11 Mar 09 HOW DOES A SMALL CHILD LEARN THAT IT IS A BOY OR A GIRL?

Theory 3

A third theory suggests that a child obtains its gender-identity as part of the growth of its observational powers, which adds information to its brain cells. The behaviour of its parents and other visitors to it, when it is very small, starts the process.

As I have said, people treat boy babies differently from girl babies from the earliest days after birth. As the child becomes increasingly mobile, these early memories direct it to look at, and assess, men and women differently. It does not do this for rewards of parental approval, nor to identify with one or other parent, but because it makes a value-judgement of what it wants to be. It sees its father, or some other male, as stronger, more powerful than its mother. A boy child has already had ‘memory traces’ on its brain that it resembles a male, more than a female, and this is the impetus for it to begin to identify with males. As the child identifies, it models its behaviour on the male behaviour it observes, not for any reward or approval, but because of its ‘memory traces’.

During the years between 2 and 7 the boy’s gender-identity and his body concepts may be influenced by other information he receives from the outside world and absorbs, but his inclination is to value things which his own sex does and to note, but not act on, things the other sex does. Quite quickly the boy child develops a sex stereotype, which is a shorthand way for him to recognize his own sex.

Later, in early adolescence, many boys and girls develop an emotional attachment to a person of their own sex. A boy, for example, seeks the approval and recognition of the chosen male and does all he can to get that approval, by behaving in a way he expects will be rewarding. As the boy develops physically he replaces this emotional attachment with emotional attachments to girls.

Whatever the mechanism, each child seems to go through several stages. Up to the age of 2 or z\ the boy does not know his own sex. By the age of 3, a boy child is able to answer correctly, ‘I am a boy’, and knows what a boy is and in what ways he is different from a girl.

By the age of 4, a boy can identify other children as boys and as girls by clothing, hair, or other physical characteristics. And one or two years later, a boy (and a girl) believes that its sex is firmly unchangeable. A boy will always be a boy. Rather surprisingly perhaps, a knowledge of the differences in its own genital anatomy and that of girls seems to be relatively unimportant. This suggests that gender-identity is not determined by a child’s instinctual wishes but by observation of the general behaviour of each sex.

What has been written should not be taken to imply that gender-identity is fixed in all instances. The wide variability of human perceptions, thoughts, and behaviours means that some individuals do not obtain a fixed gender-identity.

It is also important to understand that behaviours appropriate to gender-identity are constantly changing. For example, men today do many household chores which forty years ago would have been considered inappropriate, and women do many things which, in the past, were considered to belong to men exclusively. Another example can be found in dress, in the use of jewellery, and in hairstyles. In all these areas there has been a trend to a ‘unisex’ position, and the firmly held beliefs of what dress, jewellery, or hair-style was appropriate to men and women have been abandoned.

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