According to Thorne and Luria, the aspect of childhood experience that serves as one of the main sources of gender differences are the gendered games and social interactions on the playground, making up gender segregation. Boys tend to play more competitive games and band into large groups to get away with rule breaking. They swear more and are more fascinated by sexuality into adolescents rather than fostering relationships with girls. Girls tend to separate into pairs instead of large groups, usually based on their "best friend" of the particular time. They focus on niceness, thoughtfulness and friendships rather than the competitiveness inherent in boys. Children maintain gender segragation through these social rituals and hence form theirdifferent patterns of bonding-boys share the arousal of rule-breaking as a group and girls focus on the construction of intimacy and romance.
According to Goldscheider and Waite children in contemporary families contribute to only about 15% of household tasks, drastically less than children in previous generations. In general, the bigger the family was, the more housework the children did, and overall as children got older they took on more responsibility in the home. The biggest variance between genders rests on the idea of "female chores". Girls prove to participate in five times more chores than boys of the same age. Children interstingly played a greater role in household tasks when living with step-parents than when living with both biological parents.
According to Annette Lareau, the models of childrearing differ by race and class. Middle class parents, regardless of class, enroll their children in leisure activities and organized activities to help foster their personal development. Working class and poor parents leaned more towards natural growth and personal development, naturally due to their economic situation. Consequently, middle-class children, regardless of race, seemed to gain a greater sense of entitlement from their family life, and thus race had much less impact than social class on childrearing.
The signs of commercialization of childhood presented in Juliet Schor’s article are driven by marketing and adverstising. As children watch more TV they are more greatly influenced by the ads they are bombarded with, and thus at a very young age are already aware of and influenced by brand names and materialism. TV, video games, the internet-all sources of commercialization that impressionable children are surrounded by have affected many parts of their lives, including nutrition, unsafe practices such as consuming drugs and alcohol, and most importantly their values and psychological state, which are now heavily guided by materialism and the idea that wealth will make you happy.