Social Class And Its Impact On Children

This portfolio will discuss how gender and social class have an impact on children.
Gender is the socially ascribed characteristics. Gender impacts on children as it all around them through gender stereotypes and behaviours. Their awareness comes from their; education, peer group, popular culture and within their family.
Martin and Ruble (2004 cited in Aina and Cameron, 2011 P.11) suggest how gender stereotypes are apparent even before birth ‘Concepts of gender identity are sometimes placed on children even before their birth, with the selection of paint colours for the nursery’. Along with this Browne (2004) states ‘One of the first questions new parents are asked are ‘is it a boy or a girl’. This is also recognising how children are being

Within the family it is also evident how parents are stereotyping their children. This is done through many ways, however, one of these is story telling. Fiese and Skillman (2000 as cited in Aina and Cameron 2011) suggests that mothers are more likely to tell their daughters stories about relationships and support, whereas farther’s are more likely to tell their sons stories about bravery and achievement. This means even within the household children are being raised in, they are being brought up into stereotypes through doing stereotypical activities with their parents like storytelling, meaning that the children are growing up wanting to succeed in them roles. They will grow up thinking men have more power than women and this could lead to gender inequality, treating them differently.
Popular culture has a huge influence on young children within gender stereotyping. Aina and Cameron 2011 suggest how gender stereotyping occurs through marketing toys and objects for a specific gender. For example, boys can only play with certain toys like cars and trains and

There can be different reasons for this. For example, if a child is brought up into a working class family and they decide to defer gratification, they are giving themselves the opportunity to move up in the class system as they might have gone to university and achieved a high paid job which means that they would then be classed as middle class. (Gaine and George, 1999). This is an example of how social mobility can affect a child’s life in a positive way, however this could also affect a child negatively. A child could achieve well in school and get a good job but then become unemployed. This could then mean that they would have to move down the class system, making it difficult for them to achieve and work their way back up the class system. This could affect them physically and mentally as it would affect their self-esteem negatively affecting their motivation to want to achieve and progress. Moving down the class system could be seen as embarrassing as it would be affecting their social