This longitudinal study examines the association between child gender and child aggression via parents' physical control, moderated by parents' gender-role stereotypes in a sample of 299 two-parent families with a 3-year-old child in the Netherlands. Fathers with strong stereotypical gender-role attitudes and mothers were observed to use more physical control strategies with boys than with girls, whereas fathers with strong counterstereotypical attitudes toward gender roles used more physical control with girls than with boys. Moreover, when fathers had strong attitudes toward gender roles (stereotypical or counterstereotypical), their differential treatment of boys and girls completely accounted for the gender differences in children's aggressive behavior a year later. Mothers' gender-differentiated parenting practices were unrelated to gender differences in child aggression.Higher levels of aggressive behavior in boys than in girls represent one of the most pronounced gender differences found in the literature on child development (Archer, 2004;Hyde, 1984;Loeber, Capaldi, & Costello, 2013). It has been suggested that in addition to potential biological and evolutionary influences (Archer, 2004), these gender differences may arise because of parental differential treatment of boys and girls (Chaplin, Cole, & ZahnWaxler, 2005;Mandara, Murray, Telesford, Varner, & Richman, 2012). Parents' gender-role attitudes might play a role in the differential treatment of their sons and daughters (Bem, 1981;Eagly, Wood, & Diekman, 2000), but this mechanism has rarely been studied. Therefore, the current study examined the longitudinal associations between mothers' and fathers' gender-role attitudes, gender-differentiated use of physical control strategies, and gender differences in child aggression. Social role theory and gender schema theory provide rationales for differential parenting of boys and girls, and for the link between gender-differentiated parenting and differences in aggressive behavior of boys and girls (Bem, 1981;Eagly et al., 2000). Social Role TheoryAccording to social role theory (Eagly et al., 2000), gender differences in social behavior arise from prevailing divisions of gender roles in societies, in which women are viewed as homemakers and men as economic providers. This division is still visible in present-day societies; mothers are more likely to be the primary caregivers of young children (Huerta et al., 2013; The Fatherhood Institute, 2010), women are overrepresented in educational and nurturing occupations, and men are overrepresented in occupations that are associated with power, physical strength, status, and agentic personality characteristics (i.e., management, engineering; U.S. Department of Labor, 2012).It is proposed that these gender roles lead to stereotypical ideas and expectations about the different nature and behavior of men and women (i.e., gender stereotypes), which lead to differential treatment of men and women, and boys and girls, which in turn leads to gender differences in behav...

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Most studies on early childhood parenting include only mothers. Fathers are rarely observed in interaction with their young children, although they play an important role in the socialization of their children. In this study, we observed parenting of mothers and fathers toward their sons and daughters in families with two children, using a within-family approach in a sample with systematically varying family constellations. Participants included 389 families with two children (1 and 3 years of age). Parenting practices were coded during free play using the Emotional Availability Scales (Biringen, 2008). Findings revealed that mothers showed higher levels of sensitivity and lower levels of intrusiveness toward their children than fathers. Furthermore, mothers and fathers were more sensitive and less intrusive toward their oldest child than toward their youngest child. Fathers' higher intrusiveness toward the youngest child was only found in the case of a youngest boy. Child gender was not related to parenting in any of the other analyses. Our results suggest that parent gender is more salient than child gender in the prediction of parenting practices in early childhood.

Goals of the current study were to examine fathers' and mothers' emotion talk from toddlerhood to preschool age, and to test whether parents socialize emotions differently in girls and boys. In a sample of 317 families, we observed both parents' emotion talk and their use of gender labels, while discussing a picture book with drawings of children displaying 4 basic emotions (anger, fear, sadness, and happiness), with their first- and second-born children when the children were 4 and 2 years of age, respectively, and again 12 months later. Findings revealed that parents generally elaborated more on emotions with the second-born children when the children were 3 years of age than when they were 2 years old. With their firstborn children parents elaborated less on emotions when the children were 5 years old than when they were 4 years of age. Further, mothers elaborated more on emotions than fathers. Parents' use of gender labels for the children in the pictures showed that parents associated anger more with boys, whereas they associated sadness and happiness more with girls. These findings suggest that parents adjust their emotion socialization strategies to their child's level of emotion understanding, and that both parents convey stereotypical gender messages during parent-child discussion of emotions.