Here is a transcript from a video clip shown to three- to six-year-old children, by psychologist Luigi Castelli and his colleagues:
ABDUL [black adult male]: Hi, my name is Abdul and I come from Senegal which is an African country.
GASPARE [white adult male]: Hi, my name is Gaspare. I come from Padova. I’m Italian. I have nothing against the fact that people from other countries and, possibly, with a different colour of the skin, come and live in Italy with us. I’m happy if you come to live in our city. I believe we must be tolerant and welcome everyone in the same way, and I do not really care about the colour of the skin. For instance, if my child would become friends with a child whose skin is black I would be very happy. In order to live in a better world we must overcome the differences between us.
When it comes to holding a generous, open-armed policy towards people with different skin tones Gaspare, I think we can all agree, cannot be faulted. Psychologist Luigi Castelli and colleagues showed two groups of preschoolers a video clip in which Gaspare expressed these egalitarian, colour-blind opinions, and then asked the children questions like Would you like to play with Abdul? or How much do you like Abdul? A third and fourth group of children were asked the same questions after seeing a slightly different clip. In this alternative clip, Gaspare steered clear of race politics altogether, and talked only about his work in a dress shop.
So, which group of children felt most warmly towards Abdul? Was it, as you might expect, the children who heard Gaspare’s positive, moving words about our common humanity? In fact, no. It made no difference. But something else, unspoken, did.
In half of his positive speech clips, Gaspare’s nonverbal behaviour matched his words: he shook Abdul’s hand with enthusiasm; he spoke enthusiastically; he sat near Abdul, leaned towards him, and regularly looked right at him. But in the other positive speech clip, Gaspare’s actions belied his verbal sentiments: his handshake was flaccid; his voice was slow and hesitant. Gaspare also kept an empty seat between himself and Abdul, leaned away from his African acquaintance, and avoided eye contact. Likewise, in the verbally neutral clip, sometimes Gaspare’s body language was positive, and sometimes it was negative. It was these nonverbal cues the children picked up on. To them, the nonverbal actions spoke louder than words. Children who saw the enthusiastic physical behaviours – regardless of what Gaspare actually said – felt significantly more friendly towards Abdul than children who saw Gaspare’s body express unease.12
To the researchers, this was no surprise, just another piece of the puzzle of children’s racial attitudes. It’s natural to assume that children, at least to some extent, pick up their views about other ethnic groups from their parents. And yet when you canvass parents and their children on this subject, their answers simply don’t match up. More (or less) prejudiced parents don’t have more (or less) prejudiced children, particularly at younger ages.13 But that’s when you just ask outright. Recently, however, Castelli and his colleagues found that white mothers’ implicit race attitudes do match the racial attitudes of their offspring. Their consciously expressed attitudes seem to have no influence on the children. But the stronger the mother’s implicit negativity towards black people (measured using the Implicit Association Test), the less likely her child is to choose a black child to play with, and to rate a black peer in a positive, charitable fashion.14
When it comes to race, children seem to be learning from the wrong half of the half-changed mind. That’s not to say that children are oblivious to what is said. (For ethical reasons, the researchers didn’t show a racist clip. As they point out, if they had used this as a contrast to the positive message they might well have seen a greater impact of the verbal message.) The point is that they also learn from what is not said, but expressed in other, more subtle ways, and even when this contradicts the spoken message. To my knowledge, no one has yet explored whether children’s gender attitudes are influenced by a parent’s implicit gender associations. But, intriguingly, there seems to be no relationship at all between parents’ and children’s explicit gender attitudes in those early preschool years.15 Castelli’s findings prick the suspicion that it is not that young children are learning nothing about gender from their parents, but are instead picking up on the gendered patterns of their parents’ implicit minds. Is it possible, for example, that parents subtly and inadvertently convey ambivalence about cross-gender play – an unenthusiastic tone of voice, a withdrawing of attention – from which infants perceive and learn? As psychologists Nancy Weitzman and her colleagues suggested over twenty years ago, ‘expressed attitudes may be easier to change than deeply entrenched, nonconscious forms of behavior’.16 The research tools are now available for developmental psychologists to investigate how parents’ implicit attitudes about gender affect their behaviour and their children, and it will be interesting to see what they find.
