Abstract

The hypothesis advanced by R. R. Scars and his collaborators that restrictive childrearing by parents leads to femininity in children was tested by means of a self-administered child-rearing attitude test given to mothers rather than by means of ratings of interview data as used by Sears and his coworkers, One hundred ninety male and 160 female, 5th and 6th graders were given an M-F test for children, and on the basis of the scores the mothers of the most masculine and the most feminine students were given a child-rearing attitude test measuring four child-rearing dimensions previously isolated from Korean mothers. Analysis of the test scores from 60 mothers of the masculine and 79 mothers of the feminine students showed that a "cold" mother is associated with a feminine boy whereas an "overprotective or domineering" mother is associated with a feminine girl. Permissiveness and emotional involvement were unrelated to child's femininity. It was concluded that at least for mothers data do not support either the primary identification hypothesis or Sears' activity-restriction hypothesis. An unexpected finding, namely that mothers of the boys were more masculine than those of the girls, was explained in terms of greater number of male siblings expected for a male student as against a female student. Evidence was presented which bore out the latter expectation.