This assignment will explore the different experiences of childhood boys and girls have. It will look at how their experiences differ. However, as defined by the United Nation the term child means every human below the age of 18 years. Therefore, an experience of 7 years old will be very different from 17 years. Their experiences will differ according to the discourses around them. This can be created by their families or education or in their workplace. Also the culture and the religion can shape the children’s gendered experience. However, there is two main ways of understanding children and gender. The scientific and the social constructionist approach both look at gender from a different perspective.
Gender plays very important roles on perspectives over the centuries. Indeed, the scientific approach looks at sex as biological base of building the children’s gender. They acknowledge gender as product of a nature, which is the biological differences, and also through nurture, which is the social and cultural practice. Piaget and Kohlberg’s believed that children were involved in making sense of their own genders as a key of their social world (cited in Woodhed, 2003, p196). However, the social constructionist approach sees sex and gender as a human meaning-making. They believe that gender produces sex and not vice versa. It also believes that gender creates the argument as sex could not exist without gender. Indeed they argue that gender is something we do but not something we are. Although, the social constructionist argues that the nature/nurture debate is misconceived but it sees gender as a product of discourse. It considers that in different cultures different discourses operate and their importance vary from a culture to another. And these discourses will affect the gendered experience of childhood.
The scientific approach takes into accounts the biological