Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Exploring both interstellar and interpersonal space-time continuums. The Last Show with David Cooper. What age do kids start worrying if they're boy enough or girl enough? Well, new research suggests that that happens surprisingly early, as young as five years old. And the way boys and girls react to that pressure are very different.
Let us dig in with Adam Stanaland, a psychology professor at the University of Richmond, who's recently written about this. Adam, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. When you started looking into this, what big question did you have in the back of your mind? Like, how does this whole be a real boy, be a proper girl pressure first show up with kids?
Yeah. So we were drawing on a lot of the research with adults that has shown that these typicality threats. So telling someone that they're not a typical man or not a typical woman can have interesting adverse consequences.
Chapter 2: What age do children start feeling gender conformity pressure?
So for men, for example, if you tell an adult man, certain adult men, you're not masculine enough, they'll become aggressive to try to reassert their masculinity.
I would take that as a compliment, but let's keep going.
Yeah. Women demonstrate corresponding responses for femininity. So we didn't know when this started among children. We have some research that I've done in the past on adolescent boys, but further down the lifespan, we weren't sure. And then a lot of, on the other hand, with kids, a lot of the past research has been correlational.
So there hasn't been a lot of experiments done with kids to try to figure out when did they start feeling this pressure? When did they start thinking about these things and responding to threats, typicality threats in most ways?
Chapter 3: How do boys and girls react differently to gender pressures?
Let's talk about one of these experiments, something about kids playing trivia games and then introducing the subject of flowers or football. Walk me through this one and what it says about the way that kids kind of reinforce these norms.
Yeah, so we wanted to know how kids would respond to these kinds of threats, but we wanted to do it in a way that was what we call developmentally appropriate. So for kids, something that would make sense for them, that wouldn't threaten their psychology skills. you know, long-term or leave lasting consequences.
And so we did borrow from the adult literature that's done some of the same things with adult men and women. But instead we had kids play two trivia games, a boy questions game and a girl questions game. And then we randomly gave them feedback that either said that they did really well in both games. So boys would get, you did well in the boy game, you did well in the girl game.
Or that said, for a boy, for example, if you were in the threat condition, what we call it, then they would get feedback that said that they did really well in the girl questions game, but not so well in the boy questions game. And so then we would briefly describe, you know, this means that you're more like other girls than like other boys, for example.
Okay. And so the moment that a kid gets feedback like that, that they're not typical for their gender, what were some reactions that you observed?
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Chapter 4: What research questions motivated Adam Stanaland's study?
Yeah, we did a, we weren't sure what was going to happen. So we did like a whole battery of measures and we did some fancy statistical stuff to see how they kind of grouped together. And so we ended up looking at their what's called their typicality enhancement. So how much they tried to prove to us that they were like a boy.
So they would tell us how much they like things like trucks versus dolls. And then we would look at the scores there. Or we would even ask them if they wanted to try to replay one of the games that they had just played. And so the extent to which a boy, for example, would try or want to replay the boy game again is an indicator to us that he's trying to prove to us that he's still masculine.
And then we also looked at how much they would avoid being atypical, so moving away from the other gender, so slightly different but nuanced. And then their concerns about being viewed by their peers as less than, right? So we asked them about their self-esteem in the moment. And then we also said, if your friends found out about this, how would they respond? How would they feel about it?
And so we got three kinds of measures and looked at different things there.
So what's driving this worry that I might not fit in if I'm a boy or a girl? Is it fear of being rejected by your peers? Is it fear of feeling like you're not normal? Like what are some of the reasons behind it? Or is it just mirroring what adults do?
Yeah.
I think the answer to that is yes. All the things you said, right? We're not exactly sure what's going on mechanistically, but we do know from our data that all kids, regardless of their age or gender, got concerned about their feedback, right? They became, their self-esteem lowered. They were concerned that their friends would not like the feedback that they had gotten.
What was really interesting, though, even though that happened, was that younger girls and older boys were the ones who were specifically trying to prove behaviorally that they were typical girls or typical boys. And we think this is because past research shows that young girls around three to four are really into femininity.
They get lots of messages about wearing pink frilly dresses, and it's actually called the pink frilly dress effect. And then as girls age, they kind of realize boys have it good, right? I want to be more like a boy. And they start getting encouraged to move into these traditionally historically male spaces, sports, leadership, science, et cetera.
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Chapter 5: What experimental methods were used to study children's responses to gender norms?
I think so. And I'm a social psychologist by training, but also do a lot of developmental psychology work because I believe that a lot of the answers to these things have to be when kids are young enough to intervene, right? By adolescence, by late adolescence or young adulthood, those things are pretty crystallized.
And so it's hard to make as much intervention, although people change a lot in college and stuff. So that could be another point, an inflection point. So Yeah, I think multiple interventions in the lifespan is probably good. But you're right about this intergenerational transmission.
So for parents listening, maybe little Jimmy comes home and say, you know, he tells his friends he likes Barbies and they make fun of him. Or maybe little Sally comes home and she's like, I like Lego or something or trucks. Right. And her friends make fun of her. What would you advise a parent? What would you tell a parent? What would they need to know based on your research and what you know?
Oh, God, I don't like scary to tell parents things. But OK, high level takeaways, things they might want to consider, maybe not actions they need to take.
Yeah, I actually wrote a piece in Scientific American about this and it had four different R's and I can't remember what the four R's now are, but something like resist, restructure the way that they think about things.
So you can say like, oh, they're just pointing out that this is not what they typically see, but it's what, you know, kids can do whatever they want to, whatever they as long as it's enjoyable and safe.
Well, Adam, I've enjoyed our chat. Thank you so much for being on the show. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. You can read more about this. Adam wrote a piece for The Conversation titled Gender Conformity Starts Young and Boys and Girls Fall in Line in Different Ways. Adam Stanaland is a psychology professor at the University of Richmond. Adam, thank you again for being on the show.
Thanks so much.
My name is Mickey Fox. Friday, February 27th on Global. I'm Sheriff of Edgewater. For her, keeping the peace. Cartel's moving in. Means every investigation. People are getting threats. It's close to home. At the end of the day, I'm responsible for this town. Secrets, loyalties, and small town justice collide in a new hit drama. I'm a damn good sheriff.
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