After posting, it occurs to me: the ideal audience for this post might also be busy child-rearing or sleeping at this hour.
2: I didn't solicit the opinions of the unbechilded, teo. Geez.
4: I bet you've got like thirty goddamn million potential children.
That's okay, Stanley. The unbechilded among us can probably use a rest, and yield the floor.
If the bechilded would just quit childrearing and show up we wouldn't have to steal their thread.
7: Hey, now. They've got a pretty steep task. Let's not set unrealistic expectations.
I'm a childrearer, but I have no insights to add to Stanley's "hmph, that's troubling". So carry on with your thread-stealing.
I bet parents would be more reluctant to administer electric shocks to girls, also. Milgram could have scooped this research by decades if he'd just been a bit more daring.
The unbechilded among us can probably use a rest, and yield the floor.
I'll yield the floor, as long as the bechilded don't start tilting it under me.
I was especially heartened to see this paragraph of the review:
Her approach is especially welcome because the exaggeration of brain-based sex differences has launched a publishing flurry in the past few years from credentialed authors who should know better. Eliot calls them out by name -- the prime culprits are Louann Brizendine, Leonard Sax and Michael Gurian -- and hacks away at their groundless claims.
Insofar as this kind of research and discusison is of immediate practical use, I think it's because it gives ammunition to people trying to counteract the vast weight of "But they're just booooorrrrrrnnnnn that way!"* justification that is barely below the surface of so much sexism toward children.
On a similar note is that heartbreaking video that B linked recently, made by the young filmmaker who repeated the black doll/white doll experiment cited in the Brown v. Board of Education case.
*Please nobody caricature this into a claim that I think young children are blank slates that are entirely created by nurture.
*Please nobody caricature this into a claim that I think young children are blank slates that are entirely created by nurture.
Steven Pinker got a whole book out of that caricature, so there isn't much left to do with it.
If you throw your baby in a pond, it'll swim just like a monkey.
I'm wondering how much of "underestimated their daughters' aptitude" is "were more protective of their daughters". A lot, would be my guess, even if in the end it boils down to essentially the same thing.
My son's first words were "Your design is underpowered and your theory underspecified." Researchers avoided us.
If you throw your baby in a pond, it'll swim just like a monkey.
Awkwardly?
"were more protective of their daughters"
They could fall and break their hymens, you know.
I know! And then they lose all their value.
18: I should say so! We really don't need to see more boys who do the things girls don't, the things noted in this from the OP's link: "How can we help girls stay confident in math, learn how to read a map, and embrace technology and competition?"
Let me make that point more clearly, though: sigh, we want to help girls embrace competition?
okay, okay, okay. I have no trouble reading maps, by the way; I love maps.
22: It really wasn't that amazing. I'd been muttering the reviews on my latest journal submission.
But the mothers of the girls -- unlike the mothers of the boys -- underestimated their daughters' aptitude by a significant margin.
Sounds... slanted. Did they try it with the fathers? Strangers?
max
['Transference would dwell happily in these fields.']
NEWARK, Del. -- Finding character witnesses when you are 6 years old is not easy. But there was Zachary Christie last week at a school disciplinary committee hearing with his karate instructor and his mother's fiancé by his side to vouch for him.
Zachary's offense? Taking a Cub Scout utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about joining the Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary now faces 45 days in the district's reform school.{power chord of doom} HE BROUGHT A SPORK TO SCHOOL!
max
['Hyperventilate! HYYYYYYPPPPPPEERRRRRRVVVVVEEENNNNNNNTTTTIIIIILLLLLATTTTTTTEEEEE!']
were more protective of their daughters
I think this is right on. As a daughter myself, my (otherwise progressive) parents balked at a few activities my brother was allowed to do independently at certain ages - play in the woods behind our house (8-ish), ride my bike a couple of miles to the neighborhood pool (11-ish), etc. When confronted with this unfairness Dad offered some pretty stereotypical ideas about how the world was more dangerous for women. That may or may not have been true, but it was a tough lesson either way.
