socialization

Bring on the sweaters and pumpkin spice lattes!  The time of year has finally arrived where jackets and boots become wardrobe staples and changing leaves capture the imagination. What exactly is it about the autumn season that people love? Kathryn Lively, professor of sociology at Dartmouth College, might have the answer.

In a recent Huffington Post article, Lively explains that people view fall as comforting. From a sociological perspective, individual’s emotions are tied to the meaning we give ourselves, others, and times of year.  For example, the emotional connection towards Thanksgiving and football season symbolizes what many believe the autumn represents. This coming together of joy and creating memories provides special meaning to this season. But perhaps the biggest reason for our infatuation with fall is that we have been socially conditioned to enjoy fall since we were children. The fall represents a temporal landmark where a clean slate can begin and new routines begin. As Lively explains,

“We’re conditioned from a very early age that the autumn comes with all these exciting things…As children, we come to associate fall with going back to school, new school supplies, seeing friends. It’s exciting, for most. We still respond to this pattern that we experienced for eighteen years.”

Whatever the case may be, enjoy the fall season, but remember to brace yourself – winter is coming.

The BBC recently reported on new research that documents the way young boys are negatively affected by gender stereotypes.

Girls believe they are cleverer, better behaved and try harder than boys from the age of four, research suggests.
By the age of eight, boys had also adopted these perceptions, the study from the University of Kent found.

Social psychologist and lead researcher, Bonny Hartley, presented children between the age of four and 10 with a series of statements describing children as being hard working, clever, and timely in the completion of the work. They then chose the silhouette of either a boy or girl depending on which gender they thought the statement most accurately described.

On average, girls of reception age right through to Year 5 said girls were cleverer, performed better, were more focused and were better behaved or more respectful, the study found.Boys in reception, Year 1 and Year 2 gave answers which were equally split between favouring boys and girls, but by Year 3 their beliefs were in line with those of the girls, the researchers said.
Ms Hartley said that children of both genders thought, in general, that adults believed that girls did better than boys at school.

Hartley also documented the immediate impact that gender expectations may have on test performance.

In a separate investigation, she tested two separate groups of children in maths, reading and writing. The first group was told that boys do not perform as well as girls, but the other was not. Boys in the first group performed “significantly worse” than in the second group, which Ms Hartley says suggests that boys’ low performance may be explained in part by low expectations.

The study demonstrates the power of socialization and speaks to the need for teachers to be particularly cognizant of vocalizing any gender-based expectations, as they may create self-fulfilling prophecies.

She also warns against the use of phrases such as “silly boys” and “school boy pranks” or teachers asking “why can’t you sit nicely like the girls?”

A media shout out for some of the great work being presented at the American Sociological Association’s Annual Meeting right now in Atlanta…

The Chicago Tribune reports on a recent study that contradicts the common perception that kids without siblings have worse social skills than their peers from larger families.

The new study questioned students in grades 7 through 12 at more than 100 schools. This time researchers found that only children were selected as friends by schoolmates just as often as peers with brothers and sisters.

“Anyone who didn’t have that peer interaction at home with siblings gets a lot of opportunities to develop social skills as they go through school,” a co-author of the study, Donna Bobbitt-Zeher, said in a news release.

With political representation and federal funding at stake, Midwestern states are showing the highest Census response rates so far. According to the New York Times:

With Thursday dubbed Census Day — the day the questionnaires are meant to capture as a snapshot — South Dakota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, North Dakota and Iowa are ranked the top five states by federal officials, because they have the highest participation rates in the census so far. People can send in the forms until mid-April, but the Midwest’s cooperativeness might rightly worry other regions.

After all, the census guides the federal government on decisions with lasting impact — like how many representatives states will have in Congress and how much federal money they win for their roads.

But the high rates of participation in these rural states may have less to do with vying for power and resources and more to do with social norms and sensibilities.

Census officials said lots of social factors seemed to correlate to a community’s responsiveness (or silence) to the census mailings. Places where people stay put, for instance, often answer. In this town, most people said they had grown up here.

