Child Development: Gender Identity, Parenting Roles, and Language Acquisition
The Threshold Theory of Money and Discussion
According to Money, the critical threshold for the formation of gender identity in children is two years old. Money developed guidelines to treat infants born with ambiguous sex organs. He recommended that as soon as possible and prior to the critical threshold, the child be assigned to the gender possessing the potential to operate closer to normal. These recommendations have also been implemented when the sex organs have suffered accidental damage.
Money argued that the sex of a person is so uncertain at birth that with a simple change in learning practices, along with a simple surgical operation, a child could become a girl or vice versa. His famous case involved twin boys, one of whom suffered severe burns to the penis by accident during circumcision. Money’s patient underwent surgery to form a cosmetic vagina (in the 60s, genital surgery was still in its infancy), and the child was raised as a girl, at first apparently successfully. However, she needed psychological therapy sessions and as a teenager had attempted suicide. He rejected the female identity and later underwent surgery to restore his male identity. Although it seemed at first that he had rebuilt his life as a man, marrying a woman with 3 children, in 2002 his twin brother committed suicide, and two years later, he committed suicide as well. Among the multiple causes, psychological damage points to the therapy sessions conducted by Money.
Money’s emphasis on nurture over nature fit perfectly with the progressive spirit of the time, especially with the feminist movement, whose supporters claimed that the traditional role of women was not biologically defined. Moreover, it was the natural reaction of a society that still remembered the Nazi horror, which had argued that people were what they were because of biology and had therefore to remove the “undesirable products” such as Jews and gypsies.
Literature seems to support the hypothesis opposing Dr. Money. Indeed, two papers presented during the course of the congress of the Society of Pediatric Endocrinology, held in the U.S. in May 2000, support the opposite theory and determined that “the scientific evidence supports that gender identity is established by biology over education”. In fact, as pointed out by William Reiner, a psychiatrist and urologist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center (USA), “Children who participated in the research have shown that the male can develop not only in the absence of a penis, but also when testicles are removed.”
However, Lynne Segal, professor of Psychology and Gender at Birkbeck College in London, believes the history of the experiment did not tip the balance of the nature and nurture debate. In her view, shared by most experts, this dichotomy is false.
In my opinion, the key lies in the claim of William Reiner: “The brain is the largest sexual organ. It is the brain that tells the individual what to do with the penis, vagina, or any other part of the anatomy.” In the formation of the brain and, therefore, gender identity, multiple elements interact, and each person will have a particular result, hence the complexity.
The Father’s Role: Traditional and Modern Approach
The father’s role under the traditional approach has more to do with authoritarian power over the child than as an object of attachment or person involved in child-rearing. Until the seventies, the father was simply seen as the progenitor from the biological point of view, and no other role was attributed to the care and upbringing of children.
As time progressed, the father was becoming more important in the social and emotional development of their children. First, the father had the obligation to care for his wife and indirectly their family, above all referring to the economic aspect. For a long time, it was very unusual to see a father walking with his children, playing with them, or serving as emotional support.
One of the reasons why men until recently were unnoticed in parenting is that the mother spends more time with the newborn and the child in the early years of their life. Increasingly, men are more involved in the care of children, and they spend more time with them in the early years of life.
Palkovitz (1984) argues that parents are more involved in the care of children if they live in an intact marriage and if the wives were encouraged to take part in the development of their children and thus acquire an important role in their lives. Most children prefer their mother as company when they are distressed, injured, or sick and instead prefer their fathers as playmates. Currently, the role of playmate is only one of the few roles men play in the care of children.
The traditional family has evolved, and today we have a different family structure. It may be the case that women have better jobs than men and therefore she returns to work, and the father is engaged in the care of children. In modern society, competent parents are required in the care of children. Parents today can assume the role of the mother in the same way as women.
There is no genetic structure that requires women as caregivers, and therefore we can say that parenting is something you can learn. To be a good caretaker, a parent must be involved in child care from the beginning. This involvement requires a certain sensitivity to the child’s cues and an ability to prevent certain undesirable situations. Besides being a good caregiver, the father can anticipate their behavior to the needs of the child as a good female parent would.
What really matters when it comes to being a good caretaker can be learned by men as well as women, and the most important thing is the willingness to parent by fathers. If the child perceives the father as a caregiver sensitive to their physical and psychological needs, they will develop a preference for the father as an object of attachment. In these cases, you can see an example of a child who wakes up at night crying from a nightmare calling his father instead of his mother.
The role of the mother requires more than a predisposition to give birth and to breastfeed. Being a good caregiver and a good mother requires more than physical care and hygiene of the child. A good caregiver and the object of addiction is the person the child turns to when they need emotional support, when the child is hurt or sick, and in many other situations of need.
The Functional Concept of Motherhood
The functional concept of motherhood would include all those behaviors performed in raising a child, both by the caregiver and the child itself, regardless of who the caregiver is (male, female, birth mother, or surrogate…). Motherhood can be understood as a dyadic system synchronized between caregiver and child in which all the elements of the interaction are adjusted.
The child is in a helpless and immature situation in need of care and pre-adoptive physiological and psychological social skills. They have a repertoire of innate abilities that allow them to adapt socially, such as the moro reflex, the sucking reflex, grasp reflex, crying, the reaction and orientation to the mother’s voice, and the preference to seek human figures, and so on.