I think it may also be possible that the moms had a better idea of what the boys could do because they had to watch the boys more closely to stop the boys from breaking everything in the house. (This is why we can't have nice things.)
25: my favorite part of that article:
"The law was introduced after a third-grade girl was expelled for a year because her grandmother had sent a birthday cake to school, along with a knife to cut it. The teacher called the principal -- but not before using the knife to cut and serve the cake."
My daughters can break things every bit as well as any boy. I had a nice vase, an elegant hunk of crystal, until yesterday.
I have no idea if I caused more damage than my sisters (unless you count car wrecks, in which case, I'm ahead of the rest of my family combined), but I'm pretty sure I got yelled more for the stuff I did break.
Did they try it with the fathers? Strangers?
Judging from the study title, evidently not.
Mondschien, E.R., K.E. Adolph, and C.S. Tamis-LeMonda, 2000. Gender bias in mothers' expectations of infant crawling. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 77:304-16.
(Thanks to Amazon's Search Inside This Book. Study is discussed on pp. 66-67; briefly cited in the Notes section, and cited in full in the bibliography on p. 387.)
Oh, and speaking of social reprecussions of sex-role stereotypes: I once talked with a man who runs a program for fathers, and he told me that his clients customarily fill out their own names under "secondary caregiver" even when they are the custodial parent. That's some powerful conditioning, there.
And then the babies were tested to see how steep a slope they could navigate.
If this was true 'testing to failure', why don't I find it on YouTube
And plus also, why are the babies being presented with slopes to climb as measures of their abilities writ large? Yea, verily, ye must climb a mountain. Though I see they are climbing, or crawling, down the slope, actually.
But maybe that's all 11-month-olds can do that can be measured.
My sister crashed more cars than I did. I did an Oldsmobile, she did a Volvo and an Infiniti. Possibly one more.
We both very nearly drove into the Delaware River.
According to the study, 11-month-olds are impressive crawlers, parsimon. I'm simply shocked you didn't know this.
We both very nearly drove into the Delaware River.
People often panic when they find themselves in New Jersey and don't see a clear exit.
People often panic when they find themselves in Philadelphia and don't see a clear exit.
36: Oh, I'm sure they are. I just thought they might be able to do other things as well. But I'm sure that's what people think of with 11-month-olds: crawling strongly? Going to try to stand up, maybe? I'm sure, though, that physicality is where it's at for 11-month-olds, so it's what you'd measure.
People often panic when they find themselves in Delaware and don't see a clear exit?
We treated the boy and girl alike when it came to what they were allowed to do. It's even possible the girl was allowed more freedoms earlier because she came second and we were more relaxed as parents by then.
In any event, she's far more into adventures than he is, she'll do the skydiving, bungee jumping, swimming with sharks, zip lines in the rain-forest stuff given any opportunity.
I don't think it's particularly gender related. I think it's intensity seeking/risk taking because it makes one feel good. That's why I loved the motorcycle.
Adventures are to be avoided. They make you late for breakfast.
25, 28: This is why I could never be a parent. I'd kill the principal and half the school board, or have a stroke trying to resist it. Zero tolerance = zero judgement. Zero-tolerance school administrators are bad people, and should feel bad.
I'm with max; I want to see the complementary studies of fathers' expectations, and of both parents' expectations of kids' ability to crawl up slopes rather than down.
Seeing work on parental expectations always reminds me of a developmentally disabled kid I knew in college, the child of my house's resident heads. She was a sweet, sweet girl, but minimally verbal and physically quite weak. Students in the house did a lot of babysitting for the RHs. When the child was about three years old, a babysitting housemate taught her the colors; the sitter told me that evening that the child picked up the word-and-color pairings readily. When the mother came home, the sitter said, Hey, look what your daughter can do! The mother wasn't having any of it. She insisted that the sitter was wrong, and that the child couldn't learn such a thing, certainly not in just one afternoon. The mother flat refused to even watch her daughter try, let alone to try to teach her much of anything else.
