Gender Issues in Young Children’s Literature

In recent decades, extensive studies from diverse disciplines have focused on children’s developmental awareness of different gender roles and the relationships between genders. Among these studies, researchers agree that children’s picture books have an increasingly significant place in children’s development because these books are a widely available cultural resource, offering young children a multitude of opportunities to gain information, become familiar with the printed pictures, be entertained, and experience perspectives other than their own. In such books, males are habitually described as active and domineering, while females rarely reveal their identities and very frequently are represented as meek and mild. This valuable venue for children’s gender development thus unfortunately reflects engrained societal attitudes and biases in the available choices and expectations assigned to different genders. This discriminatory portrayal in many children’s picture books also runs the risk of leading children toward a misrepresented and misguided realization of their true potential in their expanding world.