About the project
Several questions guide our study: what gender norms and dispositions do parents (mothers and fathers) receive and transmit to their daughters and sons? How is the parental work of gender socialisation carried out on new-borns and then on very young children and what are the effects? How do parents deal in practice with the more or less explicit injunctions to treat girls and boys equally, but also to differentiate and individualise each child? What are the social disparities of these gendered educational practices according to the cultural and/or economic capital and mobility trajectory of the parents?
The structure of the project combines two themes, on the one hand, and three transversal axes of analysis, on the other.
- We focus on a central dimension of socialisation: the body. The construction of gender dispositions involves practices, injunctions and models involving the body. We describe parents' tastes and practices in terms of childcare (grooming, hygiene, feeding), care of bodily appearance (weight management, clothing, etc.), education in motor skills and bodily autonomy (meals, activities that promote body awareness, use of the potty), as well as the organisation of the mixed or gendered separation of the bodies of very young children (bedroom, sociability).
- We also describe the division of parental labour and parental arrangements, which show very young children a gendered organisation - or not - of the family and social roles. Research has shown that men and women are neither equally nor equally involved with their children: despite increasing paternal involvement, fathers remain in the background (Champagne et al., 2015), even more so when it comes to looking after a daughter (De Saint Pol and Bouchardon, 2013). Even today, mothers are still preferentially entrusted with (and/or assign to themselves) tasks related to body appearance, while fathers seem to be more involved in outings and games (Brugeilles and Sébille, 2009, 2011). We therefore analyse the role of each parent with each of their children, according to their gender.
- A combined approach to gender and family position in different family configurations. More specifically, we focus on differences in socialisation by taking into account both sex and birth rank in order to understand the combined effects of generational position in the family and gender (Clément et al., 2019). This makes it possible to check the existence of a 'sexuation of parental pedagogy' (Langevin, 1999) and to confront it with the parental discourse which often advocates the norm of equality between children. The diversity of family configurations (single-parent households, blended households, etc.) are also considered.
- Social positions and trajectories. We observe the variations in gendered educational practices according to the endowment of cultural and/or economic capital and the mobility trajectory of parents. Our approach aims to describe in detail the social variations within each social group and fraction of a group, going beyond the major social cleavages (upper, middle and working classes). Migration origin and trajectory are also taken into account here.
- A temporal approach to gendered socialisation. Gender norms and associated behaviours are not static, but malleable and evolving. Our longitudinal perspective makes it possible to describe the socialisation process, gender norms and parental practices in the evolution of family and socio-economic configurations during early childhood (couple situation, siblings, employment, housing). It adds to the analysis by introducing the construction of parental experience and the reflexivity of mothers and fathers on their practices over time. We are then able to see how gender norms, tastes and practices evolve over the years, through births and possible family reconfigurations.