Gender Segregation In Children

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Recommended: The influence of play in the child developmental process

Being a child is supposed to be some of the greatest years of your life. During your childhood years you are supposed to adventure, learn, play and just enjoy being young. Over the decades the idea of childhood and play is something that has dramatically changed due to a list of factors. One of these factors has to deal with gender segregation between children and why this seems to be happening. Gender segregation is the tendency of children to associate with others of their same sex. (Cook & Cook, 2009) Today especially it’s becoming more prevalent that only boys are playing with boys and girls only are playing with girls. We are going to take a look to see why children are making these decisions, if cultural norms have any effect on these decisions, and what happens when children break these norms.
Why are children deciding to gender segregate themselves? Children’s tendency to engage in gender segregation is a widespread and well-documented phenomenon. (Hoffmann & Powlishta, 2001) Gender segregation starts at a very young age, usually by three the children are separating themselves during play according to gender and this continues until the middle of childhood. Although many studies have been performed to see what is causing this gender segregation we still don’t seem to fully understand why children are doing this.
One theory that explains why gender segregation exists is play/interaction-style theory. This theory states that children prefer to play with other children who have styles of play or interpersonal interaction that are similar to their own. For example, roughhousers choose to play with other roughhousers, and cooperative children prefer to be around other cooperative children. (Hoffmann & Powlishta, 2001) This a...

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...en gender segregate themselves is cognitive schemas. As children grow and develop they are constantly learning schemas or ideas about what boys are supposed to act like and what girls are supposed to act like. Children pick up these schemas from parents, siblings, television shows, and anyone else who they interact with. These schemas that children are picking up are usually ones that are stereotyped about gender differences. Examples: “Boys are rough and like to fight and play with trucks” and “Girls are nice and like to talk and play with dolls.” Schemas can also cause children to filter out or misremember instances that contradict the schema. Children discount the number of times they’ve seen girls play ball and boys play with dolls, for example. As children learn gender-based schemas, their play and playmate preferences become more segregated.(Cook & Cook 2009)

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