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scientific?scientific?Posted Aug 11, 2005 12:34 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524)In reply to: scientific? by Alan_Hicks Parent article: Getting in touch with the feminine side of open source (NewsForge) Studies have been conducted on young children (who it is presumed are less influenced by gender roles than older children and adults) Have you been around small children and their parents much lately ? I have, being the father of a son aged 11 months, and being the one at home taking care of him. Yesterday, for example I was at the doctors with my son and we where waiting in the waiting room. Along with us was a mother and a son aged around 1.5 years. There's toys for the kids so they'll stay entertained. The son in question selected to play with a doll. This was *promptly* attacked by the mother: "Do you really want to play with that? Are you a girl?" It think it's very easy to underestimate how early some kids learn what "should" interest them and what is "unsuitable". The 1.5 year old couldn't even understand his mother (at that age he migth understand like a dozen words or so), but he understood very well that the mother was unhappy about his choise. So he played with a car instead, to hearty smiles from the mother.
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scientific? Posted Aug 12, 2005 23:29 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Studies have been conducted on young children (who it is presumed are less influenced by gender roles than older children and adults)That's so preposterous, and irrelevant to the context, that I think it's just a misstatement. I think the presumption is probably just that a young brain has less gender role information in it than one that has been absorbing gender role information for 20 years, and therefore its organic development would be less influenced by said cultural influence and more by born-in factors. If you just want to talk about influence on the person, young children are probably more influenced by gender roles because they don't have the advanced reasoning and full body of information on which to make their own conclusions. At that age, you work strictly on simple association. I distinctly remember being shocked when I met my second school principal (Age 5), because he was a man. Why did I think it was unnatural for a school principal to be a man? Because the only other one I had ever known was a woman. Now getting back to the study, if you wanted to see how my brain processed school administration concepts without the variable of gender role influence, you would have to get to me before I met the first principal.
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