Free Essay On Childrearing Practices

Childrearing is one of the toughest and most challenging task a parent has to undertake to ensure that his/her offspring turns out to be the person they want him/her to be in the future. This is what shapes the life of the child in question since it is a series of activities that influence the decisions that a child will make growing up and the eventual character he/she will uphold upon growing to be independent. This paper is out to find out the effect of parental childrearing practices on gender difference at the individual as well as the institutional levels with regard to gender performance as well as gender inequalities.
The interviewee in this case was my aunt and the subject of the interview was my cousins. My aunt has three children, one of whom is a boy and the other two are girls. The decision to have each child was made separately according to the desired number of children they had in plan. The first child, who is a girl was received with a lot of joy regardless of the gender. This is because it was their first child and they were overjoyed to finally have a baby. The second child, a boy, was received with much more joy compared to the first one. This is merely due to the fact that he was of a different gender and a boy for that matter. The decision to have him again, was purely due to their family planning decisions. The decision to give birth to the third child was purely out of curiosity to see if they would get another boy child. It was experimental but planned nevertheless. The third child turned out to be a girl, against the expectations of the parents. However, this was not a bad thing. Her delivery was received normally with little hype.
Coming on to the names, my uncle is a systematic and organized person who is obsessed with arranging his activities and things in a certain order which is easy to work with. For this reason, he named the children in a systematic way such that every single one of my three cousins have their names starting with the letter ‘E’. The specific letter was chosen since it runs way back into the family’s history.
On the issue of consumption associated with raising the children during infancy and early childhood, my aunt used the normal trends. Each child was born with a room already prepared for them. The arrangement, decoration, and coloring of the room as well as the clothing of the children was gender sensitive in that the male child was dressed as one right from childhood while the female ones were treated accordingly. The food was more or less the same across the three siblings while the books and toys were again according to the child’s gender. The female off springs played with Barbie dolls and teddy bears while the male child got toy cars and a soccer ball to play around with. Being a middle class family, the children were taken to good schooling institutions right from childhood to the level they have reached. This is because they wanted their children to receive the best education and to decide the career paths that they wanted to have for themselves. Their children’s performance in school helped them know the areas of interests of every child and hence they used this to decide which path to let them pursue as well as which schools were best fit for them. For instance, in the situation of the first born child, who is a girl, her love for music led her to be taken to a music school during high school. This was meant to help her nurture and grow her talent and love for music. Talent development was a crucial aspect when raising these children. The parents made sure that they identified each child’s interests and talents and proceeded to encourage them and supported them by taking them to institutions of learning where their talents would get a chance to grow. My male cousin for instance loved soccer, so his performance in soccer led to him making it into the school soccer team, a situation that pleased his parents since they were in full support of the idea. Regarding the chores extended to the children, the same criteria was used. Chores which have been thought to be best done by the females were assigned to the females while the manly ones were assigned to the son. As the children grew older, their parents chose to relieve them of house chores so as to let them focus on their academic work. As a matter of facts, more time was dedicated to school work and talent development and most of the previous chores they used to undertake were assigned to a house help.
The children were left to choose their friends with little supervision from their parents. This was meant to enhance their decision making and to teach them to start making wise decisions. Curfews were imposed only when they made mistakes or performed poorly at school. As for dating, the children were allowed to date once they attained the legal age. Prior to that, only friendships were allowed and no kind or form of dating was acceptable. Locations like night clubs were only open to the children once they attained 18 years of age. Being staunch Christians, my uncle and aunt raised their children the Christian way and all church functions or at least most of them were must attend events. Family reunions and get together were often organized. This was a platform to bond.
In the analysis above, it is correct to say that parental behavior and parental gendering activities contribute largely to gender difference as well as gender inequality. Parental activity is further responsible for particular gender performance. For instance, the boy in the family was treated differently from the girls and was given different types of toys, chores, room decoration and coloring, different clothes etc. this was done purposefully to help define his gender from the other gender. Parenting activity indeed adds to, maintains and mitigates gender inequality in the community. This is mainly because the male child is treated distinctively differently from the female child since the society has already set up the standards to work with. Certain jobs which are deemed to be less technical and less strenuous have been delegated to the women while the more complex and strenuous jobs have been left to the men. Women, of the female child is generally viewed by the society as the weaker sex and this has been taken up by the parents and can be seen in the parenting activities that lead them to treat the two gender differently.