Blog 12 - Childhood

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.) What are the signs of commercialization of childhood presented in Juliet Schor’s article? How does this commercialization affect children’s well-being?

Children’s social relations during play time are an aspect of childhood experiences that serves as one of the main sources of gender differences. “Boys tend to interact in larger and more publicly-visible groups; they more often play outdoors, and their activities take up more space than those of girls. Boys engage in more physically aggressive play and fighting; their social relations tend to be overtly hierarchical and competitive” (139). Girls on the other hand tend to interact in much smaller groups or friendships. “Girls more often engage in turn-taking activities like jump-rope and doing tricks on the bars, and they less often play organized sports. Girls describe their relations using language that stresses cooperation and ‘being nice’ (139). These initial roles act as scripts that they will follow into adulthood. Both girls and boys are helping to socialize one another into primary adult gender roles.
The segregation that girls and boys experience during their childhood greatly influences their experiences later in life. “In their separate gender groups, girls and boys learn somewhat different patterns of bonding – boys sharing the arousal of group rule-breaking; girls emphasizing the construction of intimacy, and themes of romance. Coming to adolescent sexual intimacy from different and symmetric gender subcultures, girls and boys bring somewhat different needs, capacities, and types of knowledge” (147).

In the Goldscheider and Waite article they examined the amount of housework done by children and how their work varies by the child’s gender and family type. It was found that children take relatively little responsibility for most household tasks, about 15% of the total household labor (811). They housework that is performed by children usually consists of washing dishes, cleaning the house, doing laundry, and doing lawn work. Goldscheider and Waite also determined that most families do not give children any responsibility for paperwork, or much responsibility for grocery shopping or child care (811).
The particular tasks of housework performed by children were also found to be significantly dependent on one’s gender and family situation. For example, “families with teenage girls report sharing five times more of these other tasks with children than do families with boys of the same age. In fact, girls ages 12-18 seem to carry the largest share of housework of all children” (813). Furthermore, young adult males contribute no more to housework than do preteen children and do significantly less cooking and child care than children 6-12 years old. “This childhood socialization helps to reproduce the sex segregation of household labor found among husbands and wives. The family is a “gender factory,” serving as a focal point where the importance of the division of labor between the sexes is most strongly reinforced” (813).
Specific family situations/types also influence how much housework is performed by children and who in particular performs those tasks. For example, “families headed by unmarried women, have both less money and less of the mother’s time at home than do families headed by couples. Under these circumstances, families may feel more need to turn to the labor power of the children, both in the home and in market” (814). Furthermore, Goldscheider and Waite reported that many of these mothers say they cannot function without the children’s labor. Although the children in mother-only families take nearly twice as much responsibility for household’s tasks as those in standard nuclear families, there was no change reported in the traditional allocation of tasks between boys and girls. These children, of mother-only families, however, were clearly more central to the family economy in a way that they are not in other families, and as a result, they are likely to feel needed and more responsible (815). Children who live with their mother and stepfather also take a greater role in household chores than do children who live with both their biological parents.

In the contemporary age there are many signs of the commercialization of childhood. “A 2000 Griffin Bacal study found that nearly two-thirds of mothers thought their children were brand aware by age three, one-third said it happened at age two. Kids have clear brand preferences, they know which brands are cool, they covet them, and pay attention to the ads for them. Today’s tweens are the most brand conscious generation in history” (7). This commercialization is due to a variety of factors, however, “underlying them all is a marketing juggernaut characterized by growing reach, effectiveness and audacity” (2). Many companies are investing a lot of time and money into learning more about this new and upcoming market. For example, “hundreds of companies’ representatives come to hear the latest findings about what kids are up to from researchers, psychologists, and ad agency reps” (3). In addition to listening to the latest findings of professionals, “marketers are videotaping children in their private spaces, providing-in-depth analysis of the rituals of daily like. They are taking the streets, to stores, and even going to schools to observe and record. Researchers are paying adults whom kids trust, such as coaches, clergy and youth workers, to elicit information from them. Online, they’re offering money, products, and prizes directly to kids in return for salable consumer information” As a result of all this children-intensive research, marketers now had a better idea of how to reach their potential consumers. Recently, it was found that children now have more of an influence in parental purchases; particularly within the food market. For example, when Fruit Roll-Ups were first introduced the ads had both kid and mom appeal; for moms they called the attention towards the fruit aspect of the snack. After a while however, Fruit Roll-Up marketers realized that this dual messaging was unnecessary. Consequently, ad agencies moved toward targeting their advertisements directly at kids while worrying less about Mom.
The commercialization of childhood has also found been found to affect children’s well-being. Increasingly, children are now found to be suffering from more emotional and mental health problems. “Rates of anxiety and depression went from negligible to 3.6%; attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder rose from 1.4% to 9.2%. Estimates of major depression are as high as 8% for adolescents. [Furthermore] in recent decades, suicide rates have climbed, and suicide is now the fourth leading cause of death among 10-14 year olds” (13). These new statistics are less than comforting and visibly illustrate that children’s mental and psychological health are much worse today than they were ten to twenty years ago.