• Baby girls tend to have bigger vocabularies than baby boys, but that might not be due to gendered parenting practices.
• Parents talk more to babies after the babies have said their first words, regardless of whether the baby is a boy or a girl.
• Caregivers can support language development by speaking with and responding to their infants, regardless of their child’s gender, age, or language abilities.

Why are baby girls more advanced in language development than baby boys?

On average, baby girls have better language skills than baby boys. Researchers have found that girls tend to say their first words earlier, say more words, and combine words into sentences earlier. Where does this gender difference come from?

Maybe caregivers talk more or differently with baby girls than with baby boys in ways that support early language development. While this could explain the gender difference in early language skills, prior studies investigating this possibility have yielded conflicting results, so it is unclear whether early language input differs by gender.

While it may look like caregivers talk more to girls than to boys, they are really talking to talkers more than to non-talkers.

Another possibility comes from evidence that caregivers are sensitive and responsive to their children’s language skills. For example caregivers are more likely to respond to speech-like vocalizations (like “bababa”) than to non-speech-like vocalizations (like crying or laughing). This means that parents might talk more to babies with better language skills. Since girls have better language skills than boys on average, it is difficult to figure out if differences are due to children’s gender or their language skills.

Studying gender differences in babies’ language environments

To untangle the roles of gender and early language skills, my colleague at Duke University, Elika Bergelson, and I conducted a study that asked: How does babies’ language experience differ depending on their gender and their language skills?

Our study used data from a year-long examination of children’s early language environments called SEEDLingS. We followed the language development of 44 children from ages 6 to 18 months. The children were growing up in the United States and learning English, and most were White from middle-class families.

Photo: Yan Krukau. Pexels.

When babies are 6 months old, they have not begun to talk, but they have started to understand words. Many babies say their first words around the time of their first birthday, and most become chatty toddlers within a year, by 18 months. By investigating infants across this age range, we captured changes in children’s language environments over time.

In our study, we collected monthly audio and video recordings from each family. We listened to the recordings and analyzed the nouns (like “apple” or “shoe”) that the babies heard and the nouns that the babies said. In total, our study analyzed more than 250,000 instances of nouns from more than 2,000 hours of recordings of babies’ language environments.

Baby girls had larger vocabularies than baby boys

We found that girls had bigger vocabularies than boys. On average, girls said 29 different nouns by the end of the study, while on average, boys said only said 11 unique nouns. This gender difference in vocabulary also increased over time, meaning that girls’ vocabularies grew faster than boys’.

Children play an active role in their language development – they influence their own language learning environments as they grow by engaging in conversation with their caregivers.

After replicating the finding that girls have bigger vocabularies than boys, we asked: Is this gender difference due to parents talking differently or talking more to girls than to boys? That is, could caregivers’ speech drive the gender difference in children’s vocabularies? To answer this question, we analyzed how many nouns the babies heard, depending on their age, gender, and whether they had said their first word yet.

Caregivers talked more to talkers, regardless of babies’ gender

Caregivers did not talk more to baby girls than to baby boys in our study. On average, babies heard 122 nouns per hour in the recordings, but this did not differ by children’s gender. However, both girls and boys heard more nouns after they began to talk. On average, babies heard 106 nouns per hour in the recordings before they started talking, but after they said their first word, they heard an average of 140 nouns per hour.

These findings suggest that girls’ early advantage in language skills may not be driven by caregivers talking more or differently to girls than to boys. Instead, babies’ first words led to significant changes in what they heard: Caregivers talked more to talkers. Remember, girls tend to start talking earlier and have larger vocabularies than boys. That means that while it may look like caregivers talk more to girls than to boys, they are really talking to talkers more than to non-talkers.

Photo: William Fortunato. Pexels.

We still do not know why baby girls have bigger vocabularies than baby boys. Perhaps this difference in language skills is driven by other differences in parents’ behavior, like touch or eye contact. Alternatively, biological differences may explain girls’ language advantage. For example, some research suggests that infants’ levels of sex hormones influence brain development in language-related regions. Researchers need to investigate these possibilities.

How can parents support their children’s early language development?

Our study found that girls’ vocabulary advantage might not be the result of gendered differences in caregivers’ speech to their babies. Instead, we discovered that babies’ language environments change when they start talking.

What does that mean for parents? The results of our study show that children play an active role in their language development – they influence their own language learning environments as they grow by engaging in conversation with their caregivers. However, caregivers also play a critical role. To support their children’s language development, caregivers can talk with and be responsive to their children, regardless of the children’s gender.

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Sex differences are extremely subtle and variable. Instead, what emerges from a large body of research is a mosaic of countless brain attributes that differ in unique patterns across all individuals. There are far more similarities between female and male brains than differences. Brains are more like the heart and kidney than like reproductive organs.

“At birth, the total difference in brain volume between boys and girls is 6%, and this increases to 11% in adulthood. However, the difference in average body mass starts at 4% and increases to 18% over the same period. Therefore, it appears that larger bodies require larger brains.”

When pondering male-female differences, it is customary to refer to sex as the inflexible biological component and gender as the psychosocial manifestation. But with brains, the two are mixed because brains are plastic and alter around experience. So for brain science, the term sex/gender is used and assigned based on how a person identifies themselves.

However, there are small differences between girls and boys and between women and men. A comprehensive review of neuroscience research led by Lise Eliot, author of the book Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps – And What We Can Do About It, explains the differences found from birth onwards.

A key risk in reviewing the literature is bias driven by medical and popular interest. The public has a strong desire to find differences, so studies that find differences are more likely to be published than studies that do not. Similarly, studies that find differences are more likely to be found in literature searches that use terms like “gender differences” and “sex differences.”

