No matter how independent one might consider him-/herself, social laws make one accept the role that defines one’s gender (Rhode, 2004). However, if even the wrong social role has been offered at a certain stage of a child’s development, there are several ways to help an individual be accepted into the society, which can be seen in the case below.
A boy named Billy, who can be defined as the focus of the case study (Blonk, 2003), spending most of his time with girls and playing the games that girls typically play, seems to have adopted a “girly,” feminine manner of behavior. As a result, after becoming a member of a group of boys, Billy faces a number of conflicts and suffers, being unable to confront his bullies, which is the key problem of the case.
It is also worth mentioning that Billy’s problems are not restricted to school and bullies. Realizing that his son does not behave the way a man should, his father fears that the former will not be able to grow into a successful man and, which seems even more dreadful to Billy’s father, will turn out to be a homosexual. Therefore, certain actions must be undertaken to help the boy integrate into his school mini-society. At present, it is obvious that the boy’s understanding of his gender role should be redefined.
The case study above offers a lot of food of thoughts. It is obvious that Billy has problems with communicating with his peers. The given problems will not dissolve was time passes; on the contrary, unless an efficient interventions offered, the problems win communication are likely to snowball until Billy is completely unable to socialize successfully.
Even though Billy’s father has voiced the concern about his son’s sexual preferences, it is obvious that at the given stage, there is no reason to expect that Billy will display sexual interest towards boys. As far as the conflict goes, the boy’s main problem is that he is unwilling to change his behavior towards a socially accepted one under the pretext that girls are more beautiful and, therefore, it is more reasonable to be a girl.
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development will help nail down the problem. On the one hand, according to Piaget, the stage when the behavioral pattern was being acquired has been missed and it will be extremely hard to develop a new behavioral model for Billy (Berk, 2006, 31). On the other hand, however, behaviorism and social learning theory claims that “development involves an increase in learned behaviors” (Berk, 2006, 31).
Even though the situation seems rather complicated, there are still the ways to help Billy integrate into his school mini-society and improve relationships with his father. First of all, it is necessary that the boy should understand why he is being bullied without making him feeling guilty about his behavior. Further on, it can be recommended that the family offered Billy more opportunities for developing his manly qualities, e.g., buying him toys that are generally considered “for boys,” etc.
Several questions can arise after the case study analysis. To be more exact, these are the following questions:
- Is it necessary to impose a standard for gender related behavior on children from an early age?
- Can people be judged on their merits, disregarding their behavior that differs from the standard prescribed by their gender role?
- What are the possible ways to be accepted in the society for a person whose behavior does not correspond to the one that is considered standard for his/her gender?
Reference List
Berk, L.E. (2006). Child development (7th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Blonk, v. d. H. (2003). Writing case studies in information systems research. Journal of Information Technology, 18, 45-52.
Rhode, M. (2004). Infant observation as research: Cross-disciplinary links. Journal of Social Work Practice, 18(3), 283-296.