There are certainly more than a few signs that contemporary parents have mixed feelings about the very idea of successfully rearing unisex children. A large meta-analysis in 1991 gathered together all the studies that looked at whether parents treat boys and girls differently.17 While in many ways parents seemed to treat boys and girls much the same, in one domain they clearly did not: parents encouraged gender-typed activities and play, and discouraged cross-gender behaviour. Of course, this study is now around two decades old and there are some indications that, these days, parents are actively encouraging cross-gender play. But, scratch the surface of these genuinely egalitarian values, and the contradictions of the half-changed mind still appear, especially for boys. The parents in a small study of twenty-six preschoolers from a southeastern city almost all agreed that girls should be encouraged to play with building blocks and toy trucks, and to play Little League and other competitive sports. However, when the researchers asked the children themselves whether their parents would approve of cross-gender play (What would Mum think of that? Would Dad like you to play with one of those?), they heard a rather different story. For instance, only a quarter of the three-year-old girls thought that their mother would want them to play with a baseball and mitt, or a skateboard (both of which the little girls readily identified as ‘for boys’), compared with 80 percent of the three-year-old boys.
The same parents also all but unanimously thought it important for both boys and girls to develop social skills. Yet in apparent contradiction to this belief a third of them, when asked, were either uncertain whether they would buy their son a doll or would definitely not do so. Interestingly, the three- and five-year-old boys tested were well-aware of this ambivalence, with just two of the twelve boys of the opinion that their parents would be happy for them to play with a doll. That’s a far cry from a gender-neutral environment.18
The parents interviewed by Emily Kane, by contrast, were more liberal (although we don’t know how the children perceived their parents’ attitudes). She found that these parents ‘celebrated’ and even encouraged gender nonconformity in their young daughters. ‘I don’t want her just to color and play with dolls, I want her to be athletic’, one father said. They also mostly ‘accepted, and often even celebrated’ activities they thought would promote domestic skills, nurturance and empathy in their sons – including play with dolls, toy kitchens and tea sets (although sometimes this acceptance was rather grudging). However, even in these parents there was evidence that the gender border was being carefully negotiated and patrolled for boys. Many parents drew the line at Barbie, for instance (who was regularly requested by the little boys) or tried to diminish her quintessential femininity: ‘I would ask him, “What do you want for your birthday?” … and he always kept saying Barbie … So we compromised, we got him a NASCAR [National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing] Barbie.’ Another father said that if his son ‘really wanted to dance, I’d let him …, but at the same time, I’d be doing other things to compensate for the fact that I signed him up for dance.’19
In curious contradiction to their explanations of their preschoolers’ gender-
stereotypical behaviours (many, you will recall, turning to biology as the only possible remaining explanation), Kane found it ‘striking … how frequently parents indicated that they took action to craft an appropriate gender performance with and for their preschool-aged sons, viewing masculinity as something they needed to work on to accomplish.’20 Cross-gender behaviour is seen as less acceptable in boys than it is in girls: unlike the term ‘tomboy’ there is nothing positive implied by its male counterpart, the ‘sissy’.21 Parents were aware of the backlash they might, or indeed had, received from others when they allowed their children to deviate from gender norms. ‘[P]arents [are] thinking consciously, even strategically, about their children’s gender performance, and sometimes crafting it to ensure not their children’s free agency but instead their structured and successful performance of gender’, argues Kane.22
From these admittedly limited data, an interesting picture emerges. As Orenstein described the state of flux of the twenty-first century, ‘[o]ld patterns and expectations have broken down, but new ideas seem fragmentary, unrealistic, and often contradictory.’23 Some parents, at least, genuinely want to rear children outside the constraints of rigid stereotypes, yet even before children are born parents have different expectations of them. They sincerely believe that boys and girls deserve to be free to develop their own interests and to become rounded individuals – gender norms be damned – yet at the same time they channel and craft their children’s ‘gender performances’, especially for boys. (For girls, this pressure may kick in more during adolescence, some researchers suggest.) Parents say they are open-minded about their sons taking up nontraditional careers, like nursing – but in the very same questionnaire they reveal a preference that their sons behave in gender-typical ways. And, even though they sincerely claim to hold the two sexes as equal, parents simultaneously devalue the feminine and limit boys’ access to it.