Overall brain size

Overall brain size is unambiguously larger in males. Nevertheless, once the size of the individual is considered, sex/gender alone accounts for little difference. At birth, the total difference in brain volume between boys and girls is 6%, and this increases to 11% in adulthood. However, the difference in average body mass starts at 4% and increases to 18% over the same period. Therefore, it appears that larger bodies require larger brains.

Consider differences by sex/gender of other organs: While the average size of women’s and men’s brains differs by 11%, the size of human hearts differs by 17%, lung size differs by 23%, liver size differs by 14%, the size of the pancreas differs by 18%, the size of the kidney differs by 19%, and thyroid size differs by 25%, with all of these organs larger in men.

Boys and men have a higher proportion of white matter than grey matter in their brains, but this proportion correlates with brain size. Men and women matched for brain size exhibit no difference in the grey matter-to-white matter ratio.

Photo: Ketut Subiyanto. Pexels.

Size of particular parts of the brain

The biggest sex/gender size difference in the human brain is in a tiny component of the anterior hypothalamus, the INAH-3, which is only 0.6 mm in diameter and 60% larger in human males. But even this is a very small difference compared to other animals. In rats, the similar structure is five times bigger in males, so big that it has been named the “sexually-dimorphic nucleus.”

Sex/gender differences in the size of the hippocampus and the amygdala have been a topic of popular interest, given that they are linked to sex/gender differences in learning and emotion. But the differences are tiny – no more than 1% in either case.

The volume of the caudate volume appears to differ between boys and girls in early adolescence, but not before or after that time. This difference could just be a fleeting effect of girls’ earlier entry into puberty.

Studies of sex/gender differences in the average size of the pallidum, thalamus, cerebellum, and nucleus accumbens have found nothing significant. Studies of the thickness of the cortex and of individual regions within the cortex have yielded similar results. Only in the larger putamen has an average size difference been found, but this is less than 3%.

Brain connectivity

There is minimal support for the popular idea that the left and right hemispheres of the brain are more connected in women than in men. This notion has been subject to extensive analysis over decades. These connections have been measured in clinical research, such as studies of aphasia following damage to the left hemisphere. The research has been carried out while men and women were engaged in various auditory, visual, tactile, and dual-task activities, as well as in situations where the subjects were resting. In all cases, sex/gender differences were trivial or non-existent.

“The brain circuitry for emotion processing, like that for language and spatial recognition, shows overwhelming similarities between women and men, and even more similarities between girls and boys.”

A difference in the size of the corpus callosum has been invoked to argue that women have stronger left-right brain connections than men. Researchers have looked for differences in fetuses and children but have not found any.

Predicting sex/gender by measuring brain activity

Researchers have applied artificial intelligence to observing brain structure and activity through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and efforts to predict if the subject is a woman or a man. The accuracy of such predictions is high, at 80%-90%, but most of the differences identified have been based on brain size. Even efforts to measure brain activity while women and men were doing tasks in which behavioral sex/gender differences are most frequently recognized, such as language or spatial skills, have found little difference. In one study, no differences in brain activity were found in 8-year-olds during spatial tasks.

The behavioral differences between women and men must have a neural basis, but researchers have not found evidence that these differences originate at birth. This supports the idea that these differences are learned through practice and socialization in childhood and beyond. When the brains of men and women military pilots with similar training in spatial skills were compared via MRI scans, no sex/gender differences were found.

There has been a huge interest in finding sex/gender brain differences associated with emotional processing. Objective measures of empathy, such as the ability to identify emotion in photos and video clips of faces, suggest that a female advantage is learned through childhood and adolescence since the differences are small in early childhood. However, there is little consensus in brain research results across hundreds of studies. The brain circuitry for emotion processing, like that for language and spatial recognition, shows overwhelming similarities between women and men, and even more similarities between girls and boys.

The authors of the review conclude: “Scholarly interest in brain sex differences is as old as Aristotle…. these findings can be interpreted as rebutting the popular discourse about the “male brain” and the “female brain” as distinct organs.

Challenges to these conclusions

The conclusions reached by Eliot and her colleagues are not universally accepted and were criticized in a commentary published after their paper appeared (Hirnstein & Hausmann, 2021). Similarly, another recent research report noted that the sex differences were indeed small, as Eliot and colleagues showed, but suggested they might in fact be important (Williams et al., 2021).

The post Is there a male brain and a female brain? Science says no appeared first on Child and Family Blog.

Nurturing fatherhood was embedded in male biology long ago and likely laid evolutionary foundations for other fathering roles.

How central is hands-on, caring fatherhood to men’s roles in families? We know that many fathers are very capable caregivers. Data show that fathers in many parts of the world are doing more hands-on care than their own fathers did. Many dads warm to the role. And research demonstrates that involved fathering benefits children. But how much is interactive caring at the core of who men are as fathers? Is it a passing development, an aberration from men’s foundational, evolved roles over the history of our species: to be a hunter/breadwinner?

New anthropological research offers an intriguing answer. It suggests that caring fatherhood is not only core to men’s parenting, but that it may have come first in human evolution, before fathers provided food for their offspring. Indeed, if humans had not first developed early forms of caring fatherhood, then the provider father might never have arrived: Thus, “caring dad” may have laid the evolutionary foundations for “provider dad.”

This explanation springs from our attempts to understand a very distinctive and unusual feature about humans: We are virtually the only primates who routinely share large quantities of food with one another. Adult males, females, and children benefit from such sharing. Indeed, the pooling of high-energy food resources (such as meat and root vegetables) helps explain how humans evolved large, energetically costly brains that make up only a small percentage (~4%) of our body weight but require nearly 20% of the calories we burn each day. It also helps explain our unique family strategy of raising many very needy, slow-growing children at the same time, which sets us apart from other mammals, including other primates.

“These findings highlight direct caring for children as an important feature of men’s lives from early in human evolution.”

