gender labeling on differences
in easily observable characteristics such as hairstyle and clothing, and they
do not grasp the importance of genital differences in determining gender.
As children’s thinking about the physical world becomes more complex, so
does their understanding of gender. Gradually, by about age seven, children
enter a second stage and acquire the concept known as gender constancy.