Early Childhood

About the report:

Raising the education level of the overall U.S. population requires closing the educational gaps among racial/ethnic groups and by gender. Although the members of the younger generation of some racial/ethnic groups are more likely to attain college degrees than their predecessors, that is not the case across all groups. Other findings include: the high school completion rate for young people has not improved much, and college enrollment gaps have widened among racial/ethnic groups during the past two decades.

The Minorities in Higher Education series, which began in 1984, is designed to help gauge the progress in our quest for educational excellence and equity for all races/ethnicities and for both men and women in American higher education. The full status report is produced biennially in even-numbered years, while updates on selected information are provided as a supplement in the intervening years.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Abstract:

Gender representations reproduce and legitimate gender systems. To examine this aspect of the gendered social order, we analyze the representation of males and females in the titles and central characters of 5,618 children’s books published throughout the twentieth century in the United States. Compared to females, males are represented nearly twice as often in titles and 1.6 times as often as central characters. By no measure in any book series (i.e., Caldecott award winners, Little Golden Books, and books listed in the Children’s Catalog) are females represented more frequently than males. We argue that these disparities are evidence of symbolic annihilation and have implications for children’s understandings of gender. Nevertheless, important differences in the extent of the disparity are evident by type of character (i.e., child or adult, human or animal), book series, and time period. Specifically, representations of child central characters are the most equitable and animals the most inequitable; Little Golden Books contain the most unequal representations; and the 1930s-1960s—the period between waves of feminist activism—exhibits greater disparities than earlier and later periods. Examining multiple types of books across a long time period shows that change toward gender equality is uneven, nonlinear, and tied to patterns of feminist activism and backlash throughout the century.

"In many preschool classrooms, gender is very noticeable—think of the greeting, "Good morning, boys and girls" or the instruction, "Girls line up on this side, boys on that." A new study has found that when teachers call attention to gender in these simple ways, children are more likely to express stereotyped views of what activities are appropriate for boys and girls, and which gender they prefer to play with.
The study, by researchers at The Pennsylvania State University, is published in the November/December 2010 issue of Child Development.

Children in the classrooms in which teachers avoided characterizations by sex showed no change in responses or behaviors over the two weeks. However, children in the other classrooms showed increases in stereotyped attitudes and decreases in their interest in playing with children of the other sex. They also were observed to play less with children of the other sex.

The findings extend earlier research showing that classroom environments that make divisions by gender lead to increased stereotypes among elementary-school-aged children. By highlighting the powerful effect of classroom environments on preschool children's gender-related beliefs and behaviors, the findings have implications for how teachers structure classrooms and interact with children."

"Motherhood may actually cause the brain to grow, not turn it into mush, as some have claimed. Exploratory research published by the American Psychological Association found that the brains of new mothers bulked up in areas linked to motivation and behavior, and that mothers who gushed the most about their babies showed the greatest growth in key parts of the mid-brain.

Led by neuroscientist Pilyoung Kim, PhD, now with the National Institute of Mental Health, the authors speculated that hormonal changes right after birth, including increases in estrogen, oxytocin and prolactin, may help make mothers' brains susceptible to reshaping in response to the baby. Their findings were published in the October issue of Behavioral Neuroscience.

The motivation to take care of a baby, and the hallmark traits of motherhood, might be less of an instinctive response and more of a result of active brain building, neuroscientists Craig Kinsley, PhD, and Elizabeth Meyer, PhD, wrote in a special commentary in the same journal issue."