Recent research published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience has found that parents display stronger neural responses when their own children, rather than unknown children, violate gender stereotypes. This effect is especially pronounced when the gender-nonconforming child is a boy, and among parents who view such violations as less appropriate. This study highlights how deeply personal and situational factors shape parental reactions to children’s behavior that defies traditional gender roles.
Stereotypes about gender roles streamline social interactions by setting expectations for behavior. However, when these stereotypes are violated, the reactions can be intensely negative. Previous studies have shown that parents generally react more unfavorably to their children engaging in activities that clash with these gender norms, such as a boy playing with dolls.
The new study was initiated to explore the neural underpinnings of these reactions, particularly to understand how parents process and react to their own children’s gender-nonconforming behaviors compared to those of other children. Understanding this could shed light on the emotional and cognitive impacts of gender norms within families.
“People receive a wealth of social information on a daily basis that they subconsciously categorize. This is adaptive since it facilitates quick and efficient processing of social information,” explained study authors Christel Portengen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan and Joyce Endendijk, an assistant professor at Utrecht University.
“Unfortunately, this processing does not come without caveats; parents who rely more on heuristic biases about gender are more likely to respond negatively when children violate gendered expectations. Most studies that examined how parents’ brains process gendered information used brain responses to unknown children.”
“Yet, parents likely have different gendered expectations and standards for their own sons and daughters than unknown children. In our study, we therefore wanted to examine whether these brain processes differed when parents’ own children violated gendered expectations, e.g., a boy who likes to play with dolls. The use of neuroscientific measures was essential for this study, since these methods can provide insights into the processing of social information that occurs largely outside of our conscious awareness.”
The study included 74 Dutch families, each with at least one son and one daughter between the ages of 3 and 6. The research was designed to measure neural responses using event-related potentials (ERPs), a type of brain activity measured through electroencephalography (EEG).
During the experimental phase, parents were shown photographs of children — both their own and those unknown to them. Each photograph was paired with words that either aligned with or violated traditional gender stereotypes, such as “dolls” for girls or “tractors” for boys.
The stimuli were divided into two blocks: one for toys and another for behaviors, which helped in examining different aspects of gender stereotyping. Parents viewed these images while their brain activity was recorded, and they were tasked with forming impressions based on the combined information of the image and the word.
The researchers found that parents exhibited stronger neural responses to their own children’s gender-nonconforming behaviors compared to those of unknown children. This heightened response indicates that violations of gender norms by one’s own children are perceived as more significant and emotionally salient than those by children to whom the parents do not have a personal connection.
“Even though we found some evidence that parents processed gender-stereotype violations of their own children differently than those of unknown children, we only found this for problem behavior and not toy preferences,” Portengen and Endendijk noted. “This is surprising, since the largest differences between boys and girls in the preschool years are generally found for toy preferences.”
The researchers also found a differentiation in responses based on the child’s gender. The neural reactions were more pronounced for boys than for girls when they engaged in gender-nonconforming behaviors. This is in line with previous research, which has found that parents are more accepting of gender-nonconforming behaviors in daughters than in sons, often trying to alter their sons’ behaviors more frequently.
Additionally, the researchers discovered that parents’ baseline attitudes towards gender roles significantly influenced their neural responses. Those with more traditional views on gender exhibited stronger reactions to gender norm violations.
“Our results show that parents’ brains react differently to gender-stereotype violations of their own children compared to unknown children, specifically when the violations involved problem behavior (e.g., ‘aggression,’ ‘anxiety’),” Portengen and Endendijk told PsyPost.
“Importantly, kinship between parent and child appeared to elicit stronger brain reactions to and negative evaluations of gender-stereotype violations. Furthermore, the stronger brain reactions to gender-stereotype violations could partly be explained by parents’ more negative evaluations of gender-stereotype violations.”
But there are some limitations to consider. The study predominantly involved white, highly-educated, heterosexual couples, limiting the generalizability of the findings. Future research could benefit from including a more diverse set of participants to understand cultural, racial, and socio-economic variations in parental neural responses to gender nonconformity.
Additionally, the study relied on parents’ responses to static images and text, which might not fully capture the dynamic ways in which parents interact with and respond to their children in everyday situations. Further studies could use more interactive or real-life scenarios to gather data.
“The overarching goal of the larger research line is to better understand why some parents use very different parenting practices with boys and girls, whereas others engage in more gender-neutral parenting practices,” the researchers explained. “Our long-term goal is to gain insights into the brain processes and cognitive processes that underlie the ways parents teach boys and girls about societal gender norms in early childhood.”
The study, “Mothers’ and fathers’ neural responses toward gender-stereotype violations by their own children,” was authored by Christel M. Portengen, Anneloes L. van Baar, and Joyce J. Endendijk.
