The effect of children picture story books on children's and mother's gender role attitudes

This study, which aimed to understand the effect of egalitarian or alternative gender role representations in picture storybooks on children's gender stereotypes and their mothers' gender role attitudes, was conducted in a quasi-experimental study with 17 children in the experimental group and 18 children in the control group at the age of 60-72 months, and their mothers. In the experimental process, children picture story books that do not contain gender stereotypes were read to the children by their mothers within 30 shared book reading activities and the experimental process was evaluated for both children and their mothers through pre-tests, post-tests and stability tests. Gender Stereotypes Assessment Tool was applied to children and Gender Roles Attitude Scale was applied to the mothers. The findings of the study show that children have a high level of gender stereotypes, those stereotypes of children show parallelism with their daily life practices rather than their mothers' gender role attitudes, the egalitarian or alternative gender roles representations of children picture storybooks affect the gender perceptions of the children in the experimental group in a positive way and the stereotypes of the children in the experimental group have changed towards being more gender egalitarian compared to their own pre-tests and children in the control group.