Eleanor Maccaoby

16 Pages 3901 Words

cal situation with a child, asking them to record their reactions and responses to statements made by the child, such as: “Daddy (or Mommy), come look at my puzzle…Daddy, help me…Baby, you can’t play with me. You’re too little…Leave my puzzle alone or I’ll hit you in the head!” (Maccoby and Rothbart 1966). The “child” in this situation was a recording of a 4 year old’s voice. Parents were told either that the child was a girl, or that it was a boy. Differences in their responses were examined, scoring the permissiveness of the parent. The parents were then given a questionnaire to measure the extent to which they differentiated between the sexes by either (a) feeling boys and girls are different on selected characteristics, or (b) feeling boys and girls should differ on these characteristics (Rothbart and Maccoby 1966).
Rothbart and Maccoby (1966) hypothesized that parents showing high differentiation between boys and girls would show greater differences in reaction to the boy’s voice compared with the girl’s voice than would parents who differentiated little between the sexes. The results showed that high sex-role differentiation parents did display larger differences between their treatment of boys and girls than did low-differentiation parents, but their treatment was not more sex-role stereotyped because reactions did not reinforce dependency in females and aggression in boys. High sex-role differentiation parents tended to be more permissive toward the child of the opposite sex. Rothbart and Maccoby (1966) suggest that this may be a result of the parent responding to the child as a member of the opposite sex, reacting more favorably to the actions of the child who most resembles his/her marital partner, or, that the parent may be reacting less favorably to the child of the same-sex because of feelings of rivalry with this child. Mothers in the study were more likely to allow aggression toward t...