- [Second-place Winning Entry, 2026 Chidera Anushiem Undergraduate Essay Competition]
- THEME – Equality Begins at Home: How Family and Upbringing Shape Attitudes Towards Gender
“Three sons, but you are the daughter I never had” My mother said to me in Idoma that evening after coming back home tired from work to meet the concoction rice I had surprisingly prepared. Although, the eleven-year-old me was already preparing a response to give if she asked “is that the kind of food you will cook if you go to your wife’s house?” like I have heard a lot of Nigerian moms say to their daughters whenever they made a meal with a bit too much salt, like I did. But that didn’t happen.
The experience of growing up without viewing cooking as a skill to be developed is not exclusive to me. Globally, girls ages 5-14 spend 160 million more hours every day on unpaid care and domestic work than boys of the same age (UNICEF, 2023). This imbalance shows that domestic roles like cooking are culturally assigned to girls, making it far less common for boys to engage in such activities. And this begins at home.
When a child is brought into the world, it is the home that first brings the world to them. From the way parents and close relatives express their gender beliefs to the observable division of labour and parental roles within the household, children begin to internalize expectations of how boys and girls should behave. And while contemporary parents increasingly endorse egalitarian gender ideologies, subtle gender-differentiated behaviors in parenting practices may still persist (Endendijk et al., 2016). Children are like video cameras with legs, they’ll often ignore what you say and record what you do.
Overall, mothers’ and fathers’ behaviours become better predictors of children’s gender-role attitudes than parents’ ideology (Halpern and Perry-Jenkins, 2016). When a boy child grows up in a home where the father is the sole breadwinner of the family and the mother the one who bakes the bread, she begins to internalise these roles as natural rather than assigned.
However, while the family serves as the first site of gender socialization, it is by no means the only one. As children grow, their understanding of gender is continuously shaped by broader forces such as media, and play toys which reinforce or challenge the lessons learned at home.
The media, in particular, acts like a cultural parent by consistently portraying gender in stereotypical ways, with male characters disproportionately occupying roles of authority and action, while female characters are more often depicted in nurturing, emotional or appearance-focused roles (PubAdmin Institute, 2025).
This is also supported by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media (2024), which found that male characters remain significantly more likely to be depicted with a professional identity (42.4%) compared to their female counterparts (33.3%). Such a disparity cultivates a cognitive script in young minds, effectively coding masculinity as public authority and femininity as domestic or secondary.
Conversely, the same observations of parental roles and other secondary agents of socialization that shape a child’s understanding of gender can be leveraged to help them view it through a more accurate and equitable lens. When fathers are involved in childcare and housework during childhood and adolescence, it plays an important role in shaping children’s gender-egalitarian attitudes (Cano and Hofmeister, 2023).
Similarly, in the employment sphere, adult daughters of employed mothers are more likely to be employed and, if employed, are more likely to hold supervisory responsibility, work more hours and earn higher incomes than their peers whose mothers were not employed. And in the domestic sphere, sons raised by employed mothers spend more time caring for family members and daughters spend less time on housework (McGinn et al., 2019). These studies prove, beyond doubt, that when children observe both parents contributing across domains, they develop a sense of responsibility as human rather than gendered.
Furthermore, engagement with gendered toys has significant effects on children’s cognitive and socio-emotional development, often narrowing the range of skills they acquire. Construction toys such as LEGO and building blocks, which are more frequently associated with boys, tend to develop spatial reasoning and problem-solving skills.
In contrast, dolls and domestic play sets, which are more commonly given to girls, are linked to the development of empathy, communication, and social understanding. Over time, this guides children’s activities in accordance with gender stereotypes and thus restricts their individual development potential (Kollmayer et al., 2018).
Nevertheless, while recent research indicates that modern adults have begun to view toys through a more gender-neutral lens regarding mathematical and spatial skills, the persistent bias regarding ‘assertiveness’ and ‘social-verbal’ skills still remains a barrier (Kolb et al., 2026). Ultimately, to foster gender equality from early childhood, parents should encourage cross-gender play through exposure to diverse categories of toys and activities. Such practices challenge children to deconstruct the belief that their abilities are tied to their sex, replacing it with a more fluid and expansive understanding of human potential.
In the end, if the seeds of inequality, as analyzed in this essay, are first sown in the home, then equality can also be cultivated there with equal intentionality. The responsibility, therefore, lies in consciously shaping environments where children are free to develop beyond the limits of traditional gendered expectations.
References
1. UNICEF (2023) Gender norms and unpaid work. Available at:
https://data.unicef.org/topic/gender/gender-norms-and-unpaid-work
(Accessed: 15 April 2026).
2. Endendijk, J.J., Groeneveld, M.G., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M.J. and Mesman, J. (2016) ‘Gender-differentiated parenting revisited: Meta-analysis reveals very few differences in parental control of boys and girls’, PLOS ONE, 11(7), e0159193.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0159193
(Accessed: 15 April 2026).
3. Halpern, H.P. and Perry-Jenkins, M. (2016) ‘Parents’ gender ideology and gendered behavior as predictors of children’s gender-role attitudes: A longitudinal exploration’, Sex Roles, 74(11–12), pp. 527–542. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-015-0539-0
4. PubAdmin Institute (2025) Gender stereotypes in media: Analyzing representation and impact. Available at:
https://pubadmin.institute/psychology-and-media/gender-stereotypes-media-representatio n-impact
(Accessed: 16 April 2026).
5. Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media (2024) See Jane 2024: How Has On-Screen Representation in Children’s Television Changed from 2018 to 2023? Available at: https://geenadavisinstitute.org/research/see-jane-2024-how-has-on-screen-representation in-childrens-television-changed-from-2018-to-2023/
(Accessed: 16 April 2026).
6. Cano, T. and Hofmeister, H. (2023) ‘The intergenerational transmission of gender: Paternal influences on children’s gender attitudes’, Journal of Marriage and Family. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12863
7. McGinn, K.L., Ruiz Castro, M. and Lingo, E.L. (2019) ‘Learning from mum: Cross-national evidence linking maternal employment and adult children’s outcomes’, Work, Employment and Society, 33(3), pp. 374–400.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017018760167
8. Kollmayer, M., Schultes, M.T., Schober, B. and Spiel, C. (2018) ‘Parents’ judgments about the desirability of toys for their children: associations with gender role attitudes, gender-typing of toys, and demographics’, Sex Roles, 79(5–6), pp. 329–341. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-017-0882-4
(Accessed: 16 April 2026).
9. Kolb, N., Niklas, F. and Stadler, M. (2026) ‘Same toy, different play: investigating adults’ ratings of the cognitive benefits of stereotypically gendered toys’, The European Educational Researcher, 9(1), pp. 1–15. https://doi.org/10.31757/euer.913.
Joshua Obeya is a student, writer, and professional overthinker who occasionally turns thoughts into sentences.