The advantages of food sharing can be seen in some contemporary societies that practice foraging (or hunting and gathering) to meet their food needs. Hunting can generate large, nutrient-dense food resources, but successful hunts of large animals are also unpredictable. Men’s specialization as hunters is generally possible only with the nutritional assurance provided by women’s more consistent foraging of plants, insects, and other small animals.

Photo: Humphrey Muleba. Unsplash.

Thus, it is clear why humans continued to share food after sharing had become established. The more difficult question is: How and why did it begin in the first place? Food sharing and role specialization can be costly to the sharers; you need reliable partners for it to pay off. Hunting is risky and was probably inconsistent in the deep past, with simple technology and rudimentary communication. So humans would not have hunted routinely – and would likely not have shared the proceeds widely – if there was no assured payback.

The evolution of sharing would have required a history of cooperation, trust, and reliability within communities, including between males and females. What conditions might have enabled such strong, prosocial relationships to have already emerged among early humans and our extinct ancestors? Through observation of non-human primate behaviors, my research team suggests an answer: Low-cost, basic forms of adult male care of infants, aiding mothers, helped pave the way for greater cooperation, including food sharing.

Non-human primate males offer rudimentary care

For example, in some baboon species, individual adult males in larger multi-male, multi-female social groups form close social bonds with females when they have an infant. These adult males are very tolerant of the infant. They provide protection against infanticide and from aggressors in the group. These baboon friendships between adult males and females emerge during pregnancy and often continue beyond weaning, but they dissolve if the infant dies. Thus, the male-female relationship is supported by a loose form of joint parental care, which can give the male a better chance of mating, though the female generally does not mate exclusively with that male.

Male mountain gorillas are also very tolerant of infants and juveniles, and interact with them, even though they do not seem to differentiate their own young from those of other males. This caring behavior may enhance the males’ attractiveness to females: Males who provide more direct care have more reproductive success, according to a recent study by my colleague, Stacy Rosenbaum. Likewise, macaque females in some species prefer males who interact with infants, according to recent data. So it seems that basic paternal care can emerge in primates even in non-monogamous situations when the males are unclear about paternity, which was long thought to be a major evolutionary barrier to committed fatherhood. This care for infants, and the relationship bonds that it builds with females, is low cost and thus possibly part of males’ mating effort.

We argue that similar low-cost behaviors could have evolved in early humans and then been ratcheted up through evolutionary time. Caring would have laid the social and trust foundations for the later emergence of more proactive, riskier, more costly food sharing. Such food sharing eventually led to subsistence specialization and resource pooling that became common in human families and communities. Thus, we argue that the caring father predated the provisioning father rather than vice versa.

Testosterone and caring capacities

Another indicator tells us about the ancientness and centrality of child care to men’s parenting: their biology. Nurturing caring is supported in men and regulated by variations in hormones such as testosterone and oxytocin. There is evidence that men with lower testosterone often engage in more prosocial, generous, and empathetic behavior than men with higher testosterone. Our team of researchers was the first to identify, in the Philippines and subsequently in other contexts, a relationship between lower testosterone in men and the amount of child care they do. In a large project that tracked men in their 20s over five years, testosterone levels dropped significantly when men became partnered fathers.

“This perspective questions how paternal roles have been viewed through 20^th-century industrial societies, which shaped narrow perceptions of men’s capabilities.”

Therefore, fathers appear to be biologically primed to provide direct care for their children. Indeed, in many other animals, fathers’ hormones change in similar ways when dads cooperate with moms to raise young. As anthropologists, we know that cultural contexts have large effects on shaping human parents’ roles in families. So it might be most accurate to say that men are biologically evolved to be culturally primed as caregivers.

Photo: César Abner Martínez Aguilar. Unsplash.

These insights suggest that caring fatherhood is not an aberration of changing current social conditions. Rather, it is rooted in our evolutionary past and can be supported by changes in testosterone, other hormones, and the brain, which help men shift from one specialized role to another and back again. A biological and cultural requirement for these shifts toward caring is men’s proximity and availability to their children. In some societies that practice foraging, men are with their children for much of the day, and those fathers are more involved in hands-on child care than fathers in virtually any other human societies. We are still learning about the biology of fatherhood in these societies, but these caring behaviors and fathers’ availability to their children often correspond with lower testosterone in men in the Philippines, the United States, European countries, Israel, and other settings.

Is caring fatherhood linked to being community minded?

In our most recent research, we explored whether testosterone levels are linked to fathers’ social roles not only in the family but also in the broader community. In the Republic of Congo, we studied fathers in BaYaka families, which rely on forest resources for a major part of their income. They are generally hands-on dads, holding their babies, taking their older children with them to work in the forest, and sleeping with them as a family. BaYaka communities are also egalitarian and very cooperative.

As part of their roles as fathers, BaYaka men are valued for generously sharing resources across the group, so caring fatherhood in this context is not limited to the nuclear family but extends to the broader community. In our study, we tested for links between fathers’ testosterone and rankings from their fellow dads on these locally valued roles. We found that those men considered to be better community sharers had lower testosterone than their peers. Also, BaYaka fathers who were seen as being better providers had lower testosterone than fathers who were ranked as less effective in acquiring resources. So in many contexts around the world, lower testosterone in fathers is linked to expressions of parenting that fathers, their partners and co-parents, and their broader community value as critical contributions for children.

Caring fatherhood is no longer peripheral

These findings challenge how we might think about contemporary fatherhood and its potential. They highlight direct caring for children as an important feature of men’s lives from early in human evolution. This perspective questions more historically and culturally limited ways in which paternal roles have been regarded, viewed through the particularities of 20^th-century industrial societies, which shaped quite narrow perceptions of men’s capabilities. Our growing understanding of the biology of fatherhood underscores the flexibility of fathers to adapt to meet the many different challenges that face parents, whether it is providing direct care to children or food and resources for them.

