Why Parents May Cause Gender Differences In Their Children?

For society the term “gender” intones a set of behaviors, attitudes, mannerisms, etc… which work to divide individuals by their sex and set limitations depending on their gendered “norms”. For society to begin to understand that gender, like Judith Lorber mentions in Night to His Day, “is constantly created and re-created out of human interaction, out of social life, and is the texture and odor of that social life” (54), their will have to be copious amounts of public awareness which ignites social change. In the Western World the concept that “individuals born are sexed but not gendered” (Lorber 57), is difficult to understand. People are taught to be either feminine or masculine based on their genitalia and that creates an inequality in society

A parent 's interaction with their child on a daily basis is also a strong influence in creating gender biases and expectations. In the article, “Why Parents May Cause Gender Differences In Their Kids” author Sharon Begley writes about how children are perceived differently depending on their sex and how that causes kids to conform to the stereotypes of what it means to be a female or male in Western Society. This is illustrated in a particular study conducted by psychologists and documented in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, where mothers were asked to estimate how steep a slope their eleven month old babies could crawl down. The mothers of boys were able to get it right within one degree, while the mothers of girls underestimated their daughters by nine degrees (Mondschein et. al). Some might believe that these miscalculations are an innocent mistake. However, the prejudice that comes with gender causes parents to place limitations on their children and shape what they experience accordingly, which in turn stimulates the development of “sex differences in adult behavior” which is “the result not of innate and inborn nature but of nurture” (Sharon). For a while, according to Dr. Lise Eliot, an associate professor of neuroscience at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, the general consensus was that females had a higher hippocampal volume than men. This misconception caused people to assumption that women were “emotional” because of the volume difference. A biological argument as to why men and women were different was appealing to many until science proved that men and women’s hippocampus is the same, (Regan