The Influence Of Peers On Gender Roles

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It’s a beautiful sunny morning in New York City; families and couples wake up, shower and tend to their daily responsibilities. All the husbands across the world go and wake up their children, turn the coffee maker on and start making homemade pancakes for everyone. The wives wake up and immediately check their work emails, hop in the shower and suit up for the day of work that lies ahead of them. The wife kisses her husband on the cheek, grabs a pancake with her bare hand, grabs the coffee that her husband made her, her briefcase and is out the door with a blink of an eye. The husband stays behind in the kitchen, cleans the dishes from breakfast, makes the kids lunches, sends them off on the bus and then retreats back home to start some cleaning, laundry and make dinner. Now, majority of people may be reading this and think, “Wait a minute, this …show more content…

Witt explores gender roles, socialization and methods to end gender roles. She starts my stating that, “major influences on gender role socialization include parents, the media, school and peers. Parents have an impact on their children’s gender role in many ways. Through day-today interactions, by acting as role models, by reinforcing the larger message of society and by offering approval or disapproval of the child’s actions and behaviors, parents express their own values and thus exert much influence on how their children view the roles of ales and females” (pg. 1). This article then goes on to state that in order to end socializing, it starts with the parents (Witt 2000). The parents have to be ones who make a conscience effort to allow their children to explore their interest on their own. If your son wants to wear a dress, encourage him to do so. If your daughter wants to major in nuclear space engineering, support her to do so. We need more parents who are fostering their child’s individuality rather than stunting

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