International Women's Day. What we teach without knowing we teach.
March 8th
International Women's Day was Friday. I live in New York, I work in an industry where women are, statistically, wildly over-represented at every level, and I still have conversations every week that remind me the work is nowhere near done.
I want to talk about what children learn about gender, because the research on this is different from what most parents expect.
Children do not primarily learn gender norms from explicit teaching. They don't primarily learn them from media, though media contributes. They learn them from observation — from watching the specific, repeating patterns of the adults around them.
Who in your household apologises most? Who interrupts? Who defers? Who makes the final decision? Who manages the social calendar, the medical appointments, the invisible logistics of keeping a family operational? Who remembers the names of all the children's teachers? Who sets the emotional temperature?
These patterns — not the stated values, not the conversations about equality — are what children absorb and replicate. And they absorb them early, by age four, into a model of gender that is extremely resistant to later revision.
Children form gender norms by age four into a model that is extremely resistant to later revision. What they see in the first years is what they will replicate.
Children form gender norms by age four into a model that is extremely resistant to later revision. What they see in the first years is what they will replicate.
What they see in the first years is what they will replicate.
Materials, steps, what to notice — the hands-on part that makes the edition usable at home with your children this week.
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