Gender-Role Cognition in Three-Year-Old Boys and Girls

Although the multidimensionality of gender roles has been well established, few researchers have investigated male and female roles separately. Because of the substantial differences in the ways male and female roles are portrayed in our culture, boys and girls may think and learn about these roles differently. The male role is more clearly defined, more highly valued, and more salient than the female role; thus, children's cognitions about these two roles may be expected to differ. The present study addressed the question of whether there is sex-typical variation in gender labeling, gender-role knowledge, and schematicity. Participants were 120 families; 15% were from minority ethnic groups, and 17% were single-parent families; 25% of the parents had a high school education or less. Results indicated that at 36 months of age, boys were less able to label gender and less knowledgeable about gender roles than were girls. Boys' knew more about male stereotypes than female stereotypes, whereas girls knew considerably more than boys about the female role and as much as boys about the male role. Boys and girls were found to be similar in gender schematicity. Traditionality of parental attitudes regarding child-rearing and maternal employment were not strongly related to children's gender cognition.     

Discerning direct and mediated effects of ecological structures and processes on adolescents' educational outcomes

This short-term longitudinal study examined the relations among family and school characteristics, family-level processes (youth perceptions of parent-adolescent interactions), school-level processes (youth perceptions of school belonging, school climate), adolescents' school engagement, and later academic performance. Participants were an ethnically diverse, urban sample of 1,120 9th-grade students (M age = 14.6 years). The structural characteristics of families and schools influenced the proximal processes that occurred therein, and these proximal processes, in turn, influenced students' proximal (i.e., engagement) and distal educational outcomes (i.e., grades in school). Moreover, the structural characteristics of families and schools influenced proximal and distal outcomes indirectly through their influence on the proximal processes. The multimediated ecological model suggested that intervening at the process level may be a successful means of improving both adolescents' engagement in school and their subsequent school performance.     

Family income and its relation to preschool children's adjustment for families in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care

The current study examines relations of mean-level estimates, linear changes, and instability in income and family processes to child outcomes and addresses whether income, through its impact on family functioning, matters more for children living in poverty. Temporal changes and instability in family processes, but not income, predicted children's adjustment. Cross-sectional mediational analyses indicated that for families living at the poverty threshold, family processes fully mediated the effect of average income over the study period on social behavior but only partially mediated its effect on cognitive-linguistic development. The strength of these associations diminished as average income exceeded the poverty threshold. That is, income had a greater impact on the family functioning and development of poor children than of nonpoor children.