A parent with a half-changed mind (or perhaps even mostly unchanged with an egalitarian veneer) will not parent in a spotlessly gender-neutral fashion. A parent who has just read an impressively scientific-sounding popular book or article about how boy and girl babies come differently prewired, or have differently structured brains, might not even try. Babies, in turn, seem to be primed to like what is familiar and are remarkably sensitive to their social world. So what, then, are we to make of recent evidence that children show gender-stereotyped interests before they are even two years old? For example, psychologist Gerianne Alexander and her colleagues measured how long five- to six-month-old babies looked at a pink dolly and a blue truck. There weren’t any differences between boys and girls in how long they looked at each type of toy. But when the researchers counted up the number of times the babies briefly fixated on each toy (that is, when gaze remained still for at least 100 milliseconds), they found that girls were less interested in the truck: they fixated on it less than on the doll and less than did boys.24 And at just one year of age – when offered cars, dolls, beauty sets and so on – boys and girls have been found to play in sex-stereotypical ways in the lab. One study, for instance, found that one-year-old boys played longer with boyish toys than did girls, while girls spent longer with girlish toys than did boys. At this age cross-gender toys haven’t yet acquired a ‘hot potato’ quality and the differences in play behaviour are very modest.25 Despite the gender differences seen in this particular study, for instance, boys still spent 37 percent of their total playing time with girlish toys (compared with 46 percent of their time with boyish toys).26 Similarly, another study of one-year-olds found that, although boys this age played more with the boyish toys, the sexes spent a similar amount of time with girlish toys and were equally likely to choose a ball, a doll or a car as a gift from the experimenter.27
Still, there are differences, and at first glance these findings seem to toll the bell for the idea that children’s gendered play preferences are purely socially constructed. The reason is that infants at this young age, so far as we know, are not aware of their own sex. They can’t therefore be basing their behaviour on reasoning along the lines of I am a girl and girls do not play with trucks. Sax argues that the findings from this kind of research spell an end to the ‘“Dark Ages” – that period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s during which it was politically incorrect to suggest that there were innate differences in how girls and boys learn and play’.28 Yet do these subtle differences reflect hardwired predispositions that differ between the sexes (a possibility that, by the way, developmental psychologists who are interested in social influences on play behaviour readily acknowledge)? Or do they reflect babies’ sensitivity to their social and physical worlds? Does a six-month-old girl look longer at a pink doll than a blue truck because that’s how she’s wired or because she’s seen more pink and more dolls in her short life (especially paired with pleasurable experiences with caregivers) and less blue and fewer trucks?29 Does a one-year-old boy really play less with a plastic tea set because of hardwiring?30 What are we to make of boys’ greater interest in looking at balls and vehicles over feminine toys at nine months of age, given that six months earlier they looked at dolls, ovens and strollers just as much?31 These are questions that deserve some thought.
Whether subtle (or even not-so-subtle) differences in the experiences, environments, toys, encouragement, and nonverbal communication offered to baby boys and girls can explain their modestly gendered early interests remains to be seen. Infants and toddlers don’t need to know whether they are a boy or a girl to nonetheless be responsive to their parents’ ‘structuring, channeling, modeling, labeling, and reacting evaluatively to gender-linked conduct’, as psychologists Albert Bandura and Kay Bussey have pointed out.32
But what is indisputable is that, as we’ll see in the next chapter, we make the mystery of gender as easy as possible for children to solve.
