Gender Cues Children

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Pages: 7

Gender-Cues and their Effect on Children

When we’re young we often find ourselves hassling to find our place, where we belong in this world and who we want to be friends or socialize with. It could have been thought then that those choices were purely of our own choosing, but were they? As adults looking back on our youth we may come to see that thought wasn’t so. In reality society tries to form us to fit into its cliché idea of how our own gender should behave. Our meager minds were being subconsciously shaped…
Society tends to give off a lot of gender-cues. A gender-cue is a characteristic that is culturally associated with gender or sex. Body movement, physique, gesture, grooming, hairstyle, or vocal inflection are all gender-cues. When kids are young they begin forming impressions of gender-identity and once they realize where they belong they end up having a preference for others like themselves. One example is of a boy, he would want to be as much like the other boys as possible, he’d also have a
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A 5 year old will most likely have formed a remarkable gathering of stereotypes about gender, albeit often incorrect. Take for example, there have been many women who wear false eyelashes to enhance their feminine look. A 4 year old girl named Erin was explaining to her aunt why some of the people in her drawing had eyelashes while others did not, “The ones with eyelashes are girls; boys don’t have eyelashes.”. This is untrue, but because of gender-cues sent out by society Erin assumed it was. Take a look at some iconic cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, Bugs Bunny and Lola Bunny, Donald Duck and Daisy Duck, the list goes on and on. Sure, there are some cartoons that do not conform to this gender-stereotype, but in general it is a very common thing to be observed in children’s television.