Child Development & Personal Example

Ray is an only child but his neighborhood now has a large number of children within two years of his age and he never seems to lack friends. Barbara was at home with him until he started kindergarten. Since then she has worked weekday mornings in her father's store. She, or Tony, always picks Ray up from school or walks home with him. They have also left him with baby-sitters at least one evening a week since he was about two years old. Ray has always been a very friendly child--happy to see almost anyone--and he has always gotten along well with other children.

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g back, it occurs to me that this 'girlfriend' was the only child in the neighborhood who was exactly Ray's age. Her mother and Barbara were good friends and spent a lot of time looking after each other's kids which threw the children together even more than their ordinary out-door play did. Then, when they started kindergarten, they were taken in the mornings by her mother and picked up by Barbara. At the time it seemed odd that they would go on about his girlfriend, or would ask him if they were going to marry, but now it seems clear that it was part of Ray's gender socialization. As Papalia et al. point out, "a tendency toward sex segregation in play seems to be universal across cultures" and boys and girls do not generally enjoy playing together because their styles of play are usually so different (230). Thus, in essence, the 'girlfriend' routine taught Ray to distinguish the gender of the people he associated with. If he happened to spend a significant amount of his time with a girl, he learned, there had to be some special circumstance or explanation for this. By repeatedly referring to the child as his "little girlfriend," it was made clear that if this was embarrassing, he could avoid it by not associating with gi
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Approximate Word count = 1581
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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