Gender Typing Theory

2. Gender typing is, “how children acquire their knowledge about gender and how they develop their gender-related personality characteristics, preferences, skills, behaviors, and self-concepts.” This is developed through the biological, social, and psychological stages of development such as during the prentatal period, infancy, and adolescence (Matlin, 2012, pg. 75). During the prenatal period, or the time before birth, gender typing begins once doctors and parents assign the unborn baby a gender based on the child’s biological sex, which is thus, based on the child’s sex chromosomes and gonads, or sex glands. Even when a child is born as an intersex baby, without clear biological male or female parts, doctors will most often perform surgeries to make …show more content…
This gender polarization, that splits males and females into separate categories, (64) makes reactions and gender expectations more predictable, as they would adhere to the “gender appropriate” ideas about the child. Two different theories attempt to explain gender typing, including the social learning approach which is the idea that children are rewarded for “gender appropriate” behavior and punished for “gender inappropriate” behavior (Matlin, 2012, pg. 83). The other argument is the cognitive developmental approach which believes that “children are active thinkers who seek information from their environment; children also try to make sense of this information and organize it in a coherent fashion” (Matlin, 2012, pg. 84). These dynamics also lead to gender identity, or a child’s identification of whether they are a girl or a boy (Matlin, 2012, pg. 85) which may not match their biological classification. Parents are significantly involved in gender typing of their own kids, when they assign and encourage gender typed activities, which affects their own behaviors, based on their kids’