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Article Excerpt
Do contemporary families promote gender-differentiated or egalitarian attitudes and behavior surrounding mathematics? The current study examined mother-child interactions during mathematics homework as a microcosm of contemporary gender socialization. Results revealed individual differences in mothers' treatment of their fifth-grade sons and daughters during mathematics homework interactions, with effects moderated by mothers' gender-role attitudes and mathematics education. Traditional mothers, especially those with greater mathematics education, showed more gender differentiation than egalitarian mothers. Similar individual differences were seen in mothers' and children's attitudes toward mathematics. These findings illustrate the subtlety of gender socialization by showing that mothers' gender-role attitudes, children's gender-role identities, and mothers' education all play important roles in the gender differentiation of children's mathematics attitudes and behavior.
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Gender-role attitudes have become increasingly egalitarian over the past several decades. A review of studies published between 1970 and 1995 found that during that period, adults' attitudes toward women and gender roles underwent a swift and steady change from traditional to egalitarian, a trend that was true for both women and men (Twenge, 1997). Consistent with this shift in gender-role attitudes, scientific thinking about gender socialization has also changed. Current theories of gender socialization go beyond the notion that all parents act upon gender stereotypes and treat boys and girls differently in an effort to mold them into different, culturally prescribed gender roles. Rather, researchers now believe that the process is much less explicit and that children develop their understanding of gender roles through observation of adults' subtle, implicit behaviors (Gelman, Taylor, & Nguyen, 2004).
The purpose of the current research was to observe the dynamics of contemporary families and examine if and to what extent gender socialization takes place in a particular situation, mothers helping their children with homework. To do so, we examined mothers' and children's attitudes toward mathematics, an academic domain still stereotyped as male-dominated. We also observed mother-child interactions while working on mathematics homework to examine whether mothers behaved differently with sons and daughters. In doing so, we took a contemporary view of gender socialization and assumed that gender socialization would not be blatant or universal in all families. Rather, our goal was to identify individual differences that would distinguish whether children experienced gender-differentiated or egalitarian attitudes and treatment during mathematics learning at home.
The Role of Parents in Children's Mathematics Achievement
Although parents tend to treat daughters and sons similarly in most domains, they do encourage gender-typed activities (Lytton & Romney, 1991). Thus, to the extent that mathematics and science are still considered male domains, we would expect gender differentiation to persist in parents' encouragement of mathematics and science. Research suggests that it does. For example, there is considerable evidence that during parent-child interactions involving science, parents provide more scientific explanations and use more cognitively complex language with sons than with daughters. This is true both in naturalistic settings, such as science museums (Crowley, Callanan, Tenenbaum, & Allen, 2001), and during structured science tasks in the home (Tenenbaum & Leaper, 2003; Tenenbaum, Snow, Roach, & Kurland, 2005). Importantly, parents' engagement with children in scientific conversation predicts their children's performance on a science test several years later (Tenenbaum et al., 2005).
Parents also play a major role in shaping their children's attitudes toward and subsequent success in mathematics and other domains. Many studies have demonstrated that children's self-perceptions of their academic capabilities mirror their parents' perceptions (e.g., Bouchey & Harter, 2005; Fredricks & Eccles, 2002; Frome & Eccles, 1998). In one study, parents' perceptions of a child's ability were more strongly related to the child's self-perceptions than were the child's actual grades (Frome & Eccles, 1998). That is, if parents thought that the child was good or bad in mathematics or that mathematics was easy or hard for the child, then the child was likely to perceive himself or herself in the same way, and children held views consistent with their parents' views regardless of how well they were actually doing in mathematics class. Notably, parents held more positive perceptions of boys' mathematics ability than girls', and those perceptions were related to children's self-concepts and their expectations for future success in mathematics.
Individual Differences in Parent-Child Interactions
Just as theories of gender socialization have become more nuanced regarding the subtle ways in which socialization occurs, psychologists now acknowledge that many factors work together to determine how children are socialized. Parents' motivation, ability, and gender beliefs all interact with children's characteristics and environmental cues to determine how parents treat their children (Pomerantz, Ng, & Wang, 2004).
We believe that individual differences among parents in education and gender-role attitudes are particularly important in how they socialize their children regarding mathematics. Parents' attitudes toward education are shaped by their own educational attainment (e.g., Battin-Pearson, Newcomb, Abbott, Hill, Catalano, & Hawkins, 2000) such that parents with more education have higher expectations for their children's academic attainment. In turn, parents' aspirations for their children's education prospectively predict children's decisions to take mathematics and science courses in high school (van Langen, Rekers-Mombarg, & Dekkers, 2006). Furthermore, mothers with more education may communicate mathematics concepts more effectively, just as teachers with more mathematical knowledge do (e.g., Hill, Rowan, & Ball, 2005). Research also has shown that mothers with traditional gender-role attitudes--i.e., those who believe that men and women should hold separate social roles and responsibilities--show more gender-differentiated behavior toward their children than do mothers with egalitarian gender-role attitudes (Weitzman, Birns, & Friend, 1985).
The Current Study
The current study extends previous research in several important ways. First, this study provides current data about parents' gender-related socialization to examine if and how parents convey subtle expectations about achievement in gender-related domains. Second, through in-home observation of mothers and their children, it provides a direct behavioral test of how mothers act toward their fifth-grade sons and daughters during mathematics learning at home. Finally, we explore the possibility that gender-differentiated behavior and attitudes may be present in some families but not others. Specifically, we look at the role that mothers' educational background and adherence to traditional gender-role attitudes play in their interactions with and attitudes toward their child in mathematics.
Consistent with previous research and theorizing on gender socialization (Frome & Eccles, 1998; Hyde, Fennema, Ryan, Frost, & Hopp, 1990; Pomerantz, Ng, & Wang, 2004), we expected that, on average, mothers would have more positive perceptions of boys' mathematics achievement and ability than girls', and we predicted that children's attitudes toward mathematics and their self-concepts of mathematics ability would mirror their parents', with boys indicating greater achievement and ability than girls. However, we expected no corresponding difference in children's actual achievement (gender differences in achievement would not be expected until high school) (Hyde, Fennema, & Lamon, 1990). We also examined the possibility that mothers would treat boys and girls differently in two aspects of the homework interactions: mathematical content and maternal assistance. Both of these variables have been linked with children's learning in previous research (e.g., Pratt, Green, MacVicar, & Bountrogianni, 1992; Tenenbaum et al., 2005). We predicted that, by providing more mathematical content and more sensitive instruction to boys than to girls, mothers' teaching would reflect stereotypes that boys are better than girls at higher-level mathematics.
Importantly, we were also interested in individual differences among families that might predict how sons and daughters are treated during homework interactions. We hypothesized that mothers who had taken advanced mathematics course work would be more effective teachers than would mothers with less mathematics education. We also predicted that mothers with more traditional gender-role...
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