Talking about the past: What do educators think about reminiscing with girls, boys, and everyone else?

Gendered reminiscing conversations may impact children’s developing identities and potentially reinforce socially constructed binary-gendered stereotypes. Prior research has established that parent-child reminiscing has measurable benefits for young children including development of autobiographical memories, social-emotional and language skills. Parents display individual differences in their elaborative and emotional reminiscing styles and there is some evidence that reminiscing is a gendered practice whereby parents speak differently to female and male children. Although educators also show similar individual differences in elaborative style, there are no known studies focusing on educator-child reminiscing and child gender. The aim of this study was to investigate how educators varied their responses to the perceived genders of children in educator-child reminiscing conversation vignettes. An online quantitative survey was used to collect self-reported data from educators who currently work in Australian ECE settings. The survey included six reminiscing vignettes in which the protagonists’ gender and emotion was varied and two questionnaires: Caregiver-Child Reminiscence Scale and Gendered Emotion Beliefs Scale. A generalised linear mixed model analysis was undertaken to explore the relationship between differences in vignette protagonist gender and emotion states, and educators’ choice of elaborative and emotive language responses. The findings from this analysis indicated that there was no significant relationship between educators’ elaborative or emotive response preferences and child gender. However, there was a significant relationship between emotive language and vignette emotions, specifically sadness and anger. There was also evidence to suggest that university qualified educators were more likely to choose emotive responses compared to non-university qualified educators. Together, these findings indicate that educators in this study did not differ their responses based on children’s genders but did respond more emotively to children expressing negative emotions.