The digital economy – and more immediately, the COVID-19 pandemic – are bringing fathers’ work back into the home. This means that many men are spending more time in closer proximity with their children. Will this greater availability of dads to children be correlated with a surge in caring fatherhood and further narrowing of the gender care gap?  Our research with BaYaka fathers also raises questions of whether more caring fatherhood can be harnessed to encourage greater community engagement by men in an age when many serious challenges demand communitywide action.

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Many want schools to challenge prejudice against new family forms and want parents to provide more information about donors, half-siblings, and surrogates, according to a new book, We Are Family.

People concerned about children growing up in new forms of families (e.g., LBGTQ families, families created by donor eggs) have worried unnecessarily. In the face of dire warnings about such families, studies consistently show that their children turn out just as well as – and sometimes better than – kids from traditional families with two heterosexual parents. Findings have been remarkably similar, whether studies have focused on families with lesbian mothers, gay fathers, transgender parents, or single mothers by choice. Findings on families created by donations of eggs, sperm, or embryos, as well as by surrogacy, reflect the same pattern.

In studies of all these new forms of family, we, along with other research teams, have found that the quality of family relationships matters for children’s welfare far more than the number, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or biological relatedness of the parents.

It has taken nearly 50 years of studies, many following children across decades, to establish the empirical evidence. And there has been plenty of heartache along the way, starting with lesbian mothers who lost custody of their children back in the 1970s. In the half century since then, public and expert fears about new forms of family have underpinned various legal barriers to parenthood, discriminatory practices, and widespread stigmatization.

“My brother and I knew people in our school that had gay and lesbian parents and that did get bullied quite a lot, and that scared us from telling people.”

More new forms of family coming

However, even though research on children’s outcomes is clear, the story does not end there, for two reasons. First, the diversity of new family forms seems likely only to expand as science advances and people seek new paths to parenthood. Artificial wombs, eggs, and sperm are just over the horizon. At the University of Cambridge Centre for Family Research, we are already examining children’s outcomes in co-parenting families in which couples are not romantically involved, children are parented by single fathers by choice, and transgender people give birth after they have transitioned.

These developments pose fresh challenges to what has long been seen as the norm for children to flourish. Let’s hope people avoid repeating over-hasty judgments. We should await the evidence and be calmed by encouraging outcomes from other new forms of family.

Children are asking for change

Second, and perhaps more important, there is much more to say about children in these new forms of family, beyond simply logging their long-term outcomes. What is it like for them to grow up in such families? We should listen to their voices, and hear their thoughts and feelings. To that end, our team has conducted many studies gathering children’s stories.

Through our work, we have found that schools, parents, and the wider society still have much to learn about supporting children in non-traditional families through their experiences, which can be upsetting. The distress is not related to the type of family children have, but because of stigmatization, inadequate communication, and lack of understanding, mainly from those on the periphery of home.

So, for example, many children with LGBTQ parents have been stigmatized in school, by society, and sometimes by wider family. When we interviewed children of lesbian mothers born in the mid-1960s when they were young adults, almost half reported being teased or bullied as teenagers.

Stigmatization burdens children

“I wasn’t allowed to go to my friend’s house anymore,” said Anna. “Her mum and dad forbade me from going anywhere near, and that hurt me because she had been my best friend for a long, long time. I lost that friend. And then, of course, there was a chain reaction. Everybody found out. They said, ‘Don’t go near her, she’ll turn out like her mum.’”

John was bullied when schoolmates found out about his lesbian mom. “School was one big nightmare really, because I got picked on so much,” he explained. “I had cigarettes stubbed out on the back of my neck, and high-heeled shoes thrown at me, and a bit of hair cut off, and my head chucked down the loo, and that sort of thing.”

Children have felt the need to clam up about their families because of widespread prejudice. Stacey explained: “My brother and I knew some people in our school that had gay and lesbian parents and that did get bullied quite a lot, and that scared us from telling people. So, we never told anyone. It was hard keeping secrets.”

“Schools, parents, and wider society still have a lot to learn about supporting children through their experiences.”

Effective school challenges to prejudice

Schools must create a positive, supportive environment for such children. It pays off. Carol, 14, highlighted helpful action by her school: “Basically, they spread the word how it’s not very good to say, ‘Oh this is so gay’ or ‘that’s so gay,’ even though it’s used as a different meaning. They tell them that’s wrong and why you shouldn’t say that.” Mike, 17, recalled how a new English teacher, who was gay, made a difference: “He has one of the Stonewall ‘Some People Are Gay, Get Over It’ posters in his classroom. Just seeing the poster in his room is really cool.” As part of our research project, the UK campaign for equality of LGBTQ people, Stonewall, published 10 recommendations from children on how schools can support them and their same-sex parents.

Children of transgender parents have been bullied and teased in similar ways, and inclusive attitudes by schools can help them. Wendy explained: “I put my hand up and said, ‘I don’t have a dad because my dad’s transgender,’ and I got an award for it ‘cos it was actually really brave of me to say.”

Tell children what’s happening

Parents also should consider being more open about what is happening in their families. “It would have helped if he had explained things a bit better,” said Henry, 18, reflecting on when his father transitioned to being a woman. “It wasn’t so much him wearing dresses, but more him being a bit manic and doing strange things.” Chris, 18, advised other children in a similar situation: “Try to get them to communicate with you as much as possible because it’s worse if things are happening and you don’t know why.”

Children tend to accept, in a matter of fact way, their father’s or mother’s change of gender if it happened while they were little or a long time ago. “Chloe’s always been Chloe,” said Susanna, 14, who was a toddler when her father transitioned. “I don’t remember when it actually happened, so it’s basically been for as long as I remember.”

Experiencing transition can worry them

 But some children find it difficult when they experience a parent’s transition. They can have fears of loss, which typically pass, but which can be very real during gender transition. Jade, who was six when her father transitioned, was upset about losing her dad: “When she transitioned, I felt like there was a hole in my heart because I missed my dad and every time somebody talked about their dad, I got really upset.” But she grew more accepting. At age nine, Jade reflected: “When she transitioned, it made her a lot happier ‘cos, when she was a boy, she was really unhappy. Ever since she’s transitioned, she’s come home from work, hugged us, and been really happy. It’s changed a lot since she transitioned.”

