How Family Shapes Gender Identity through Socialisation

From the moment a baby is wrapped in either a pink or blue blanket, the family begins a quiet, lifelong project: turning a biological body into a gendered being. Long before a child can speak about identity, they have already absorbed thousands of cues about what it means to be a “boy” or a “girl”. The family, more than any school or peer group, is where this transformation begins. Sociologists call this process gender socialisation, and it explains why gender feels so natural even though much of it is socially constructed.

What is gender socialisation? 🔗

Gender socialisation is the process through which individuals learn the behaviours, attitudes, expectations, and roles considered appropriate for their sex by their society. While sex refers to biological differences, gender is a social and cultural construct. The family is the first agent of socialisation, shaping a child’s sense of self long before formal education or media take over.

This learning is rarely explicit. Parents do not sit children down and lecture them on masculinity or femininity. Instead, gender is transmitted through everyday practices: the toys chosen, the chores assigned, the praise given, the freedoms allowed, and the restrictions imposed. By the age of five or six, most children have a firm grasp of what their society expects from “boys” and “girls”, and they begin policing these boundaries themselves.

How families instil gender roles from childhood 🔗

The family produces gendered subjects through what sociologists call differential treatment. Sons and daughters are raised differently from infancy, often without parents realising they are doing so. These differences accumulate into what feels like “natural” masculine or feminine behaviour.

Differential celebration and welcome 🔗

In many households, the birth of a son and a daughter are not greeted with the same enthusiasm. Rituals, distribution of sweets, and announcements often differ in scale. The UNFPA notes that for over a century, India’s census has shown a marked gap between the number of boys and girls, a gap traced back to decisions made at the most local level – the family. The reasons cited are familiar: sons are expected to provide old-age support, continue the lineage, perform religious rites, and add to family wealth, while daughters are often viewed as a financial drain through dowry.

Toys, play, and the shaping of skills 🔗

Boys are typically handed cars, blocks, cricket bats, and construction sets – toys that encourage spatial reasoning, competition, and outdoor mobility. Girls are given dolls, miniature kitchens, and dress-up sets that rehearse nurturing, domesticity, and appearance management. These choices are not trivial. They shape the cognitive and emotional skills children develop, and they preview the adult roles they are being prepared for.

Chores and the rehearsal of adult roles 🔗

Domestic work is one of the most powerful sites of gender training. Research on son preference and children’s housework in India shows that parents who believe a girl must be “socially fit” for her future household assign daughters a disproportionate share of cooking, cleaning, and caring for younger siblings. Boys, meanwhile, are often exempt or given outdoor tasks. By adolescence, girls have spent thousands more hours on household labour, internalising the idea that this is “their” work.

Differential investments in health and education 🔗

Differential treatment is not just symbolic – it has measurable consequences for survival and wellbeing. A study on selective versus generalised gender bias in childhood health and nutrition in India found strong evidence of discrimination against girls aged 0-35 months in vaccination, medical treatment for respiratory infections, and breastfeeding beyond 17 months. The researchers describe this as “generalised discrimination” – not always a conscious choice, but the outcome of internalised schemas about the differential value of sons and daughters operating in daily life. In education too, families often invest more readily in sons’ higher studies while channelling daughters toward “appropriate” feminine professions or early marriage.

Chodorow’s theory of mothering 🔗

Why do women, generation after generation, end up becoming the primary caregivers? The feminist sociologist and psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow offered one of the most influential answers in her 1978 book The Reproduction of Mothering. Chodorow argued that mothering is not a biological instinct but a socially reproduced capacity, transmitted through the very structure of the family.

The asymmetry of early childhood 🔗

Drawing on object-relations psychoanalysis, Chodorow observed that because mothers are the near-universal primary caregivers, boys and girls go through fundamentally different psychological journeys. Both children begin life intensely identified with the mother. But somewhere between ages three and five, they must develop distinct gender identities – and the path is unequal.

Girls, who share a sex with their mother, are not pushed to separate as sharply. They develop their sense of self through relationship, retaining a fluid, connected, empathetic orientation. Boys, in contrast, must define themselves against the mother to claim masculinity. This requires a psychological rupture – a suppression of the feminine, the dependent, the relational – and produces a self that is more bounded, autonomous, and emotionally distant.

