Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station 77843, Texas.
Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2023 Sep 19;120(38):e2301781120. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2301781120. Epub 2023 Sep 11.
Across many cultural contexts, the majority of women conduct the majority of their household labor. This gendered distribution of labor is often unequal, and thus represents one of the most frequently experienced forms of daily inequality because it occurs within one's own home. Young children are often passive observers of their family's distribution of labor, and yet little is known about the developmental onset of their perceptions of it. By the preschool age, children also show strong normative feelings about both equal resource distribution and gender stereotypes. To investigate the developmental onset of children's recognition of the (in)equality of household labor, we interviewed 3 to 10-y-old children in two distinct cultural contexts (US and China) and surveyed their caregivers about who does more household labor across a variety of tasks. Even at the youngest ages and in both cultural contexts, children's reports largely matched their parents', with both populations reporting that mothers do the majority of household labor. Both children and parents judged this to be generally fair, suggesting that children are observant of the gendered distribution of labor within their households, and show normalization of inequality from a young age. Our results point to preschool age as a critical developmental time period during which it is important to have parent-child discussions about structural constraints surrounding gender norms and household labor.
在许多文化背景下，大多数女性承担了大部分家务劳动。这种劳动的性别分配往往是不平等的，因此代表了最常经历的不平等形式之一，因为它发生在自己的家中。幼儿往往是家庭劳动分配的被动观察者，但对他们对其看法的发展起源却知之甚少。到了学龄前，孩子们对资源分配平等和性别刻板印象也表现出强烈的规范感。为了研究儿童对家务劳动（不平等）的认识的发展起源，我们在两个不同的文化背景（美国和中国）中对 3 至 10 岁的儿童进行了访谈，并调查了他们的照顾者，了解他们在各种任务中谁承担了更多的家务劳动。即使是在最小的年龄和两个文化背景下，儿童的报告也与父母的报告大致相符，两种人群都报告说母亲承担了大部分家务劳动。儿童和父母都认为这是公平的，这表明儿童在家务劳动的性别分配方面很有观察力，并从很小的时候就对不平等现象进行了规范。我们的研究结果表明，学前阶段是一个关键的发展时期，在此期间，与孩子进行有关性别规范和家务劳动的结构性限制的讨论非常重要。