Another upset can be rejection of parents by their wider family, so children lose contact with some relatives. Theresa, whose father transitioned when she was six, explained: “People on my mum’s side of the family really struggle with it. Her parents and brothers, and basically everyone over there, cut us off. It made me sad and kind of angry because it’s really no reason to be horrible.”

“When children found out later, as teenagers or adults, they felt more negatively about how they were conceived and their relationship with their parents.”

Children should not have to explain their families

Children may also feel responsible for explaining to the outside world issues such as gender transition. “My problem,” explained Susanna, “has been having to explain to other people constantly because no one really understands.” Josh reported: “Sometimes, random people ask me questions and I have to explain to them. That gets tiring for me.”

Our research has highlighted issues for children born through assisted reproductive technologies, such as egg, sperm, and embryo donation, or surrogacy. Some children as young as two or three years might ask of a single mother by choice: “Do I have a daddy? Where is he?” Some – but by no means all – especially as they get into their teens, are eager to fill a gap in knowledge about themselves by finding out more about their donor, surrogate, and any half-siblings born to the same donor or surrogate.

“It’s important to me now . . . I’m always thinking about what she looks like,” explained Sarah, 14, who was born through egg donation. Alex, 14, conceived by sperm donation, said: “I would like to know who he is . . . quite a lot . . . Recently a lot more than I used to.”

Tell children early about their origins

We have found that it is generally better to start talking to children early about how they were conceived and born. Children who find out later, as teenagers or adults, tend to feel more negatively about how they were conceived and in their relationships with their parents than children who have had the conversation about their beginnings early. Many parents hold off telling their children, fearing that the children will love them less. However, these fears are unfounded because children who are told early tend to be very accepting, often not particularly interested, and unshocked by learning more as they grow older.

The risks of not disclosing this information to children have grown with the advent of ancestry sites offering DNA tests, which can suddenly lead unsuspecting children to discover half-siblings and relatives of whom they had no inkling. Children may find their identities destabilized, and learning about their beginnings in this way can undermine their trust in their parents.

The story of new forms of family is largely good news, of children flourishing, much as we might expect them to do in traditional families, and sometimes doing even better. The composition of their family does not upset them. It is other factors, such as people’s reactions to their family or the lack of information about their origins, that cause them distress. The solutions lie in better understanding, greater societal acceptance of diverse families, swift challenges to prejudice, and openness within families about where their much-wanted children came from.

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This research on gay fathers contradicts beliefs that fathers have less innate caring ability than mothers and challenges the historical emphasis on mothers.

Researchers at Cambridge University in the UK have found that 10- to 14-year-old adopted children of gay fathers showed higher levels of “secure autonomous attachment” than did adopted children of heterosexual parents. Children who score highly on secure autonomous attachment are able to cope on their own at times, and have positive coping mechanisms, when upset, such as turning to others for support.

Secondly, adopted children of gay fathers also showed lower levels of “insecure preoccupied attachment” than children adopted by either lesbian or heterosexual couples. Children who score highly on insecure preoccupied attachment are typically over-dependent on parents for support and show high levels of anger towards them.

Finally, children of gay fathers showed lower levels of “disorientated-disorganised attachment” – contradictory or incompatible coping strategies – than children of heterosexual couples.

But before rushing to the conclusion that gay fathers are innately better parents, as opposed to equally good parents, the researchers point out other possible explanations.

For example, gay fathers, who are still leading a social change and forging a new way in the world, are on average more motivated and well-adjusted than heterosexual parents. Indeed, in this research, gay fathers rated lower in depression and parenting stress than heterosexual adoptive parents.

Or perhaps the adoption screening process for adoption by gay men is more stringent, meaning gay fathers have to demonstrate stronger motivation and competence than do other adoptive parents. Alternatively, adoption agencies might be placing children with fewer behaviour problems with gay fathers, though there is little evidence of this. Indeed, on average, gay fathers in the sample adopted older children, and older children are more likely to show behaviour problems.

Another possibility difference between gay fathers and heterosexual parents is that they are unlikely to have been through the distressing process of attempting and failing fertility treatment. This traumatic experience can harm parental wellbeing.

Beliefs about mothers’ innate caring abilities, and the historical emphasis on mothers as “primary” attachment figures, might raise questions about attachment patterns in families with two gay fathers. However, the evidence from this research contradicts such ideas.

This is good news for the adoption system. The researchers conclude, “Given the number of children waiting to be adopted and the scarcity of suitable adoptive parents, it is important that potential adopters are not discriminated against based on their gender or sexual orientation.”

The study took place in two phases, once when the children were four to eight years old and again six years later, when the children were 10 to 14 years old. In the second phase, the children were interviewed using the “Friends and Family Interview”. The interviewers focused on how the children discussed the relationship with their parents, assessing this against various measures of secure and insecure attachment. On three out of four measures, secure autonomous attachment, insecure preoccupied attachment, and disorientated-disorganised attachment, they found statistical differences between adopted children of gay fathers, lesbian mothers and heterosexual parents. There were no differences on the final measure of attachment, “insecure dismissing”, when children portray themselves as strong, and minimize negative experiences and their need for support from others.

Earlier research has established that children do equally well when raised by lesbian mothers as they do when raised by heterosexual parents. In later research, this finding was found to apply to gay fathers, who were more responsive and warm towards their children and spent more time with them, on average, than fathers in heterosexual couples.

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Gender nonconforming youth are more likely to experience rejection and verbal, physical and sexual abuse from both parents and peers.

