IMAGE OF THE CHILD

Image of the Child

Image of the Child

The image that children are most often exposed to in preschool is that of the woman as full-time homemaker. In classroom materials, picture books, games and photographs Mother is usually shown wearing an apron, baking cookies and tending full-time to the needs of husband and children. This picture is reinforced tirelessly in the media where advertisements, television commercials and situation comedies perpetuate the image of women concerned only with clean floors, perfect cups of coffee and personal appearances.

Naturally, since young children acquire much learning through the process of imitation, one sees this pattern of the totally domesticated female symbolized by both sexes through dramatic play in day care centers and nursery schools. Many three year olds enter school with stereotyped role expectations for each sex already formed. (See "Sex Role Socialization and the Nursery School" by Carole Joffee in the Journal of Marriage and the Family, August 1971.) This is true even if the situation in their own home belies the stereotype. Often, even children whose mothers are doctors still presume that girls must be nurses. It is not only girls who are confined to stereotyped roles. Boys too are expected to conform to sexist images that abound in the home, the classroom and the media. They should be tough--"Big boys don't cry" is a phrase often used to admonish an "unmanly" three-year-oldl The media provides boys with endless images of violence; male heros most often solve conflicts with their fists, their feet or with weapons. Boys are fed an exhaustive diet of action and society seems to have no place for the quiet, contemplative or gentle male. Children of either sex who deviate from expected role behavior are likely to find themselves subjected to peer pressure and teacher/parent disapproval.

The Women's Action Alliance, a non-profit, tax exempt women's service organization founded in late 1971, became interested in the problem of sex role stereotyping in the preschool when they received scores of letters from parents. The letters complained that children were excessively exposed to stereotyped images of women as homemakers only, when in reality their mothers were working in jobs outside the home; that the family was presented as always having two parents when in reality many of the women who wrote to us were single heads of households; that the male image offered in school was a non-nurturant one which was in conflict with the values and behavior of the child's father. In response to these letters, the Alliance did some research to find out if any group concerned with early childhood education was addressing the problem of sexism. The answer, in 1972, was no, but we received encouragement from several groups (the Day Care and Child Development Council, the Child Welfare League) to develop a program ourselves. With financial aid from the Ford Foundation and others, the Non-Sexist Child Development Project w~ts begun. In order to help staff define what components were necessary for a non-sexist early childhood program ...