Why mothering reproduces itself 🔗

Chodorow’s central insight is that this asymmetry creates an inter-generational cycle. Girls grow up with the relational capacities needed for caregiving and a sense that nurturing is part of who they are. Boys grow up emotionally trained for independence and achievement, and unaccustomed to the deep relational intimacy that mothering requires. When they become parents, women feel “called” to mother, and men are content to leave it to them. Mothering thus reproduces itself, not through biology, but through the structure of family life itself.

Chodorow’s theory implies that the only way to truly transform gender is to transform parenting itself. If men shared caregiving from infancy, both boys and girls would grow up with relational selves, and the gendered division of emotional labour would begin to dissolve.

Patrilineal influences in Hindu society: Leela Dube’s intervention 🔗

While Chodorow worked largely in a Western context, the Indian anthropologist Leela Dube offered a powerful account of how gender is produced in patrilineal Hindu families. Her 1988 essay, “On the Construction of Gender: Hindu Girls in Patrilineal India”, shows that becoming gendered in India is deeply tied to kinship, ritual, and language.

The “seed and earth” metaphor 🔗

At the heart of Dube’s analysis is the “seed and earth” analogy. In Hindu cultural imagination, men provide the active, generative “seed” while women are the passive “earth” – the field that receives and nourishes it. Dube traced this metaphor across folk tales, proverbs, scriptures, and rituals in patrilineal Hindu society, showing how it naturalises male dominance. If the seed is the source of identity, then a child belongs to the father’s lineage, the mother is merely the vessel, and group placement – caste, gotra, inheritance – flows through men.

This is not a quaint old idea. It actively structures how families raise children, how property is transmitted, and why sons are perceived as essential and daughters as temporary.

Daughters as paraya dhan 🔗

Dube paid close attention to the language used around girls. Phrases that frame daughters as guests, as someone else’s wealth, or as plants being watered for another’s garden teach the girl child that her natal home is not really her own. The Telugu expression Dube cites – that raising a daughter is like watering a plant in another’s courtyard – captures this beautifully. The girl internalises her own impermanence. She learns to be accommodating, to take less, to prepare for departure.

Rituals as gender training 🔗

Rituals like Gauri Puja and Kanya Puja, performed before puberty, celebrate the girl as pure and auspicious – but only in her pre-sexual form. Marriage rituals across patrilineal Hindu communities – kanyadaan (the gift of the virgin daughter), the circumambulation of fire, the bride’s send-off – dramatise the transfer of the daughter from her father’s lineage to her husband’s. Through repeated participation in these rites, girls learn that their adult identity will be defined by attachment to another family, while sons learn they are the permanent core of their natal home.

Caste, purity, and the policing of women 🔗

Dube also showed that gender cannot be understood separately from caste. Because lineage purity must be protected, women’s sexuality and mobility are tightly policed. Women become the gatekeepers of caste, and any perceived transgression – a love marriage across caste, a wrong choice of friends – can invite severe sanctions. The differential treatment of daughters is therefore not merely about individual prejudice; it is woven into how the social order reproduces itself.

Bringing the threads together 🔗

Chodorow and Dube approach the same question from different angles, but their insights reinforce each other. Chodorow shows how the psychological structure of mother-centred caregiving reproduces gendered personalities across generations. Dube shows how the cultural and material structure of patrilineal kinship – its metaphors, rituals, language, and inheritance rules – produces gendered subjects in the Indian context. Together they remind us that becoming gendered is neither a single event nor a purely individual experience. It is a slow, daily, deeply social process that begins in the family and runs through every cell of cultural life.

Recognising this matters. If gender is made, it can also be remade – through more equal parenting, more inclusive language, more reflective rituals, and policies that genuinely value daughters. The family that taught us gender is also the place where its transformation must begin.

What do you think? Looking back at your own childhood, what were the earliest moments when you realised you were being treated as a “boy” or a “girl”? And if Chodorow is right that shared parenting could reshape gender itself, what would it take for fathers in your family or community to become equal caregivers?

References

1. https://www.unfpa.org/resources/son-preference-and-daughter-neglect-india
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3728018/
3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5988261/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Chodorow
5. https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Psychology/Culture_and_Community/Personality_Theory_in_a_Cultural_Context_(Kelland)/07:_Psychology_of_Women/7.04:_Nancy_Chodorow's_Psychoanalytic_Feminism_and_the_Role_of_Mothering
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leela_Dube
7. https://www.learnsociology.in/blog/q-explain-leela-dube-s-concept-of-seed-and-earth-2022