Gender nonconforming children, particularly boys, experience victimization. They are more likely to be rejected and verbally abused by their parents, and they suffer higher levels of both depression and PTSD. Men who identify as both gay and “effeminate” report more sexual abuse in childhood. This may be related to the general low value given to “feminine” behaviors and characteristics. Possibly as a result, boys are less likely to be gender nonconforming than girls. 

Gender identity and child development

Children learn gender labels when very young, at 18 to 21 months, shaped by parental behavior and expectations. For example, parents give girl and boy toddlers different toys, and they often expect boys to be better at crawling than girls. At two years, children can already feel atypical if they are not like others of their own gender.

Researchers at Yale and Harvard universities in the USA reviewed how victimization of gender nonconforming children influences their development. They present a “social cognitive” approach which proposes that gender identity develops through direct influences, such as verbal messages about how boys and girls should behave, and indirect influences, such as parents modelling gender specific behavior. A child is an interactive agent in this process of development. The process is influenced by culture: for example, non-Western or more religious men are likely to be less accepting of gender nonconforming individuals.

Two types of socialisation have been studied: in the home and among peers.  

Gender socialisation at home

At home, gender socialisation takes place through things like clothing, how parents praise their boys and girls and how parents use gender specific pronouns. Experimental studies have shown that adults interacting with infants introduced as a girl were more likely to give ‘feminine’ toys to the child, such as dolls and domestic items. If the infant is introduced as a boy, however, they are more likely to introduce ‘masculine’ toys, such as tools and cars, and they encourage more physical activity. Parents support things like exploration, rough-and-tumble play and dressing up differently in boys and girls, despite a lack of evidence that boys and girls are different in any domain typically associated with gender, such as crawling ability. 

Parents tend to associate gender nonconformity in children with homosexuality and often discourage gender nonconforming behavior. Discouragement of nonconformity in children as young as four years includes telling them to change their behavior, punishing or restricting their nonconforming activities and sending them to counseling. Such children are also at greater risk of physical, psychological and sexual abuse in the home, and of PTSD later in life.

These problems affect sexual and gender minority youth in particular—individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, or another orientation that is not heterosexual, as well as those who identify as transgender, agender, gender fluid, or another category that is not cisgender. Transgender youth are particularly exposed to negativity from their parents. 

Gender socialisation among peers

When young children play among peers, their play becomes more gendered. For example, girls are less likely to play with toy cars when they are not alone. Preschool and middle-school children are more likely to befriend same-sex children with similar levels of gender-typed behaviors. Peer popularity of children is strongly related to gender conformity across childhood: there are strong social rewards for conforming. 

The process of gender socialisation is visible in trends across childhood. Over time, children’s attitudes about the other gender become more similar to their friends’ attitudes. Children’s identification with their own gender grows; at the same time, peer harassment and victimization of nonconforming children increase. As a result, gender nonconforming behavior falls over the school years.

This process is linked to children’s cognitive development: they are increasingly able to make social comparisons between boys and girls, to develop a sense of self around gender and to imagine what others are thinking about them.  

Gender nonconforming youth are more likely to experience rejection and verbal, physical and sexual abuse from peers. They are more likely to experience low self-worth, but only when they do not feel accepted by their peers. If they do feel accepted, no increased risk of low self-worth is present.

Child development risks from negative responses to gender nonconforming children 

Gender nonconforming children are more likely to suffer depression and to have suicidal thoughts. They are also at greater risk of bullying others and becomingaggressive.  The authors of the review describe the process according to “minority stress theory”, which encompasses both actual discrimination and the internalized response to it on the part of the victim. Such responses may include internalized homophobia, chronic vigilance about rejection and concealment of sexual orientation. 

What can be done?

Family acceptance of gender nonconforming children is important. For example, a father’s acceptance of nonconforming behavior in his son protects the child from psychological distress. (No such link occurs between fathers and daughters.)

The researchers make recommendations to parents about how to support sexual and gender minority children – talking about gender nonconformity, respecting it, ensuring other family and community members do the same, finding adult role models, and welcoming the child’s friends. 

Action in schools to support gender nonconforming children is particularly important given the long span of strong peer influence on child development. Again, the researchers direct their recommendations to the particular case of sexual and gender minority children. They recommend that schools explicitly address sexual orientation and gender and negative reactions to gender nonconformity. Teachers need training, and gender nonconforming students need support groups. The topic should be on the school curriculum, they write, and sexual orientation should be an explicit part of anti-bullying strategies.

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How common stereotypes emerge in childhood: children don’t just learn from what adults say but also from what they don’t say.

How do children learn common stereotypes? Recent research has shown that, if you tell young children that one group is good at something (for example, “Girls are good at playing basketball”), they are likely to infer that other unmentioned groups (such as boys) are not so good at it. This is particularly likely if children believe that the person making the statement knows what they are talking about. This tendency has been tested in a laboratory setting on 4- to 6-year-olds.

In an animated game presented on a tablet, 4-, 5- and 6-year-old children were presented with two groups of made-up people called “zarpies” and “gorps”, distinguished only by wearing yellow or green clothing. Other than that, the groups were diverse in terms of race/ethnicity, gender, and other physical features. (This was intended to prevent children from bringing existing stereotypes into the test.)

Next, children heard a narrator describe attributes of one of the two groups. Half the children heard the narrator describe the group using generic statements, for example, “Zarpies are good at making pizzas.” The other half heard the narrator describe a specific individual from the group, for example, “This zarpie is good at making pizzas.”

After this, the children were shown more individual zarpies and gorps and asked to rate their pizza-making abilities. This served as a test to see if the children had adopted stereotypes about what zarpies and gorps are like.

Children who heard statements about specific individuals had no intuition about whether other zarpies or gorps would be good or bad at baking pizzas. However, those exposed to the generic group statements were more likely to attribute superior pizza-making skills to the zarpies and poor pizza-making skills to the gorps—even though the statement made no mention of gorps or their ability to bake pizzas. The tendency to infer that gorps are bad at pizzas emerged around 4.5 years of age and was stronger in older children. The findings suggest that negative stereotypes can develop from seemingly innocuous statements.

