Sex and Psychological Differentiation in Preschoolers

The authors explored the relationship between selected maternal attitudes as related to the sex, sex-role preference, and level of psychological differentiation of the preschool child. The maternal attitudes investigated were as follows: (a) the degree to which the mother has an attitude of fostering or limiting autonomy, and (b) the extent to which she expects sex differences (i.e., to what extent does she expect boys to act differently from girls). The Ss were 92 mother-child pairs, boys and girls evenly divided. The mean age of the children was 66 months. No significant difference was obtained for psychological differentiation between boys and girls. Boys, however, demonstrated a significantly higher degree of sex-role preference than girls. It was found that mothers with high expectation of sex differences had daughters with lower levels of psychological differentiation and that high expectation of sex differences in the mother was associated with authoritarianism. No statistically significant relationship was found between authoritarianism in the mother and psychological differentiation in the child, although a trend was found for girls, that authoritarianism in the mother is related to lower levels of psychological differentiation. It was suggested that a different set of maternal attitudes facilitates psychological differentiation for each sex.