Gendered behavioral norms in childhood

Gendered behavioral norms in childhood are the everyday rules through which adults teach girls and boys different ways of seeking approval, receiving affection, and imagining their futures. In Simone de Beauvoir’s account, the apparent indulgence shown to girls is not simple freedom: it encourages attachment and dependence, while boys are pushed toward independence as proof of their presumed superiority. The contrast begins in intimate family gestures and prepares children for sharply unequal adult possibilities.

Unequal Affection and Early Training

As children grow, boys are increasingly denied the kisses and caresses still permitted to girls. A girl may hide behind her mother’s skirts or sit on her father’s knees; adults indulge her tears and whims, take care over her hair and clothes, and find amusement in her expressions. The resulting attention shelters her from the anxiety of solitude, but it also keeps her in a position of dependence on others’ affection and approval.

The boy is given a different lesson. His attempts to charm or seek attention are treated as irritating, and adult instructions forbid him to ask for kisses, look at himself in the mirror, or cry. He is told to be a little man. Approval comes when he seems not to need the approval he wants: he pleases by not appearing to seek to please. The rule therefore does more than restrict tenderness; it makes self-sufficiency a performance demanded of boys and presents emotional restraint as evidence of masculine standing.

Gender as a Socially Enforced Difference

The book places these childhood practices within a broader account of women’s situation. Every subject is an autonomous freedom, but women discover themselves in a world where men compel them to assume the position of the Other, treating them as objects and seeking to confine them to immanence. Childhood distinctions are one early form of that social arrangement: habits of affection and discipline direct girls and boys toward unequal relations to independence, action, and the future.

The disparity is not described as proof that girls are naturally passive or boys naturally sovereign. Rather, the adults’ conduct gives children different routes to recognition. Girls are rewarded for remaining pleasing and close; boys are valued for separating themselves from dependence. These lessons make social expectations feel like personal character, even though the account locates their source in repeated treatment and judgment.

From Childhood to Adult Possibilities

The distinction foreshadows the adult division between repetitive domestic labor and projects that open onto the future. The book argues that childbirth and breastfeeding, as natural functions, do not by themselves provide a project through which a woman can claim a higher meaning for existence. When housework is made compatible with motherhood and assigned to women, it binds them to work that recurs without producing something new. By contrast, men are encouraged to invent, set ends, and extend their reach into the world; the figure of Homo faber embodies this socially valued capacity to project beyond the present.

The same asymmetry appears in the account of the French peasant woman. Her work may include caring for animals and children, preparing meals, maintaining the household, and laboring in fields from dawn into the evening. She can share her husband’s responsibilities and property, and may even possess considerable authority at home, yet the accumulation of agricultural, domestic, and reproductive work leaves her with little leisure. Childhood expectations thus lead toward adult arrangements in which women’s effort sustains daily life while men’s activities are more readily recognized as projects.

Puberty and the Horizon of Waiting

At puberty, the future that had previously seemed remote becomes, for the girl, a bodily and social reality. Childhood had allowed her to grasp herself as an autonomous individual in family relations, study, and play, with the future passivity expected of her remaining largely imagined. Now the approaching adult role presses into the present: she sees it as a transition rather than a time with valid ends of its own, and her youth is consumed by waiting.

The anticipated man is cast as liberator, powerful provider, and Prince Charming, someone expected to offer both escape and security. That expectation contrasts with the boy’s path toward adulthood, in which woman may be desired but does not encompass his destiny. The childhood norms of attachment and self-sufficiency therefore continue into adolescence as different expectations of fulfillment: girls are encouraged to look toward a man for accomplishment and escape, while boys are directed toward an adulthood organized around their own projects.

Repetition, Work, and the Cost of the Norm

The adult consequences are clearest in the book’s image of housework as a cycle without final victory. Washing, dusting, and mending must begin again as dishes become dirty, furniture gathers dust, and clothes are worn or torn. The task perpetuates the present rather than opening a future; its repetition gives concrete form to the domestic confinement toward which women are directed.

The book’s governing distinction is between freedom exercised through projects and a life narrowed into repetition. Childhood norms matter because they do not merely assign different manners: they help prepare girls to accept a future of dependence and recurring domestic labor, while teaching boys that independence and outward action are their due. The account presents this division as a social formation, not an inevitable result of sex, and measures its cost in the unequal freedom available to women and men.