Photo provided by the author.

In a further test, children learned about the two groups from either a knowledgeable narrator (someone who lived in the same town as the zarpies and gorps) or a less knowledgeable one (a first-time visitor to the town). Here, children inferred that gorps were bad at making pizza from the generic statement “Zarpies are good at baking pizzas” only when they heard the statement from a knowledgeable speaker—suggesting that children are more likely to learn stereotypes from someone they trust to be knowledgeable (such as a parent).

The narratives used in this experiment are available online. (You can also play a version of the game yourself.)

Together, these studies suggest how parents may inadvertently reinforce existing common stereotypes—or how children may learn them in the first place. When children hears statements like “girls wear pink” or “boys don’t cry”, they are also likely taking away the message that boys don’t wear pink and that girls cry a lot.

This research suggests that one way parents can prevent their children from developing stereotypes is by limiting the statements they make about groups and instead focusing the conversation on specific individuals (for example, saying that “Hannah likes to sing” instead of “girls like to sing”).

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Negativity towards gender nonconforming children is a significant child development problem. Peer relations correlate strongly with later social and emotional development. Interventions seeking to reduce this negativity are important.

After showing that gender nonconforming children are less popular with their peers. researchers in Hong Kongrecently  tested an intervention that successfully changed perceptions for the better, albeit only measured in the short-term and in a laboratory setting rather than in real life.

The research was divided into two studies. The first looked at how children rated their gender conforming and gender nonconforming peers. The second assessed the difference after an intervention designed to alter perceptions of gender nonconforming peers.

Study 1: How children rate conforming and gender nonconforming peers

This study involved 104 4- to 5-year-olds and 106 8- to 9-year-olds (50/50 boy/girl).

The study found:

• A general preference by children at both ages for gender conforming peers compared to gender nonconforming peers.
• The strengthening of these preferences as children get older, possibly related to the fact that same-gender peer preference peaks in middle childhood.
• Greater variation of response to gender nonconforming peers of the other gender. Eight- to 9-year-old boys actually showed some preference towards gender nonconforming girls compared to gender conforming girls.
• A particular dislike of gender nonconforming boys by both girls and boys of both ages. Much other research has found less positive attitudes towards gender nonconforming boys than towards nonconforming girls. Perhaps this is because masculine behavior has higher social status generally, and seeking higher status (gender nonconforming girls) is regarded as more acceptable than seeking lower status (gender nonconforming boys).

The children were shown on-screen vignettes of four individuals: a gender conforming boy and girl and a gender nonconforming boy and girl. Each vignette consisted of five pictures, each with a 15-second audio narrative. The pictures showed the child’s preferences for toys, activities, clothing and hairstyle, and gender of playmates. The preferences of the gender conforming boy and gender nonconforming girl were the same, and similarly for the gender conforming girl and gender nonconforming boy.

After viewing the pictures, the children were asked seven questions:

1. Friendship preference: Would you like being friends with <name>? (Yes/Don’t Know/No – ???)
2. Perceived popularity: Do you think other children would like to be friends with <name>? (Yes/Don’t Know/No – ???)
3. Emotion perception: Do you think <name> is happy? (Yes/Don’t Know/No – ???)
4. Activity preference: Would you like to do what <name> did in the story? (Yes/Don’t Know/No – ???)
5. Moral judgement: Was what <name> was doing in the story right? (Yes/Don’t Know/No – ???)
6. Sharing behavior: Distribute 10 stickers to the four children in any way you wish. This exercise reflects the fact that sharing is a show of friendliness among children and that time must be shared between peers.
7. Ranking: Rank the four children from your favourite to least favourite.

The answers to the questions showed a complex array of preferences. All these findings are averages.

4- to 5-year-old girls

• The younger girls rated gender conforming girls higher than gender nonconforming girls – preferred them as friends, perceived them as more popular, judged their actions as more moral, shared more stickers with them, ranked them higher. Only in relation to preferred activity did they rate gender conforming and gender nonconforming girls the same.
• Their preferences regarding boys were more varied. They preferred gender conforming boys as friends over gender nonconforming boys. They preferred the activity of the gender nonconforming boy over the gender conforming boy and they shared stickers equally between the boys.
• They ranked gender nonconforming boys lower than gender nonconfirming girls.

8- to 9-year-old girls

• The older girls rated gender conforming girls higher than gender nonconforming girls – preferred them as friends, perceived them as more popular, preferred their activity, judged their actions as more moral, shared more stickers with them and ranked them higher. In all but the first of these cases, the preference was stronger than shown by younger girls.
• Regarding boys, they showed no friendship preference between gender conforming and gender nonconforming boys, nor did they prefer the activities of one over the other. They shared stickers equally between the boys.
• They ranked gender nonconforming boys lower than gender nonconforming girls, more extremely than younger girls did.

4- to 5-year-old boys

• The younger boys rated gender conforming boys higher than gender nonconforming boys – preferred them as friends, perceived them as more popular, preferred their activity, judged their actions as more moral, shared more stickers with them, ranked them higher.
• Regarding girls, their preferences were more varied. They preferred gender conforming girls as friends over gender nonconforming girls, perceived them as more popular, and judged their actions as more moral. But they showed no preference between their activities, and did not share stickers differently.
• They ranked gender nonconforming boys lower than gender nonconforming girls.

8- to 9-year-old boys

• The older boys rated gender conforming boys higher than gender nonconforming boys – preferred them as friends, perceived them as more popular, preferred their activity, judged their actions as more moral, shared more stickers with them and ranked them higher. In all but the first of these, the preference was stronger than shown by younger boys.
• Regarding girls, they actually preferred gender nonconforming girls as friends over gender conforming girls, preferred their activity and shared stickers equally between them.
• They ranked gender nonconforming boys lower than gender nonconforming girls, more extremely than younger boys did. They also preferred the activity of gender nonconforming girls over that of boys and would prefer a gender nonconforming girl as a friend rather than a gender nonconforming boy.