I have no idea how often the parents had tried to teach their daughter such things and failed, nor whether there was some reason to encourage her to stay in the stroller rather than practice walking. But after that day, we always wondered just how minimally verbal, and how physically weak, the child would have turned out to be if her parents hadn't been so thoroughly resigned to her diagnosis. It was heartbreaking.
But after that day, we always wondered just how minimally verbal, and how physically weak, the child would have turned out to be if her parents hadn't been so thoroughly resigned to her diagnosis. It was heartbreaking.
Man oh man do some of those learning disabled labels get chucked too quickly on kids. It's painfully obvious that a significant number of my wife's students who are "special needs" are just godamn fine. For some reason I'm amused by the fraternal twin boys who are both labeled "special needs" in the system. One is obviously autistic and has no place in a normal classroom. But his brother isn't! He's just quiet and a bit shy. He's getting an A with no special accomodations. For christ's sakes people, quit telling that kid he has a disability.
But maybe that's all 11-month-olds can do that can be measured.
au contraire
You can see the effect described in 49 very clearly in the historic treatment (and probably ongoing) of people with Down Syndrome. The story of the deinstitutionalizing of them, and the subsequent "surprises" of what they are capable of, is both disheartening (all those lives wasted away in locked wards) and amazing.
I used to work in an institution for the mentally handicapped.* Sadly, there are a lot of people historically placed in such institutions who didn't really have to be there. Some even who were known to be 'normal' at their time of admittance but who had been, for example, sexually precocious.
The village has, or used to have, a fairly large half-way house which formed part of a program to help former residents of such institutions gain some degree of independence.
* at one time, one of the major industries for my village back home was the large Victorian asylum, and large Victorian 'colony' for the mentally handicapped.
This is exactly the sort of study that makes me dig my heels in and get resistant about any sort of suggestive evidence about innate cognitive differences between men and women, or ethnic groups. It's not that I believe it's impossible that there are such differences, but I'm really firmly convinced that people are terrible about correcting for preconceptions, and that they think they're good at it.
54: The research showing that people's preconceptions affect their perceptions is really solid.
On the one hand innate differences make sense, given that different groups have different genes. On the other, the brain is so incredibly plastic that it's hard to see how environment wouldn't swamp genetics. I'd be willing to bet that a proper controlled study would show innate sex-based differences, but you'd need to have a statistically useful population of people raised under identical circumstances, and that's just not going to happen. Given the practical realities defaulting to a blank slate model is probably less harmful than the alternatives.
It's funny, though, how very different temperament can be, and it's somewhat disheartening when it follows stereotype.
My godparents' (who are super liberal people--though he is the mechanical fix-it physicist, and she teaches ESL and has an anthropology degree) sons kids seem to be vastly different.
The girl liked to cuddle and snuggle, but the boy who is now 1 is up and away, and now that he can walk he runs a mile a minute. They can't get him to slow down, which they would like to do.
It's funny, though, how very different temperament can be, and it's somewhat disheartening when it follows stereotype.
Yes, this.
Actually, while Iris is and has been super-girly, complete with princesses* and the like, she's also been physically precocious and fearless - I toss her high in the air, flip her, spin her, etc. Kai is similar, but doesn't like being flipped (even slowly). He's also taking forever to master walking, yet is better able to catch a ball than Iris is - it's amazing to me, after 5.5 years of Iris' utter bafflement at ball sports, to see my 15-m.o. follow the ball with his eyes and put a hand on it, even if his general coordination doesn't allow for a quick grasp.
* Which she's now outgrowing, thank god, but I keep reminding myself it just means that the next awful thing is coming. So far she doesn't get Hannah Montana at all - she couldn't care less about rock stars - but I worry and wait, wait and worry.
but I worry and wait, wait and worry.
Excepting that you forgot "forever pick-up things from the floor," that's pretty much a description of parenthood.
Going to try to stand up, maybe?
