Hopefully we all agree that nature and nurture are both important in the development of gender identiy, role and behaviour, but how and when do children acquire information about their own gender and associated behaviours? Developmental psychologists study how the way children think changes and, er, develops, and this impacts on their gender role.
In this video young Ernest Lawrence participates in a couple of 'conservation' experiments. Typically for a three year old, he apparently lacks the cognitive ability to understand that cuperficial changes don't affect the underlying nature of things.
In this video we chat about gender, and his answers suggest that while he has definitly reached Kohlberg's first stage - gender identity - he is only starting to acquire gender stability and definitely doesn't have gender consistency.
Here is the presentation on Kohlberg's theory of Gender Constancy. The fact that children move through these three stages, at approximately these ages, is well supported by evidence. Kohlberg's controversial idea was that children need to reach the stage of gender consistency before they start to actively acquire information about behaviours associated with their own gender.
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