This piece is part of Scientific American's column The Science of Parenting. For more, go here.
Last year 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 expectations of my child’s emotional state. But I know from my research on the gendering of emotions that expectations around women showing nurturing and positive expressions start early. When researchers analyzed more than 16,000 yearbook photographs from kindergarten to college, including faculty and staff, there was no significant difference in smiling until age eight or nine, but then the gap started to widen with girls smiling much more than boys. By the time the subjects were 14 years old, the difference between girls and boys peaked, with girls smiling more frequently and more broadly than boys, and this remained consistent over adulthood.
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These results could be because as children grow older, they become more aware of societal expectations related to gender roles. These expectations could come from peer groups, or imposed on them from parents, teachers or, in the case of the yearbook photos, the photographer, both implicitly and explicitly. These gender roles can also be internalized from film and media representations where smiling is perceived to be more feminine (smiling women are considered more pleasant and friendly), while seriousness seen as a characteristic of 'masculinity'.
Another study where teachers reported emotional expressions found that girls express more “peaceful,” “calm” and “neutral” expressions (all positive but passive emotions with little agency), while boys showed more “surprise,” “curiosity,” “anger” and “frustration” (more agentic, or proactive, emotions). It is a widely held misconception that girls are better at regulating their emotions than boys: no neuroscience studies so far shown that self-regulatory mechanisms are more developed or active in girls compared to boys.
Society expects brown women to be more acquiescent and passive, and perceives Black women as angry. As a mixed-race girl, my child is likely to encounter some of these stereotypes too. A study of American storybooks shows that Hispanic and Latino characters display happiness proportionally more than other characters, while white American characters have the space to show displeasure, aligning with the individualistic values in many Western cultures. Children can be receiving 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 per societal norms they pick up from their peers and carers. On one hand, regularly suppressing our emotions can massively affect our mental and physical health. These emotional expectations, the offhand comments that children internalize over time, harm all children, irrespective of gender. These expectations can have a long-standing impact on their sense of self too. On the other hand, children can face bullying if they do not conform to the behaviors and norms expected of their membership groups.
Teaching our children to regulate their emotions is not wrong. Emotional socialization is an important part of parenting to build emotional competence in children 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 to be the correct emotional response. We talk about bodily autonomy with our children; we should also talk about emotional autonomy and how children can better understand and have agency over their own emotions.
Recently, I have been reflecting on my own relationship with emotions, and how I might have endorsed certain expectations through words and actions.
According to John Gottman’s meta-emotion framework, parents’ attitude to emotions and the way they accept certain emotions in themselves affects which emotions they validate in their children. Many of us have ourselves grown up with very specific emotional rules and model this in our own parenting, consciously or unconsciously. Parents are more likely to validate the child’s emotions if they consider these emotions to be acceptable, and unlikely to if they consider the cost of expressing a certain emotion too high. We could understand this cost as the cost of societal judgement and penalization or ostracization, or an emotional cost to the parent themselves of having to regulate their own emotions in response.
Another study found that mothers were more likely to use emotional language when speaking with four-year-old daughters than with sons. Before the start of this experiment, the researchers had observed no difference in the emotional understanding and expression of 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. This might include ignoring, dismissing or invalidating certain emotions in children: anger in girls, and sadness in boys.
So many problems emerge from the way we, as adults, cannot accept the discomfort that comes with children’s emotional expressions, and so we set out rules around “good girls” and “good boys.”
We can all be fearful of people judging us in public and seeing us as bad parents who cannot control or discipline our children. We label emotions to be “good” and “bad”: happiness is good, anger and sadness are bad. And we 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 cues 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 we, as parents, have to find our “best selves” before we can help our children with their extreme emotions. In my view, a better approach would be if we stop labeling some emotions as “extreme,” if we don’t set such fixed bounds around emotional expression, and if we don’t expect our children to all conform to the same template.
If we reflect on the messages that we ourselves have 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 ok to feel sad, frustrated and angry. It is what we do with these emotions that matter.
Teaching our children to understand how they are feeling, and learn strategies to tackle such emotions, is a way of encouraging emotional autonomy in our children. It is also important for children to know the correct vocabulary so they can name the 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 this lesson that she didn’t have to modulate or suppress her emotions for anyone else, I also wondered anxiously how much others would judge her for not conforming, and what the cost would be.I am not suggesting that we each take individual responsibility for solving the emotional inequities which 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.