031: Parenting beyond pink and blue

Today I join forces with Malaika Dower of the How to Get Away with Parenting podcast to interview Dr. Christia Brown, who is a Professor of Developmental and Social Psychology at the University of Kentucky, where she studies the development of gender identity and children’s experience of gender discrimination. Dr. Brown’s book, Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue (Affiliate link), helps parents to really understand the scientific research around gender differences in children, which is a harder task than with some other topics because there’s just a lot of bad research out there on this one.  I ask about theories of gender development while Malaika keeps us grounded with questions about how this stuff works in the real world, and we both resolve to shift our behavior toward our daughters just a little bit. Related Episodes Interview with Yarrow Dunham on how social groups form Interview with Kang Lee on children’s lying (yep – your kid does it too!)   References Brown, C.S. (2014). Parenting beyond pink and blue. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press. (Affiliate link) Taylor, M.G., Rhodes, M., & Gelman, S.A. (2009). Boys will be boys and cows will be cows: Children’s essentialist reasoning about gender categories and animal species. Child Development 80(2), 461-481. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01272.x   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen: 00:30 Hello and welcome to Your Parenting Mojo. We have a pretty cool show lined up for you today. So those of you who are subscribed to my podcasts by my website at YourParentingMojo.com might've seen a notification go out just before the holiday, letting you know that had been interviewed by Malaika Dower, who is the host of the podcast, How to Get Away with Parenting. And as a side note, I'll say that Malaika is interested in a lot of the same issues as I am. So you should go and check out her show and if you're the parent of a child of color then you should pause this show and go and check out her show at howtogetawaywithparenting.com right now because there are very few podcasts for this audience and hers is a really good one. So right after we recorded our episode, Malaika texted me and said, did you ever think about doing an episode on gender-neutral parenting? Does it even make a difference if I put barrettes in my daughter's hair and put her in pink dresses or if she only wears pants and I always say "yes, our neighbor is writing down his riding down the street" on her bike rather than "he or she is riding her bike." So like I always do, I looked around to see who's doing really good work on the subject by which I mean work that is actually based on the outcomes of real scientific research and not a study saying that girl babies hear about one decibel better than boy babies for very high pitch noises and that this is enough justification for gender segregated classrooms where we never let the noise get too loud in the girls classroom and I wish that I was kidding you about that, but I'm really not. So when I read the book, Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue and I found that it critically examines the relevant scientific literature on this subject, much like we do here on the show, I knew that I had to ask the author to talk with us. Dr. Christia Brown is professor of development and social psychology at the University of Kentucky where she studies the development of gender identity and children's experience of gender discrimination among other topics. Dr. Brown received her Ph.D from the University of Texas at Austin where her research focused on how and why children form gender and race stereotypes and how they understand gender discrimination. As I mentioned, Dr Brown's book is called Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue: How to Raise your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes. Welcome Dr Brown, and also welcome to Malaika Dower, who's going to be our co-interviewer today. Malaika: 02:36 Hi! Dr. Brown: 02:36 Thank you. Jen: 02:37 All right, so let's start with the big question. Jen: 02:41 Is there a genetic difference between the brains of very young boys and girls? Can you talk us through that a little bit please? Dr. Brown: 02:47 I can. I mean there are, I mean obviously there are genetic differences between boys and girls, is that when you start to really look at brain differences, there aren't very many and there definitely aren't many when you look at young children. So yes, there are some differences between adults. The problem is they've had an entire lifetime of different experiences and there's lots of evidence that all those experiences shape the brain in very concrete structural ways. So when you're talking about what are these of biological differences early in life, there are very, very few and there's far more differences between individual boys and individual girls then between boys and girls as a group. Jen: 03:31 Wow. Uh, okay. So you said two really big things there. Firstly, that the experiences that we have in our lives physically shape our brains, so that adults have very different brains than they did as children. Is that right? Dr. Brown: 03:45 That's exactly right. Jen: 03:46 Okay. And then secondly that there are some differences between boys and girls, but the overall difference between boys and girls is far less than the difference between two individual boys or an individual boy and an individual girl, is that right? Dr. Brown: 04:05 Right. So I mean the idea that knowing someone's gender doesn't help you very much predict even what their brain looks like structurally. So it definitely doesn't help you predict what kind of behaviors or interests or activities they're going to like doing. Neuroscientists even say their brains don't look different. I mean they talk about it as more of like a brain mosaic and that there's parts of kind of stereotypical boy parts and parts of girl parts all within every individual's brain. It's not this pink and blue dichotomy that we often like to think it is. Jen: 04:38 Hmm. Okay. So when we start to think about some of the topics where we imagine this being important; I'm thinking that start with temperament, temperament and emotion...what does that mean for differences if there are any. Dr. Brown: 04:55 There aren't any when it comes to emotion. And I'll say Janet Hyde does really great research, so she's a developmental psychologist, and she has done a lot of meta-analyses on these. So when I say that there aren't differences, it's not based on like one or two studies, not finding differences. She's taking kind of every study that's ever been done looking for a gender difference and puts them all into one pot and then kind of analyze as across...She has one study, looked across a million something kids. So when I say there's no difference, it's really based on hundreds of studies and they found that there aren't differences in emotion, there aren't differences in temperament in between boys and girls. The one difference you see that's, it's not big, but it is, I think what I would say, you know, an actual difference is boys have a little bit of a higher activity level like infant boys and they're a little bit more impulsive, so a little bit more likely to kind of reach out and grab something when they're infants compared to girls. Again, it's a small difference and it's just a mean level difference. So it doesn't really predict my individual daughter who's going to reach out and grab something in the grocery store so doesn't really help me as a parent. But as new looking at lots of groups, you see a little bit of a difference there but not when it comes to like emotional expression or who feel sad or who feels happy and how upset you get that, there's not a difference at all. Jen: 06:22 And so when we think about math, I've been doing a lot of reading on this right now, in terms of girls' ability to do math and that their ability actually seems fairly congruent with a boy's ability to do math, but the boy's confidence in his ability to do math is much higher. Why is that? Dr. Brown: 06:42 Well, I mean kids really early. No, the stereotype that boys are good at math. I mean there've been studies that show it was like five and six know that stereotype. So by the time they're starting school, when they're actually doing math, they know that boys are supposed to be good at this and girls are less good at it. So I think when you think that you're going to be good, that does a lot to increase your own competence and reduce your anxiety about the subject. Whereas girls kind of go in thinking, yeah, might be doing well in class, but I'm not really good at math. Malaika: 07:14 Just generally sort of the intervention of that. So if we're parents that are trying to intervene in that, where should we step in? And does reinforcement help, so I have a daughter and I want to make sure that she feels like she is good at math or that that's not even a question of being good or bad, just here's math, I will do it, kind of thing. Where if we know already that by five or six they, they have that feeling for me, trying to either counteract that sentiment in girls. Where would I start on? How...