I need a response to each peer discussion:
discussion 1:
There are many theories on how thoughts and behaviors are related to gender. “Gender identity involves a sense of one’s own gender, including knowledge, understanding, and acceptance of being male or female” (Best & Puzio, 2019; Erickson-Schroth & Davis, 2021). Most children develop this sense of awareness around two and a half years old. Gender typing is more of a stereotypical way for genders to act. Boys are known to be more aggressive and fight and girls are known for crying more. Most of all, biological details play a huge role in gender and characteristics due to hormones and chromosomes. I feel that gender is equally influenced by social and cognitive factors. For example, I strongly agree with the social cognitive theory of gender. This deals with children observing what people say and do. This has a major influence on kids. From the book Life Span Development, John Santrock states, “when infants and toddlers show gender-appropriate behavior, adults tend to reward them. Parents often use rewards and punishments to teach their daughters to be feminine (“Karen, you are being a good girl when you play gently with your doll”) and their sons to be masculine (“Keith, a boy as big as you is not supposed to cry”). What influences a child to engage in active play is when the toy is more a hands on toy. It involves movement for example, pushing a toy car. When a child rather participate in passive play, they are more timid and would rather be entertained by watching something like an electronic train move around and around.
Discussion 2:
In today’s day and age, gender feels like an elephant in the room that has become such a political hot topic, and the debate continues to grow in the media as people have such strong opinions on it. I believe that humans can definitely be influenced to have certain behaviors – we are social creatures who long for acceptance, and we are hard-wired to do so. Parental and social influences play a huge role in the behaviors that we adopt as children, as we are being raised in a society where gender plays a big role on who you are. “Especially in adulthood it seems that males vary more than females in some aspects of emotional processing and altruistic behavior, suggesting that even though it appears that males express less empathy, their higher discrimination in targeting helping behavior supports the idea that males actually outperform females in their empathetic control.” (Christov-Moore et. al, 2014)
Reference
Christov-Moore, L., Simpson, E. A., Coudé, G., Grigaityte, K., Iacoboni, M., & Ferrari, P. F. (2014). Empathy: gender effects in brain and behavior. Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews, 46 Pt 4(Pt 4), 604–627.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2014.09.001