Gender roles in the early years

According to Dr. Benjamin Spock, people are likely to appreciate girls' cuteness and boys' achievements. For example, a girl may receive the comment, "You look so pretty!" for the outfit she is wearing. While this compliment isn't harmful in itself, repeated over and over the message the girl gets is that she is most appreciated for her looks, not for what she can do. Boys, on the other hand, are praised for what they can do--"Aren't you a big boy, standing up by yourself!" Many parents encourage and expect boys to be more active, to be more rough-and-tumble in their play than girls. A boy who does not like rough play (and so goes against the gender role he has been assigned) may be labeled a "sissy." A girl who prefers active play to more passive pursuits may be called a "tomboy."

Children at a young age are socialized to behave in their right sexual manner. The girls are to be loving, caring, and compassionate. While the boys, are expected to be caregivers, protectors, and providers.

Females are associated mainly with their emotions, while males with their actions. Children see this at an early age and pick up on it. Girls automatically know that they will get pampered and be cared for, when on the other hand, boys expect punishment and responsibility is usually the last thing going through their minds.

Gender roles are seen everywhere and our children are being socialized to follow them. I went to the Aspire Park recently and noted how the children play and how they interact with others on the playgrounds. I noticed the girls stick to their corner and the boys take the centre stage in the sandbox. The girls held hands while the boys play football/soccer. After a long day, even my baby sister was conforming to their sociological rules. She revealed her emotions of sadness as we left the park.


It was very interesting to see that even when we don’t notice what’s going on around us or what’s happening to us, we’re constantly socialized and conformed to the rules set by society.

Role-models

The term role model in sociology generally means any "person who serves as an example, whose behavior is emulated by others". Who is your role model? Who do you look up to? Is it a scientist? A scholar? Or maybe your own parents?

Having actors as role models has been something that’s been going on for long now,  seeing how the actors play certain character, and the audience might fall for that certain character, but at the same time, not differentiating between the character and the actor/actress. Especially children.

One of the reasons I decided to write about this certain topic is that I remembered a little chatter between me and my friends about Miley Cyrus. How she was only seen as Hannah Montana, a role-model for little girls, and then how she evolved to a totally different example, a bad one. (1-2)

And as for boys, their role models might be from WWE(World wrestling Entertainment), which is an entertainment programs that target males from age 18-34, and also children. But how do you group children with 18-34 years old males? These role models are certainly not good ones.

Why is media portraying these people as people a child should consider a hero? Why are most kids these days not consider scholars, scientists as heroes and role models these days? Is it because the whole world is focused on self-entertainment in this century?

There are many other "role-models" to be listed but I thought that these two stands out the most.

Families in TV's Shows

To day I am going to talk about how families are perpetuate in the TV shows; how

They present them, and what the idea of family they are trying to promote for it, also how family is thought to be.

Family not always seen as real family; like there is the same sexual couple; it's tuff topic and in some country its not acceptable .For example, in conservative family won’t allowed any one of their members to have same sexual couple. But other individuals are supporting this new type of concept, and individuals are part of the society.

We notice lately that western countries’ TV shows are trying to add a new concepts in the society that every thing is fine like same sex marriage and having children a doubted by same sexual couple.

There are arias of society that appose to that, vary conservative position in the society like western society.

There are many types of families, like:

· Single parents: that happened when they face a divorce and the children decide where to live with; the mother or father. Sometimes the law decide with who the children should stay and live

· Communistic partnership: when two people live together without being married and they are committed to staple relation ship. They just are none married

· Civilian union: that is something new which is the couple are leaving together and in a stable relationship and maybe having a children but without marriage

· Also its involve people have the same sex in a relationship and these certain of unions are allow in some countries, but not on the other ones.

· Also some countries allow the adoptions for the same sex couple; its depend on the person, culture, countries and history of them. These are all different types of families

What Do Children Learn From Cartoons?

A few weeks ago, my mom’s friend cameover with her little son for breakfast. At first, the little boy was very shy and he didn’t say a word, butafter a while he started talking. What was shocking to me is that he wasspeaking in formal Arabic, which is barely used in casual life nowadays. Iasked his mom how did that happen, and she told me that she was worried abouther son not speaking at the proper age and she felt he didn’t understand herand her husband when they talked to him. But once, she said, her son was veryangry trying to tell his mom to give him a certain toy, and she was acting asif she didn’t know which toy he wanted to encourage him to speak. Luckily hesaid something. He screamed: (la oreed hatheh), which means no I want that onein formal Arabic. The mom was shocked to hear him speak in formal Arabic. Fromthat point, whenever she wanted to communicate with her son she used formalArabic. She told me her son was very happy to finally be able to understand andcommunicate with them.

According to her, her son learnedformal Arabic from Cartoons on TV, which are dubbed in formal Arabic most ofthe time. It is said that the family is the most important agent of socialization, but this case made me think whether this statement is true ornot. The kid learned the language from television instead of his family! May bethis happened because of the new common family structure; the mother and thefather are working for most of the day, whereas the son or the daughter, beforethey’re eligible to go to school, spend most of their time in front of TV withthe nanny who doesn’t speak Arabic. Moreover, I’ve heard many stories aboutlittle children learning the language of the nanny, which made them more ableto communicate better with her that with their own parents.

Other than language, cartoons canteach children a lot of things, like role taking. Children learn a lot abouthow to be a boy or a girl in the society from cartoons. For example, in Disneymovies most females are portrayed with longeyelashes, pink cheeks, red lips, and a very tiny waist. On the other hand,males are portrayed as tall, with wide shoulders, and big biceps.

Thisportrayal reflects the perfect shape of females and males expected in thesociety. Girls wear make up and want to be skinny, and boys want to go to thegym to build muscles. Moreover, females are associated with cleaning andsewing, whereas males are associated with jobs like mining, and competitionwith other males for either status or a possible mate.

Furthermore, somecartoons like Tom & Jerry, and Bugs Bunny, include a lot of violent material, which might affect the way children play with each other.

This suggests the need for parentsto supervise and try to control what their young children watch, becausewithout this supervision and interference of the parents, children mightinternalize the behaviors and values they watch in these cartoons, and this canbe very problematic, especially if parent consider these behaviors and valuesas inappropriate.