My Other-Gendered Lifestyle (blog 2)

My day-to-day life experience is different from what is social norm. During the day I am at home taking care of my two lovely children while my wife is at work. For the most part my current lifestyle is only socially unacceptable in certain circles. For example, in class we discussed sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists believe that gender roles are entirely biologically preordained. The stereotype is that women are more nurturing than men therefore by having my wife work while I stay at home as a homemaker and caregiver to our children is biologically incorrect. Although this is something that my wife and I discussed, and ultimately decided on as a temporary lifestyle while I'm finishing my undergraduate degree, to my grandmother and wife's parents what we are doing is biologically wrong. Our families have very conservative social values that have been passed down from generation to generation. Whereas, my wife and have becomes adults in a society that may not be perfect when it comes to social equality, but has vastly improved from the 1940s and 1970s when my grandmother and wife's parents were in adolescence being that, the 1920s was when womens' rights movement began, and civil rights movements began in the 1960s. I have intimate knowledge of my family's childhoods, but to think why this is true in terms of gender role theories explains their reaction.
Someone who practices a belief in social learning theory would argue that during our families' childhoods that they learned their current social values from their parents who were also very conservative. Unlike my father-in-law, who was not a homemaker and caregiver for my wife or her two sisters in the stereotypical sense a woman is supposed to be, he provided monetarily the way the stereotypical gender role for a man is supposed to. He did not change diapers, he did not watch his daughters as infants and toddlers without his wife present because those are the social gender roles of a woman. My father-in-law's social values dictate the idea that female gender roles were and are beneath him socially, and cognitive developmental theory would back his belief. My grandmother's life is very similar to my father-in-law's being that they are a little more than 15 years older than he is. She grew up in a home with a mother that was a homemaker and caregiver for my grandmother and siblings and had a father that worked to "put food on the table" so to speak.

I find it strange that my mother-in-law's social values in gender roles are extremely strong being that she was born in the 1970s, more so than my grandmother and father-in-law's who were born in the 1940s and 50s. Until I think in terms of social learning theory and reflect on the fact that my mother-in-law grew up in a Mormon household. The Mormon religion values men over women, and truly treats women as purely vessels for childbearing to the point that in heaven the women are forever pregnant.

These facts about my grandmother's and in-laws' social gender values fall in line with gender schema theory in their view of our current lifestyle, being that the social gender roles of cognitive developmental and social learning theories respectively. This of course does not make my family less respectable members of society, but proves that is it hard to break from values learned in childhood as seen in the gender role theories of cognitive developmental, social learning, and gender schema theories.