But some North Dakotans, where the state capital, Bismarck, had the nation’s fourth-highest response rate among larger cities as of Wednesday night, suggested a simpler answer. Perhaps it was the way of thinking around here — some combination, they said, of being practical, orderly, undistracted and mostly accepting of the rules, whatever they are. “We have a high degree of trust in our elected officials,” said Curt Stofferahn, a rural sociologist at the University of North Dakota, “and that carries over to times like these.”

The towns and cities the census described this week as having 100 percent participation rates are mostly tiny. How hard, some wondered, is it to get 50 responses from 50 people? And in Wolford, which officially has a 100 percent rate, plenty of people — perhaps more than 20 — are not included in that statistic because they hold post office boxes and have yet to receive forms.

By all appearances, these norms are being passed along to the next generation of rural residents.

At Wolford Public School, where 46 children from around the area attend kindergarten through 12th grade (the ninth grade is empty and only one child is in fourth grade), census leaflets, posters and stickers have been handed out in Wanda Follman’s class of 11 children.

Asked on Wednesday if their families had returned census forms yet, nearly all 11 shot their hands in the air. The children excitedly recited some of the questions from memory.

“I filled it out with my mom’s help,” said Kyle Yoder, the 8-year-old, who wore glasses and a serious face. “It was kind of easy.”

A recent New York Times article reported on some of the data that is known about gay and lesbian parenthood and how children of same-sex parents turn out. 

The Williams Institute at UCLA finds that approximately 115,772 American same-sex couples have children.  

Summarizing the state of the field:

Until relatively recently, we didn’t know much about the children of same-sex couples. The earliest studies, dating to the 1970s, were based on small samples and could include only families who stepped forward to be counted. But about 20 years ago, the Census Bureau added a category for unwed partners, which included many gay partners, providing more demographic data. Not every gay couple that is married, or aspiring to marry, has children, but an increasing number do: approximately 1 in 5 male same-sex couples and 1 in 3 female same-sex couples are raising children, up from 1 in 20 male couples and 1 in 5 female couples in 1990.

Concerning child outcomes:

“These children do just fine,” says Abbie E. Goldberg, an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Clark University, who concedes there are some who will continue to believe that gay parents are a danger to their children, in spite of a growing web of psychological and sociological evidence to the contrary.

In most ways, the accumulated research shows, children of same-sex parents are not markedly different from those of heterosexual parents. They show no increased incidence of psychiatric disorders, are just as popular at school and have just as many friends. While girls raised by lesbian mothers seem slightly more likely to have more sexual partners, and boys slightly more likely to have fewer, than those raised by heterosexual mothers, neither sex is more likely to suffer from gender confusion nor to identify themselves as gay.

Gender plays a key role in the differences that are known between children of heterosexual and sexual minority parents:

More enlightening than the similarities, however, are the differences, the most striking of which is that these children tend to be less conventional and more flexible when it comes to gender roles and assumptions than those raised in more traditional families.

There are data that show, for instance, that daughters of lesbian mothers are more likely to aspire to professions that are traditionally considered male, like doctors or lawyers — 52 percent in one study said that was their goal, compared with 21 percent of daughters of heterosexual mothers, who are still more likely to say they want to be nurses or teachers when they grow up. (The same study found that 95 percent of boys from both types of families choose the more masculine jobs.) Girls raised by lesbians are also more likely to engage in “roughhousing” and to play with “male-gendered-type toys” than girls raised by straight mothers. And adult children of gay parents appear more likely than the average adult to work in the fields of social justice and to have more gay friends in their social mix.

Same-sex couples, it seems, are less likely to impose certain gender-based expectations on their children, says M. V. Lee Badgett, director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of “When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage.” Studies of lesbian parents have found that they “are more feminist parents,” she says, “more open to girls playing with trucks and boys playing with dolls,” with fewer worries about conforming to perceived norms.

They are also, by definition, less likely to impose gender-based expectations on themselves. “Same-sex parents tend to be more equal in parenting,” Goldberg says, while noting that no generalization can apply to all parents of any sexual orientation. On the whole, though, lesbian mothers (there’s little data here on gay dads) tend not to divide chores and responsibilities according to gender-based roles, Goldberg says, “because you have taken gender out the equation. There’s much more fluidity than in many heterosexual relationships.”