Questions:1. According to Thorne and Luria, what aspect of childhood experience serves as one of the main sources of gender differences? How does it operate?2. According to Goldscheider and Waite, how much housework do children do in contemporary families? How does it vary by child’s gender and type of family? 3. According to Annette Lareau, how do the models of childrearing differ by race and class?4. What are the signs of commercialization of childhood presented in Juliet Schor’s article? How does this commercialization affect children’s well-being?
According to Thorne and Luria, the sexual scripting within childhood serves as one of the main sources of gender differences. Thorne and Luria argue that desire and arousal are shaped by and associated with socially learned activities, which they call as sexual scripts. Such social learning is related to the adult society’s view of gender and affects who does what, with whom, when how, and what it means. Gender segregation is major way in which is operates and begins from an early age in which the social organization and culture of boys and girls differ. Boys tend to engage in more physically aggressive play in more public groups while the girls interact in smaller groups and engage in turn-taking activities. This in turn affects rule-breaking behavior, interaction, and habitual performance. Furthermore, gender-marked rituals of teasing, chasing, and pollution heighten the boundaries between boys and girls, which are conveyed into later sexual scripts.
According to Goldscheider and Waite, the housework done by children in contemporary households are sex typed and create sharp gender differences which are crystalized by adolescence. On an overall basis, children contribute a relatively small proportion of total household labor- 15 percent, but their share is quite substantial for some tasks. Laundry, cooking, and yard work fall in between, with children doing 12 to 15 percent of these tasks. Thus, children’s participation in household tasks depends on which task. The authors have found that girls tend to spend about twice as much time on housework as their brothers. Further, families with teenage girls report that they share five times more tasks with children than do families with boys of the same age. This gender sex typing serves as a focal point where the division of labor between the sexes is most strongly enforced. Moreover, families in urban areas depend on urban areas depend less on their children’s labor than those in rural areas, which correlate that there is somewhat a racial issue in that urban families are more likely to be egalitarian.
According to Annette Lareau, the models of childrearing differ by race and class, because they have found that the childrearing dynamics, compared with social class, race was less important in children’s daily lives. Middle-class parents engage in ‘concerted cultivation’ by focus and attempting to foster children’s talents through organized activities and reasoning while working class and poor parents providing the basic environment in which children can grow, but leaves leisure activities to children themselves. Thus, middle-class children will most likely have important advantages. Further, there may be cultural differences corresponding with the issues of race that inhibit societal advantages for the children. However, in terms of how children spend their time, the way parents use language and discipline in the home, the nature of the families’ social connections, and the strategies used for intervening in institutions, white and black middle-class parents engaged in very similar practices with their children.
According to Juliet Schor, some signs of commercialization of childhood is that the advertisement and the effort to market to children is increasing. Children, according to Juliet Schor, are become shoppers at an earlier age; this influence is being driven by change in parenting style and the opinions of kids are being solicited from earlier ages to choose and buy. Parental tie pressure and longer working hours have driven this trend (aka guilt money and having less time to cajole kids out of not wanting something) in the commercialization of children. This commercialization can affect children’s well-being in a negative way, because food is one of the areas in which influence marketing and the decline of parental control has been most pronounced. Children’s purchasing power has risen an increase of 400 percent, in which the number one spending category is sweets, snacks, and beverages.