Further proof I am an academic geek

My fun reading this evening, after following links: an article from the journal Sex Roles.

Gender Differences in Mother-toddler and Father-toddler Verbal Initiations and Responses during a Caregiving and Play Context

(The link is to the main article, so you can choose to read it in html or as a PDF.)

I admit I skimmed much of the numbers-heavy first part. Here's a summary of the results, from the end of the article:

"Perhaps the most noteworthy finding of the present investigation is that the number of significant differences between mother’s and father’s behavior was greater in the play context than in the caregiving context. Specifically, mothers and fathers were observed to differ in the number of leads, polite commands, and imperatives they offered to children in the play context, whereas there were no differences between parents for these verbal communication strategies in the caregiving context. This pattern of findings supports arguments from social role theory that certain contexts amplify or suppress the manifestation of gender differences between females and males (Eagly 1987; Eagly and Diekman 2003). The findings also are consistent with previous evidence that males and females display similar types of caregiving behavior (LaFrance et al. 2003), and that mothers and fathers engage in similar types of behavior when caring for children (Feldman 2003; Bonny et al. 1999). Thus, it appears that caregiving is a context that constrains the manifestation of gender role differences between parents. In contrast, play seems to be a context where mother’s and father’s interaction with children take on gender-typed patterns.

The specific pattern of differences in mother’s and father’s behavior during play suggest that fathers model higher levels of instrumental and assertive behavior, whereas mothers model higher levels of facilitative or cooperative behavior. Not only did fathers make more overall initiations to children than mothers, they specifically issued more imperatives and polite commands than mothers. In contrast, mothers gave more play leads to children than fathers. In their responses to children’s initiations mothers were more likely to comply than fathers, whereas fathers were more likely to reject or ignore children than mothers. It is interesting to note that these gender-typed patterns of behavior are similar to those observed in previous studies of parent-child interaction (Aldrich and Tenenbaum 2006; Black and Logan 1995; Leaper et al. 1998). The fact that they were observed only during play, and not during caregiving, support theoretical arguments that social cues and situational demands have a significant role in shaping differences in mother’s and father’s behavior.

Although purely speculative, the pattern of gender-typed behavior observed in the play context is consistent with the proposal that parents may contribute to children’s formation of gender schema regarding particular behaviors (Beall 1993; McHale et al. 2003). That is, to the extent that children use the different frequencies of father and mother behavior as examples of what constitutes typical male and female behavior (Grusec and Davidov 2007; Renk et al. 2003), parents may be teaching children to link certain behaviors to male and female gender roles. Specifically, the fact that fathers were more assertive with children than mothers may contribute to children’s development of a schema identifying assertiveness as a component of the masculine gender role. In contrast, mother’s use of more indirect initiations (i.e., leads) and greater compliance to children’s initiations, may lead children to link such behaviors to the feminine gender role. Future research using multi-method designs, including interviews to assess children’s gender schema regarding verbal and emotional communication strategies may help to elucidate connections between parent-child play and children’s formation of gender schema."

Interesting, no?