After enduring a long quarter of multiple education classes and reading tons of, essays, studies and stories pertaining to me as a future educator, I could not help but think back to my senior year of high school’s psychology class. Within the class we did an extensive unit on child psychology and sociology which involved a number of articles and stories on many aspects of children and child rearing. One particular reading and class session was about gender roles and how parents and other adults act around boys and girls, how these actions are part of the sociological conditioning that children face when maturing into adults themselves. Our teacher had us read a paper, The Story of X, by Lois Gould. At first the paper reads like a story but by the end you obviously know there is something up. The paper was first seen in a Ms. Magazine in 1975 and has been making people question the significance of sociological conditioning and gender roles. After reading the paper I found myself very interested in how gender plays into the maturation of children and societies inherent drive to label children under gender. Here is the pdf for the paper: http://www3.delta.edu/cmurbano/bio199/AIDS_Sexuality/BabyX.pdf
image: http://www.blogher.com/inspired-childrens-book-parents-keep-childs-gender-secret-0
Ms. Smith 
I really loved reading your blog, and really thought your link to the article was very insightful. I also find the concept of gender roles and how parents and other adults act around boys and girls interesting. Personally, I believe that as adults we should try to avoid placing pressures on our children to align with a specific gender. I think it is important to let them find their own identity rather than forcing one upon them. What is your opinion is on sociological conditioning and gender roles.
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I agree with you not wanting to pressure children into gender roles, to encourage a young boy who wants to play dress up, or a little girl who wants to play with dump trucks. But social condition is so much more than just giving pearls to a boy or building a lego death star with a little girl. Its the type of words we use when describing a child or when we talk to them, how we encourage or discourage them. Like calling a boy handsome or a little girl pretty. There was one study I remember reading about how parents are tested in this social experiment with their infants. They are asked which child would crawl faster up an incline, the boy or girl child, most parents said the boy infant. Even from infancy people are labeling and forcing children into these roles, its like a self fulfilling prophecy for parents, if you treat your child a certain way deemed appropriate by society they are obviously going to be molded into that position. That’s why this story was so interesting to me because right at infancy this family faced issues from friends and family based on how the baby should be labeled. I think there should be a lot more freedom in a child’s sociological conditioning, allowing them true creativity in how they want to be addressed, what they want to play with, what they want to wear, etc. It is such a highly debated topic and can become extremely heated. I am not sure how in a school setting one could go about doing something like this but it is something I would like to look into further, thanks for the comment!
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