(Taken form "Celebrating Our Sons")
--"We hope to see some part of our dads returned to us in our child."(McGee 58)
--"Would I be able to connect with my son as intuitively as I did with my daughter?" (McGee 57)
--"I’ve come to believe that boys and girls are different from one another-Boys like to see things pop, boom and collide more readily than girls." (McGee 57)
--"My son’s need to spend time with me is different from the girls’" (Gardephe 58)
--"He loves his sisters and is protective of them." (Gardephe 59)
--"He loves to play rough, to be tickled, to be chased, to play catch, and to watch videos where the "good guy" wins in the end." (Gardephe 59)
--"Boys are different. They want to be with their dad, and they want to do "boy things." They like to get dirty and walk through puddles. They like to take things apart, whether they’re designed to come apart or not." (Gardephe 59)
--"I am more suited to raising boys." (Spence 58)
--"All my life I’ve been accused of having a big mouth, of talking too loud. But what an asset volume is when screaming at a carload of baseball players." (Spence 58)
--"Overwhelmingly, it’s boys and young men, not girls, who make the evening news. Schoolyard bullies are usually boys, too." (Cooper 59)
--"Oh, boys will be boys." (Cooper 59)
--"It’s been said that aggressive behavior is normal in boys. If so, Brendan has always been delightfully abnormal." (Cooper 59)
--"Besides adoring guns, boys are supposed to love trucks…Guns and trucks aside, there are traditional boy traits that my son does have." (Cooper 59)
--"From talking to other parents, I get the sense that their kids don’t conform to all the gender stereotypes either." (Cooper 59)
(Taken from "The Boy of My Dreams")
--Boys, in my mind, were loud, messy, and liked things I didn’t understand. Boys turned basements into swimming pools with hoses. Boys didn’t like to shop for clothes." (Feit 24)
--"But wouldn’t they [boys] they eventually become insect-collecting, heavy metal-loving, ESPN-watching teens I couldn’t understand?" (Feit 24)
Do these beliefs about sons come from observed behaviors that occur naturally and because of genetics, or do they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Do parents think sons should behave in these ways, and therefor treat them in such ways that elicit these behaviors?
Real Ways that Parents Treat Their Boys and Girls Differently
--Research in 1974 and again in 1995 showed that parents, especially fathers, describe newborn girls as softer, finer-featured, smaller, weaker, and more delicate than boys. (Bryant and Check 65)
--As children get older, parents, especially fathers, reinforce gender roles, by encouraging activities and play with toys that are gender-specific. (Bryant and Check 65)
--Parents talk more to their daughters, give them less autonomy and encourage them to help others, while encouraging boys from an early age to express certain types of emotions but not others, like fearfulness. (Bryant and Check 65)
--With 24-hours of birth, parents describe their sons using adjective such as strong, alert, and coordinated, despite the fact that there are few physiological or behavioral differences between males and females at birth. (Renzetti and Curran 7)
--Parents tend to elicit more gross motor activity form their sons. (Renzetti and Curran 7)
--Parents, especially fathers, tend to engage in rougher, more physical play with infant sons. (Renzetti and Curran 7)
--Parents play more interactive games with toddler sons and also encourage more visual, fine-motor, and locomotor exploration with them. (Renzetti and Curran 7)
--Parents
use more emotional words with daughters, and use the word anger more with
sons. (Renzetti and Curran 8)
Other Cues to Gender-Socialization
--Boys are dressed in blue and girls in pink
--Girls wear dresses and heart or flower covered outfits, boys wear three-piece suits, overalls, and super hero pajamas.
--Catalogs feature girls playing with dolls and kitchen sets, and boys with Legos and trucks.
--Toys for boys tend to encourage exploration, manipulation, invention, construction, competition, and aggression. (Renzetti and Curran 9)
--Girls’ toys typically rate high on creativity, nurturance, and attractiveness. (Renzetti and Curran 9)
--In books, men are almost always the heroes.
--In
most children’s books, boys are typically rewarded for being smart, and
girls are rewarded for their good looks. (Renzetti and Curran 11)
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