Culture and children's reasoning about preferences and gender norms.

To examine how children and young adults in two cultures think about gender norms, participants evaluated preferences that were inconsistent with gender norms. Participants (N = 200) included 53 children aged 5 years, 49 children aged 7 years, and 49 children aged 9 years, and 49 young adults from Korea and the United States. Both Koreans and Americans reasoned about violations of gender norms primarily as matters of personal choice in both public and private, with some conventional concerns in public settings. In both cultures, participants rejected the idea that an authority could have jurisdiction over gender-norm-related choices, and both groups suggested that being unable to express those preferences in public has a negative impact on individuals.

Children's reasoning about gender-atypical preferences in different settings.

Two age groups of children, 5- and 6-year-olds (n=30) and 8- and 9-year-olds (n=26), made judgments about which of two items a character should choose: a gender-typical item or a gender-atypical item that was preferred by the character. Judgments were made about situations where the character was (a) in a familiar public setting and (b) in a country where the reversed preference was typical for that culture. At both ages and in both settings, a majority of responses endorsed the character's atypical preference. However, at both ages, endorsements of the atypical preferences were significantly less frequent in the familiar public setting that in the norm-reversed setting, and justifications indicated that there would be social consequences for defying gender norms in the familiar setting.

Adolescents' reasoning about parental gender roles.

In an examination of how adolescents reason about several factors related to division of childcare labor, 38 adolescents, including 20 girls (M age = 16.36 years, SD = .50) and 18 boys (M age = 16.59 years, SD = .62) were interviewed about conflicts between a mother and a father over which parent should stay home with the child, the authority of the father, and similar issues in a traditional culture. The relative income of each parent was varied. Participants considered the needs of the child most when reasoning about infants, and the right to work most frequently when reasoning about preschoolers (p < .001, eta2 = .35). The majority (71%) did not endorse the husband's authority over the wife. However, boys were more likely than girls to emphasize the mother's responsibility to the child over her right to work (p < .01, eta2 = .23). Implications for gender equity and adolescents' future goals were discussed.

Jimmy's baby doll and Jenny's truck: young children's reasoning about gender norms.

To assess the flexibility of reasoning about gender, children ages 4, 6, and 8 years (N = 72) were interviewed about gender norms when different domains were highlighted. The majority of participants at all ages judged a reversal of gender norms in a different cultural context to be acceptable. They also judged gender norms as a matter of personal choice and they negatively evaluated a rule enforcing gender norms in schools. Older children were more likely to show flexibility than younger children. Justifications obtained from 6- and 8-year-olds showed that they considered adherence to gender norms a matter of personal choice and they viewed the rule enforcing gender norms as unfair.

Mother Like Mothers and Work Like Fathers: U.S. Heterosexual College Students' Assumptions About Who Should Meet Childcare and Housework Demands.

Many U.S. women report balancing competing demands for labor within the family and the workplace. Prior research has found that young adult heterosexual U.S. women are still anticipating doing the majority of their future family's childcare and housework, though they hold more progressive gender role attitudes than in the past. The aim of the present study was to investigate the assumptions of 176 heterosexual college students in the U.S. (M age = 20.57, 88.64% European American, 51.70% ciswomen, 48.30% cismen) about how childcare and housework should be balanced in the context of work responsibilities. Participants were asked to rate their level of agreement with two items about working mothers and childcare and working fathers and household care, and provided open-ended responses to explain their justifications for their rating. Open-ended responses were thematically coded. Results revealed that most participants wanted mothers to have the choice to work but considered childcare a limiting problem that (primarily) mothers should solve. Similarly, participants believed that working full-time did not excuse a husband from helping with chores, however they did not express concerns with the term "helping" which implies that the husband would not hold any primary responsibility. Overall, the findings suggest the importance for educational and policymaking interventions and future research to highlight practices that support and encourage the role of men in addressing childcare and household needs.

ADHD and Judgments of Impulsivity in Rule Violations.

Participants with ADHD (n = 45) and participants without ADHD (n = 130, total n = 175) judged hypothetical moral and conventional rule violations that varied the impulsivity of the act, the ADHD diagnosis, and the gender of the actor in order to examine (1) social reasoning about impulsiveness and (2) whether participants infer impulsiveness from the characteristics of the actor, including gender and ADHD-status. Moral violations were judged more negatively than conventional violations, even when they were impulsive. The characteristics of the actor influenced judgments in that participants judged boys' behavior as more acceptable, as having less control, and as deserving of less punishment compared to girls. In addition, actors who were described as having ADHD were judged overall more positively. Participants with ADHD judged that all actors should receive similar punishment, regardless of the actor's ADHD diagnosis, while participants without ADHD judged actors with ADHD should receive less punishment than those without.

Reciprocal associations between young children's developing moral judgments and theory of mind.

Associations between young children's developing theory of mind (ToM) and judgments of prototypical moral transgressions were examined 3 times across 1 year in 70 American middle class 2.5- to 4-year-olds. Separate path models controlling for cross-time stability in judgments, within-time associations, and children's age at Wave 1 indicated that across both 6-month intervals, children who evaluated moral acts as more wrong independent of authority had more mature ToM 6 months later; in addition, judgments of moral transgressions as less permissible at Wave 2 also led to more advanced ToM at Wave 3. Children with more advanced ToM judged that moral rules are more alterable, however, and rated moral transgressions as less deserving of punishment. Finally, more advanced ToM initially led to evaluations of moral transgressions as less independent of rules and then to judgments of moral transgressions as more independent of rules. During the preschool years, early moral judgments and theory of mind appear to develop as reciprocal, bidirectional processes.