Kai often impresses strangers with his pop-up ability. As I say, he's taking a long time to walk (only in the last 2 weeks has he really started to work on it, even though his first steps were months ago), but as soon as he learned to stand he also learned to squat down, then stand back up, unaided. The kid's a natural prop half. Or at least, he will be until he grows tall and thin, as is his genetic destiny.
Maybe Megan will send him a singlet.
Excepting that you forgot "forever pick-up things from the floor,"
God bless her, Iris has graduated to doing a fair amount of pickup for herself. I mean, not self-motivated (generally), but if we come up to put her to bed and there's a mess on the floor, I just tell her to pick it up and go sit and catch up on Unfogged for 10 minutes (my office is adjacent to her room).
We are currently in the middle of one of those phases where we learn that 'defiant' is measured on a scale with no upper limit.
Oooo, I envy kids their deep squats. Keep doing those, Kai! JRoth, I wouldn't add significant weight until he's about two.
61: so are we. And all our admirable progress on sleeping through the night has evaporated. On the other hand: alphabet and numbers are going well. So, we're amused but tired.
61: had to lift the near-5-year- old out of the tub bodily last night. The screaming rage lasted through towelling off, dressing, hair-combing, and a half hour past being put down for bed.
I wouldn't add significant weight until he's about two.
How about a ~24 oz. jar of peanut butter? He took himself into the pantry to retrieve it (stupid Dad, not figuring out what Baby wants), and lugged it out, with a couple staggers and drops en route.
Heh. When little kids are brought to the gym, they all beeline for the medicine balls, which look like fun to them. There's usually a funny moment of realization that the balls are disproportionately heavy.
Last time, the nephews got to playing with them anyway and then I was taken aback to realize they're happily moving stuff that's at least half their bodyweight. Of course, their form is perfect. (Not being sarcastic - the littles really do have perfect form.)
Also, as a half-year beekeeper, I am no longer convinced about bee-based phrases. I haven't noticed that they fly particularly straight. Moreover, they don't come out for work until the sun hits their hive, which at my sister's house is 9ish in the morning. "Busy as a bee", my ass. Yeah, I want to be "busy as a bee" lounging abed until 9am.
People often panic when they find themselves in Delaware and don't see a clear exit?
I certainly did once. It seems like it should be easy to figure out how to transition from the north-south turnpike to the east-west turnpike, since they're the only toll roads around, but in practice it's totally illogical and unintuitive.
But maybe that's all 11-month-olds can do that can be measured.
Mine beg to differ. Surely, throwing stuff on the floor is quantifiable.
LB's 54 captures my response exactly.
But, the 11-month-old's capabilities aren't the limiting factor for throwing stuff on the floor. The limit is always provided by the adult's willingness to pick stuff up from the floor or somehow provide additional material to be thrown.
Seems to me the proper experiment re: social perception of ability would involve total strangers and babies randomly dressed in pink or blue. And I suspect that the same results would happen - in my observation, there is still an awful lot of gender expectation [or lack thereof].
I admit I haven't been in a Toys R Us for some years, but I remember there being "boy" aisles and "girl" aisles. That annoyed me greatly. My kid liked dolls and Transformers and pretend cookware and electric cars and playing dress up and climbing trees. It pissed me off that TRU was, in effect, telling him that some of "his" toys were "girly" and not worthy of his interest.
My ex's wife has decided her daughter "must be a lesbian" because the Girl preferred to play with trucks when younger, reads Car & Truck avidly now and likes putting together models with her father. She tried dressing the Girl up as a princess, but the Girl rebelled. Her mother would probably have rated her slope-climbing abilities lower than a boy's.
My ex's wife has decided her daughter "must be a lesbian" because the Girl preferred to play with trucks when younger, reads Car & Truck avidly now and likes putting together models with her father. She tried dressing the Girl up as a princess
She needs to learn that real princesses like to dress up in boiler suits and army boots and fix truck engines. See picture.
http://caber.open.ac.uk/schools/stanway/army.html
To quote the great Ben Wolfson
"They fuck you up, your mom and dad"...
If you throw your baby in a pond, it'll swim just like a monkey.
Not like an aquatic ape?