Children's Concepts of Cross-Gender Activities

Abstract

STODDART, TRISH, and TURIEL, ELLIOT. Children's Concepts of Cross-Gender Activities. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1985, 56, 1241-1252. Concepts of gender differentiation in children and adolescents (from 5 to 13 years of age) as well as their domain-specific social judgments were examined. Subjects were presented with depictions of cross-gender activities in physical appearance, as well as with other types of social transgressions. Subjects were first administered a sorting task to assess their evaluations of the different types of transgression. Assessments were also made of subjects' judgments about the flexibility and relativity of the cross-gender activities and their personal commitment to gender boundaries. The results revealed a pattern of U-shaped behavioral growth in the! assessment of cross-gender transgressions, but not for the other social transgressions. Young children and adolescents regarded the crossing of stereotyped gender boundaries as more wrong, and expressed a greater personal commitment to sex-role regularity, than did children in middle childhood. The results showed, however, that although both young children and adolescents view gender differentiations as an aspect of psychological-personal identity, their conceptions of identity differ. In middle childhood, gender regularities are viewed as external and modifiable social expectations.