The Development of Preschoolers' Living Kinds Concept: A Longitudinal Study

Children’s Physical Gender Schemas: Acquisition and Features

Studies on how physical gender schemas develop in children have traditionally utilized forced-choice and close-ended tasks, finding that the ability to make gender-related distinctions develops in the first years of a child’s life. To reduce demand characteristics that reinforce gender binaries in children’s models of gender, we relied on open-ended discourse analysis to study children’s physical gender schemas. We focused on whether children’s ability to ask questions that distinguish gender groups was greater in older than younger children. Participants were 44 3–4-year-olds, 35 5–6-year-olds, and 23 7–8-year-old children in the U.K. who were led through a guessing game to elicit gender-related beliefs and compare their beliefs about gender to their beliefs about other entities such as living things. When asking questions to distinguish gender binary groups, older children judging gendered individuals were more likely to ask questions that stereotypically distinguished the gender groups than younger children. Older children were also more likely to focus on individuals’ biological properties, clothing, and hair length than were younger children. Thus, the development of a child’s understanding of physical gender schemas gender is discrete, developing gradually at least until the age of 8.

Young children's ability to make predictions about novel illnesses

Understanding disease transmission is a complex problem highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. These studies test whether 3- to 6-year-old children in the United States use information about social interactions to predict disease transmission. Before and during COVID-19, children predicted illness would spread through close interactions. Older children outperformed younger children with no associations between task performance and pandemic experience. Children did not predict that being hungry or tired would similarly spread through close interactions. Participants include 196 three- to six-year-olds (53% girls, 47% boys; 68% White, 9% Black, 7% Asian, 6% Hispanic or Latinx), with medium-sized effects (d = .6, η p 2  = .3). These findings suggest that thinking about social interaction supports young children's predictions about illness, with noted limitations regarding children's real-world avoidance of disease-spreading behaviors.