PubMed · 4525615
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K Klose. Fourth-hand information.. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4525615/
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OBJECTIVE: Toy gun play has been associated with aggressive behavior, and it has been suggested that child health professionals counsel families on limiting exposure. Effective violence prevention counseling requires an understanding of norms regarding parental attitudes, practices, and influencing factors. Both theories of reasoned action and planned behavior emphasize that subjective norms and attitudes affect people's perceptions and intended behavior. Few normative data exist on this issue from a cross-section of families. By establishing behavioral norms and understanding the spectrum of parental attitudes, community-sensitive and community-specific interventions for violence prevention can be developed. The objective of this study was to assess community norms on the topic of toy gun play from the perspective of parents. METHODS: An anonymous self-report assisted survey was administered to a convenience sample of parents/guardians who visited child health providers at 3 sites: an urban children's hospital clinic, an urban managed care clinic, and a suburban private practice. The parent questionnaire included questions on child rearing attitudes, practice, and sociodemographic information. RESULTS: A total of 1004 eligible participants were recruited for the study; 922 surveys were completed (participation rate 92%). The 830 (90%) respondents who were parents and had complete child data were the focus of additional analysis. Regarding toy guns, 67% of parents believed that it was never "OK for a child to play with toy guns," and 66% stated that they never let their children play with toy guns. Parents who thought that it was okay for children to play with toy guns and allowed them to play with toy guns were more likely to be male parents, have male children, and be white. CONCLUSIONS: There is variability in norms regarding toy gun play among parents, with most discouraging toy gun play. Norms varied based on gender of the child, gender of the parent, and race. Understanding norms is a first step in designing effective community-sensitive interventions.
Rarely have researchers elucidated early childhood precursors of externalizing behaviors for boys and girls from a normative sample. Toddlers (N = 104; 52 girls) were observed interacting with a same-sex peer and their mothers, and indices of conflict-aggression, emotion and behavior dysregulation, parenting, and child externalizing problems were obtained. Results indicated that boys initiated more conflictual-aggressive interactions as toddlers and had more externalizing difficulties 2 years later, yet girls' (not boys') conflict-aggressive initiations at age 2 were related to subsequent externalizing problems. When such initiations were controlled for, emotional-behavioral undercontrol at age 2 also independently predicted externalizing problems at age 4. Moreover, the relation between conflict-aggressive initiations at age 2 and externalizing problems at age 4 was strongest for dysregulated toddlers. Finally, the relation between age 2 conflict-aggressive initiations and age 4 externalizing problems was strongest for those toddlers who incurred high levels of maternal negativity. These findings illustrate temperament by parenting connections in the development of externalizing problems.
Prenatal stress influences neural and behavioral sexual differentiation in rodents. Male offspring of stressed pregnancies show reduced masculine-typical characteristics and increased feminine-typical characteristics, whereas female offspring show the opposite pattern, reduced feminine-typical and increased masculine-typical characteristics. These outcomes resemble those seen following manipulations of gonadal hormones and are thought to occur because stress influences these hormones during critical periods of development. Research on prenatal stress and human sexual differentiation has produced inconsistent results, perhaps because studies have used small samples and assessed prenatal stress retrospectively. We related maternal self-reports of prenatal stress to childhood gender role behavior in a prospective, population study of 13,998 pregnancies resulting in 14,138 offspring. Neither stress reported during the first 18 weeks of pregnancy nor stress reported from week 19 of pregnancy to week 8 postnatal related to gender role behavior in male offspring at the age of 42 months. In female offspring, maternal reports of stress during both periods showed only small correlations with masculine-typical behavior. Although this relationship remained significant when other factors that related to stress were controlled, these other factors made larger contributions to girls' gender role behavior than did prenatal stress. In addition, in both boys and girls, older male or female siblings, parental adherence to traditional sex roles, maternal use of tobacco or alcohol during pregnancy, and maternal education all related significantly to gender role behavior. Our results suggest that prenatal stress does not influence the development of gender role behavior in boys and appears to have relatively little, if any, influence on gender role behavior in girls.