The differences between parenting of boys versus girls are minimal

As an aside - I am not sure that Twitter understands the effect of all its tweaking on what is revealed in users timelines and what is suppressed.

When I first started with Twitter, I followed everyone who seemed interesting, based on what they were tweeting. I quickly discovered that some people might have an occasional insight but most of their tweets were crud. I also found myself following someone in a field in which I am interested, say archaeology, who then let political venting dominate their tweets.

I cleaned out the noisemakers and the press and got to a tweet feed dominated by history, economics, art, science reporting, reading, and other interests. It was great for a year or more. Then, without my changing the people I followed, for the past year or so, I have begun getting more and more political hackery again. I was using twitter less and less because 1) it seemed they were untrustworthy, and 2) I am not interested in emotional opinions which is what Twitter seemed to want me to be seeing.

This morning, I check in and the Twitter format is different. OK. More change.

But interestingly, the content in my feed seems to have reverted to what it looked like a year or so ago. Interesting original materials and much less bloviating. Odd, but thank goodness.

And this is one of the interesting items. Gender-Differentiated Parenting Revisited: Meta-Analysis Reveals Very Few Differences in Parental Control of Boys and Girls by Joyce J. Endendijk, Marleen G. Groeneveld, Marian J. Bakermans-Kranenburg, and Judi Mesman.

For postmodernists, social justice ideologues, and victimhood addicts, there has long been a strong desire to find that parents treat their boys preferentially to their daughters. While possible, this always struck me as improbable except under very specified circumstances. In addition, much of the research claiming to have found such son-preferentialism were laughably weak in their designs.

Endendijk et al are doing an update with a meta-analysis of all the available studies. I have significant concerns about meta-analyses so I treat this with some skepticism, but it is interesting that they find negligible differentiation between how parents treat their sons and daughters. From the Abstract:

Although various theories describe mechanisms leading to differential parenting of boys and girls, there is no consensus about the extent to which parents do treat their sons and daughters differently. The last meta-analyses on the subject were conducted more than fifteen years ago, and changes in gender-specific child rearing in the past decade are quite plausible. In the current set of meta-analyses, based on 126 observational studies (15,034 families), we examined mothers’ and fathers’ differential use of autonomy-supportive and controlling strategies with boys and girls, and the role of moderators related to the decade in which the study was conducted, the observational context, and sample characteristics. Databases of Web of Science, ERIC, PsychInfo, Online Contents, Picarta, and Proquest were searched for studies examining differences in observed parental control of boys and girls between the ages of 0 and 18 years. Few differences were found in parents’ use of control with boys and girls. Parents were slightly more controlling with boys than with girls, but the effect size was negligible (d = 0.08). The effect was larger, but still small, in normative groups and in samples with younger children. No overall effect for gender-differentiated autonomy-supportive strategies was found (d = 0.03). A significant effect of time emerged: studies published in the 1970s and 1980s reported more autonomy-supportive strategies with boys than toward girls, but from 1990 onwards parents showed somewhat more autonomy-supportive strategies with girls than toward boys. Taking into account parents’ gender stereotypes might uncover subgroups of families where gender-differentiated control is salient, but based on our systematic review of the currently available large data base we conclude that in general the differences between parenting of boys versus girls are minimal.