Study 2: The effect of an intervention to tackle negative responses to gender nonconforming boys and girls

The second study worked with 221 8- to 9-year-olds, who participated in an intervention designed to address negative reactions to gender nonconforming children. The older group was chosen because negative reactions are stronger in this age group. Also, earlier research has shown that similarly designed racial stereotype interventions work better with children of this age than with younger children.

The intervention was a three-minute slideshow with audio narrative which showed children who both violated some gender stereotypes and conformed in others. All these children were portrayed as having lots of friends, being good at catching caterpillars and achieving good grades in school.

The children were then asked the same questions as in the first study, except for the second one about popularity (since all the children in the slideshow were presented as popular).

The intervention changed some ways that 8- and 9-year-old boys and girls viewed gender nonconforming children. Compared to the control group, both boys and girls showed greater preference for the activities of gender nonconforming children, rated their actions as more moral, shared more stickers with them and ranked them higher. In relation to friendship preference, the only change was a more positive rating by boys for gender nonconforming boys.

As with similarly designed interventions targeting racial stereotypes among children, knowledge of individuals’ own characteristics may help to break down stereotyped categorisations of out-of-group people. This may go further to break down stereotypical perceptions about the whole group from which the individual comes. Another possibility is that showing similarities simply promotes liking.

Negative reactions to gender nonconforming children is a child development issue

Most children distinguish between males and females by the age of two. Gender nonconformity takes many forms, and an individual child can display both gender conforming and gender nonconforming behaviors in different activities and parts of their lives. Earlier research has shown that strongly gender nonconforming children are less popular; this phenomenon can start to appear among 3-year-olds. Earlier research has also shown that gender nonconforming boys are more prone to rejection than gender nonconforming girls.

Most studies show that as children grow into middle childhood, they become more negative about gender nonconformity. This is a time when peer group activity is most gender segregated.

Negativity towards gender nonconforming children is a significant child development problem. Peer relations correlate strongly with later social and emotional development. This justifies the development of interventions that seek to reduce peer bias against children who do not conform to gender stereotypes, similar to programmes that have been set up to tackle racial stereotypes.

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Less parental leave for same-sex male parents excludes them from benefits that support child development.

A study of parental leave entitlements has found that in the great majority of OECD countries, same-sex male parents are entitled to substantially less paid leave than different-sex parents and same-sex female parents. The study looked at the 33 OECD countries that offer paid parental leave. (The remaining OECD country, the United States, does not.)

The authors of the research suggest that the reasons behind their finding include a greater attribution of the caring role to women, and they recommend removing gendered and heteronormative language from parental leave regulations.

Only in four out of the 33 countries do all couples get the same paid parental leave: Iceland, Sweden, New Zealand and Australia. At the other extreme, in three countries—Israel, Switzerland and Turkey—same-sex male parents get nothing at all. In these three countries, same-sex female parents and different-sex parents get 14-17 weeks of paid parental leave. In 16 countries (Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland and the UK), same-sex female parents get the same amount of leave as different-sex parents, but same-sex male parents don’t. On average, same-sex male parents get 22 fewer weeks of paid parental leave than different-six parents, ranging from two weeks less in the UK to over a year less in Hungary, Japan and South Korea.

Discrepancies in paid parental leave exist also between same-sex female parents and different-sex parents, but to a lesser extent. Same-sex female parents get the same paid parental leave as different-sex parents in 19 countries, though in two of these (Slovakia and Austria) that can only happen if one mother takes 100% of the parental leave and the other none, because no sharing with a second mother is allowed. In one country, Switzerland, the difference is absent because no partner of any gender gets any parental leave. In 14 countries, leave designed specifically for fathers is not available to same-sex female parents.

There are also differences in parental leave entitlements for adoptive parents of different gender orientations. Nine countries do not allow same-sex parent adoption at all (Chile, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Poland, Slovakia, South Korea, Switzerland and Turkey), and two countries do not provide leave for adoption (Greece and Switzerland). Most of the rest, 20 in total, provide the same parental leave benefit for all adoptive couples, irrespective of gender combination. In two countries (Mexico and Portugal), different-sex adoptive parents get more parental leave than same-sex female parents, who, in turn, get considerably more than same-sex male parents.

The authors highlight three factors that drive these discriminatory parental leave entitlements.

The first is the greater attribution of caring to women then to men, which disadvantages same-sex male parents. Whilst some difference in parental leave entitlements between mothers and fathers is biologically based – the need for recovery from the birth and for the establishment of breastfeeding – the disparities are often more substantial than biology alone would justify. And any parental leave reserved for biological mothers means that same-sex male parents get less time to care for their babies. This can be substantially less: in seven countries, this difference in availability of parental leave is six months long or greater (Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Korea).

The second factor works the other way: parental leave entitlements specifically designed to facilitate fathers taking leave in different-sex relationships are not always equally accessible for same-sex female couples

A third factor in discrimination is the wider inequality in marriage and adoption rights for same-sex parents.

The study authors recommend removing from parental leave legislation gendered and heteronormative language that designates women as primary caregivers and assumes that every family has one mother and one father.

The researchers refer to the Yogyakarta Principles, which outline human rights for LBGT people. Principle 24 relates to family benefits and states that “no family may be subjected to discrimination on the basis of the sexual orientation or gender identity of any of its members, including with regard to family-related social welfare and other public benefits.”

Since shared parental leave-taking has been found to be linked to a higher rate of breastfeeding, improved child development, improved parent mental health and better protection from wage or job loss, the inequalities in the legislation expose same-sex parents more to risks than different-sex parents face.

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