If you’re ever feeling bored and aimless in a shopping centre, try this experiment. Visit ten children’s clothing stores, and each time approach a salesperson saying that you are looking for a present for a newborn. Count how many times you are asked, ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ You are likely to have a 100 percent hit rate if you try this one spare afternoon. It is so ubiquitous now to dress and accessorise boys and girls differently, from birth, that it is easy to forget to wonder why we do this or to ask what children themselves might make of this rigidly adhered-to code. And it is a rigid code. I recently stood in a clothing store, paralysed with indecision as I deliberated which outfit to choose for a friend’s new baby girl. The cutest one had little honking cars on it. Yet even though my friend lives in England, rather than Saudi Arabia, I just couldn’t choose it. I knew that if my friend ever did put her baby in that outfit (rather than just toss it in the charity pile thinking, The sooner Cordelia finishes that book on gender the better …), she would spend the rest of the day correcting strangers who congratulated her on her beautiful baby boy. And well before dinnertime she would have learned that you can dress babies in clothing intended for the other sex or you can avoid being looked at as if you were insane, but you cannot do both.
And yet this dress code for young children, despite being so strict, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the end of the nineteenth century, even five-year-old children were being dressed in more-or-less unisex white dresses, according to sociologist Jo Paoletti. The introduction of coloured fabrics for young children’s clothing marked the beginning of the move towards our current pink-blue labelling of gender, but it took nearly half a century for the rules to settle into place. For a time, pink was preferred for boys, because it was ‘a decided and stronger’ colour, a close relative to red, symbolising ‘zeal and courage’. Blue, being ‘more delicate and dainty’ and ‘symbolic of faith and constancy’ was reserved for girls. Only towards the middle of the twentieth century did existing practices become fixed.1
Yet so thoroughly have these preferences become ingrained that psychologists and journalists now speculate on the genetic and evolutionary origins of gendered co
lour preferences that are little more than fifty years old.2 For example, a few years ago an article in an Australian newspaper discussed the origins of the pink princess phenomenon. After trotting out the ubiquitous anecdote about the mother who tried and failed to steer her young daughter away from the pink universe, the journalist writes that the mother’s failure ‘suggests her daughter was perhaps genetically wired that way’ and asks, ‘is there a pink princess gene that suddenly blossoms when little girls turn two?’ Just in case we mistake for a joke the idea that evolution might have weeded out toddlers uninterested in tiaras and pink tulle, the journalist then turns to prominent child psychologist Dr. Michael Carr-Gregg for further insight into the biological basis of princess mania: ‘The reason why girls like pink is that their brains are structured completely differently to boys’, he sagely informs us. ‘Part of the brain that processes emotion and part of the brain that processes language is one and the same in girls but is completely different in boys.’ (Now where have we heard that before?) ‘This explains so much – you can give a girl a truck and she’ll cuddle it. You can give a boy a Barbie doll and he’ll rip its head off.’
But what is also overlooked is why, according to Paoletti, children’s fashions began to change. Dresses for boys older than two years old began to fall out of favour towards the end of the nineteenth century. This was not mere whim, but seemed to be in response to concerns that masculinity and femininity might not, after all, inevitably unfurl from deep biological roots. At the same time that girls were being extended more parental licence to be physically active, child psychologists were warning that ‘gender distinctions could be taught and must be’. Some pants, please, for the boys. After the turn of the century, psychologists became more aware of just how sensitive even infants are to their environments. As a result, ‘[t] he same forces that had altered the clothing styles of preschoolers – anxiety about shifting gender roles and the emerging belief that gender could be taught – also transformed infantswear.’4
Delusions of Gender Page 23