The mother comes with a socialization exercise that makes her prone to motherhood, with a high sensitivity to the interaction with babies and also acquired certain skills in education that enable her to do so. They know how to be with children, are capable, and emotionally sensitive.
Being a mother is not instinctive. In fact, mothers who have previously been sensitized are more prepared to tune with the needs and rhythms of the baby and anticipate the signals than new mothers. In this situation, there are several activities in both the child and mother. The mother displays soliciting behaviors for body contact, the child adjusts their body to the mother’s lap, and she rocks them with her arms surrounding them, giving warmth and security. This establishes special communication between mother and child.
For example, during breastfeeding, feeding rhythm and pauses are treated as dialogue-breaks and conversational exchanges. This pattern of contact-interaction, donor-recipient setting to another, typical of conversational sequences, is a fundamental step in the socialization of the child. The mother becomes the interpreter of the baby’s signals, shows a special socializing behavior, trying to meet their needs and stimulate their development (language, motor, autonomy…), and introducing cultural aspects, which prepare them to interact with a social environment. The dialogue, the initiation into language, is a maternal function.
We are born with a biological basis which tends to addiction, but most of the concept of motherhood comes from socialization. Parenting traditionally included physical care, food hygiene, and health, so that motherhood was attributed to the female sex and the biological mother. Today, a mother, besides this, should show affection and unconditional love for her child. The parent encourages and speaks with the child, leads education, selects the environments and contexts, thus selecting the child’s relationships. It is a loop of strong characteristics that work in modern societies.
Today we know that the function of motherhood can be played by both sexes and non-biological mothers and fathers. Parents with exposure to parenting can be as competent as mothers. Although most parents adopt traditional roles guided by culture, women are more sensitive in this respect by the education they have received. There is no innate or instinctive factor as used to be thought, given the complexity of motherhood. Rather than an instinct, due to its long duration, high difficulty, and specialist nature, maternity is understood today as a social function more than instinct.
Being a good mother is not an abstract observable; it is a construct that requires: a special sensitivity and dyadic adjustment to allow the mother to effectively and quickly detect signs of the child, adjust to changes in behavior during development, anticipate and comfort the child’s behavior in a climate of affection. The children’s behavior is changing and increasingly difficult, so the effectiveness of parents may also be impaired, i.e., being a good parent in the early years does not effectively secure it in later years.
The Intention to Speak
It’s amazing how a child begins to understand sentences, pronounce words, and how fast their initially poor language evolves and grows into something so complex. For Piaget, language is part of overall development, a semiotic/representative capacity.
In the beginning, the child’s speech is egocentric, that is, not cooperative, reflecting their intellectual self-centeredness, but it will fade with age and become more cooperative and social. Thus, for example, Piaget observed the child talking to themselves to understand and assimilate something.
Vygotsky, on the other hand, felt that language had a social origin and was the instrument of transmission of cultural experiences. Egocentric speech, as he saw it, was the appropriation of social language, which later would fade and be internalized. One of the functions of language would be mediation between people. Ultimately, for Vygotsky, language was the engine of development, and that this would result in higher mental functions.
Since birth, the child learns to draw attention to their different reactions: crying, screaming, etc. Thus, the child from birth expresses their feelings through reflex reactions, which are a consequence since the person in charge of these reflexes reacts to the child. Thus, the child learns; situations are created that make the child’s learning regular, what Bruner calls “Language Acquisition Support System (LASS)”. This system may be associated with the ontogeny of children because it would not be possible without the surrounding culture and the context in which it is.
There will then be what Bruner called “proto-conversations” – negotiations of meaning, interactions between child and adult, which will go even further through language. They are called proto-conversations because the child uses sounds and still cannot say words. After 10 months, the child will begin saying their first words. These first words will be in very specific contexts and in certain situations.
For example, if the child sees a dog walking on the street, then they may see a cat and also call it “dog” (or “bow-wow”), as the child associates the word dog in a given situation, giving it a much broader meaning than ours. Once the child has a greater need for communication and a more stimulating environment, their terminology will become more specific and more extensive, using each word in different situations and giving them a proper meaning.
On the other hand, they will not only use their first words to designate objects but to show intentions, wishes, requests, relationships, etc. For example, if the child says “puree,” they may also be signaling a desire: ‘I want to eat.’ Gradually, through combinations of words, they express a growing knowledge about the world around them. They are gaining more and more words, and they assimilate the grammatical rules of their language. At five years old, they have virtually mastered the ground rules, but some things still escape them.
However, psycholinguist Chomsky had a theory opposed to that of Bruner. He called it the “Language Acquisition Device (LAD)” and based it on a nativist approach, focused more on the phylogeny and genetics of the child than on the culture and context. According to him, the child has a natural ability to understand and eventually learn the language. The language is acquired because humans are biologically programmed to do so; we have specialized structures in the brain for the task.
Given that, Chomsky said that imitations were used to learn from others and also that the corrections made by the adult with the child’s errors were not helpful. Thus, the child’s pronunciations were their own creations and not mere repetitions of other people. But the theories of Chomsky and Bruner can be supplemented so that the child, having a communicative intention, is evolving through the LAD and LASS, always guided by their caregivers, between whom there will be a negotiation of meanings, which may be correct or not, but from which the child will learn.