What everybody knows about children: Mothers' ideas on early childhood

A sample of 364 mothers were interviewed with a questionnaire investigating 4 topics: developmental conceptions, socialization rules, parental social roles and sexual stereotypes. A subsample of 107 of the same mothers was then submitted to an attitude scale testing the importance they attributed to 19 traits of children's behaviour and the influence they perceived as having on the development of the same traits. The results give evidence of a social representation shared by our sample; this representation refers to a traditional way of rearing children and to a traditional division of parental social roles. The mothers' working positions and levels of instructions are found to discriminate as to their agreement on such a view. Analyses on the degree of importance and of perceived influence on the behavioural traits confirm the same results, but they also define a new emerging image of the child, which stresses different values from the traditional ones.