This piece is part of Scientific American's column The Science of Parenting. For more, go here.
A couple of years ago I was at the ophthalmologist with my six-year-old daughter. The optician asked me more than once, “Why has she been frowning all the time? Why is she so serious?”
I cannot know how much my child’s being a girl shaped the optician’s thoughts about her emotional state. But I know from my research on the gendering of emotions that people start expecting women and girls to show nurturing and positive expressions early. A different group of researchers analyzed more than 16,000 yearbook photographs of students from kindergarten to college, as well as school faculty and staff. The children showed no significant difference in smiling until age eight or nine, but then the gap started to widen, with girls smiling much more than boys. The difference between girls and boys peaked by the time the students were 14 years old, with girls smiling more frequently and more broadly than boys, and this contrast remained consistent over adulthood.
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We may see such results because as children grow older, they become more aware of societal expectations related to gender roles. These expectations could come from peer groups or be imposed on them by parents, teachers or, in the case of the yearbook photos, photographers, both implicitly and explicitly. People may also internalize gender roles portrayed in film and media, where smiling is perceived as more feminine (smiling women are considered more pleasant and friendly) and seriousness is seen as a characteristic of masculinity.
In a different study in which teachers reported their students’ emotional expressions, girls were described as having more “peaceful,” “calm” and “neutral” expressions (all positive but passive emotions involving little agency), whereas boys showed more “surprise,” “curiosity,” “anger” and “frustration” (more agentic, or proactive, emotions). It is a widely held misconception that girls are better than boys at regulating their emotions: no neuroscience studies have shown that self-regulatory mechanisms are more developed or active in girls than they are in boys.
Society expects brown women to be more acquiescent and perceives Black women who aren’t acquiescent as angry. As a mixed-race girl, my child is likely to encounter some of these stereotypes. A study of American storybooks showed that Hispanic and Latino characters display happiness proportionally more than other characters, whereas white American characters have the space to show displeasure, aligning with the individualistic values of many Western cultures. Children may receive specific messages about emotions while reading storybooks—not only gendered but also culture-specific.
These emotional stereotypes present a double bind for parents hoping to help their children develop emotional intelligence and autonomy. Very early on, children learn to modulate their emotions in line with societal norms they pick up from their peers and caregivers. Regularly suppressing our emotions can massively affect our mental and physical health. Emotional expectations and the offhand comments that children internalize over time harm all kids, irrespective of gender. These expectations can have long-standing negative effects on their sense of self, too. If, however, children do not conform to the behaviors and norms of their membership groups, they may face bullying.
So many problems emerge from adults’ failure to accept the discomfort that comes with children’s emotional expression and the way that leads them to set rules for “good girls” and “good boys.”
Teaching our children to regulate their emotions is not wrong. Emotional socialization is an important part of parenting to build children’s emotional competence and to align them with the values of a particular community. But it is wrong to expect different things from our children based on their gender and race and to minimize or invalidate their emotions based on what we perceive as the correct emotional response. We talk with our children about bodily autonomy; we should also talk about emotional autonomy and how they can better understand and have agency over their own feelings.
Recently I have been reflecting on my relationship with emotions and how I might have endorsed certain expectations through words and actions. According to psychologist John M. Gottman’s meta-emotion framework, parents’ attitude toward emotions and the way they accept or reject certain ones in themselves affect which emotions they validate in their children.
Many people grew up with very specific emotional rules and model them in their own parenting, consciously or unconsciously. Parents are more likely to validate their child’s emotions if they consider those emotions acceptable in general, and they are unlikely to if they believe the cost of expressing the emotion is too high. This cost could be the burden of societal judgment, penalization or ostracization, or it may be an emotional cost the parent pays by having to regulate their own emotions in response.
One study found that mothers were more likely to use emotional language when speaking with four-year-old daughters than with sons that age. Before the start of this experiment, the researchers had observed no difference in emotional understanding and expression between girls and boys, but this changed over the course of the study.
Through the gendered use of language around emotion, children receive a message that certain emotions are more acceptable for girls than for boys and that women talk more about their feelings. Research also shows that parents might react—often unconsciously—in a way that encourages emotional expression in girls but discourages emotional expression in boys. These cues might include ignoring, dismissing or invalidating certain emotions in children: anger in girls and sadness in boys.
So many problems emerge from adults’ failure to accept the discomfort that comes with children’s emotional expression and the way that leads them to set rules for “good girls” and “good boys.”
Anyone might be fearful of people judging them in public and seeing them as bad parents who cannot control or discipline their children. We label emotions as “good” or “bad”: happiness is good, anger and sadness are bad. And we may discourage or shy away from any “bad” emotions our children express that might make us feel like we are not being good parents. Even our implicit gestures, facial reactions and tone of voice can give children signals from a young age as to which emotions are acceptable and which we should hide away or suppress.
Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, proposes that parents have to find their “best selves” before they can help their children with extreme emotions. From my standpoint, a better approach would be to stop labeling some emotions as “extreme,” avoid setting such fixed bounds around emotional expression and not expect children to all conform to the same template.
If we reflected on the messages we internalized while growing up, we could allow ourselves and our children to sit with the discomfort of such “negative” emotions. Over the years, I have realized that it is not my responsibility as a parent to always protect my children from sadness or anger. Children ought to know that such emotions are part of our everyday life—that it is okay to feel sad, frustrated and angry. It is what we do with these emotions that matters.
Teaching children to understand how they are feeling and learn strategies to tackle their emotions is a way of encouraging their emotional autonomy. It is also important for children to know the correct vocabulary so they can name their emotions for themselves and others.
After our visit to the ophthalmologist, my child wondered, “Mummy, should I have been smiling?” I reminded her that she did not have to fake a smile. But even as I have taught her that she doesn’t have to modulate or suppress her emotions for anyone else, I have wondered anxiously how much others will judge her for not conforming and what the cost of that will be. I am not suggesting that we each take individual responsibility for resolving the emotional biases in society that perpetuate and enable gender and racial inequities. But we can all reflect on our internal emotional framework and challenge emotional norms, acknowledging that we might be enforcing some of these arbitrary rules, without even realizing it, through our words and our actions.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.