Cognitive development theory assumes that all children go through a universal pattern of development, and there really is not much parents can do to alter it. As the child’s brain matures and grows, the child develops new abilities and new concerns; and, at each stage, his or her understanding of gender changes in predictable ways. This theory follows the ideas of Piaget (1951), the child development theorist who suggested that social attitudes in children are mediated through their processes of cognitive development. In other words, children can process only a certain kind and amount of information at each developmental stage.
As children begin to be able to recognize the physical differences between girls and boys and then to categorize themselves as one or the other, they look for information about their genders. Around the ages of 2 to 5, they form strict stereotypes of gender based on their observed differences—men are bigger and stronger and are seen in aggressive roles like policeman and superhero; women tend to be associated with motherhood through their physicality (e. g., the child asks what the mother’s breasts are and is told they are used to feed children) and through women’s social roles of nurturing and emotional expressiveness. These “physicalistic” thought patterns are universal in young children and are organized around ideas of gender.
As the child matures, he or she becomes more aware that gender roles are, to some degree, social and arbitrary, and cognitive development theory predicts therefore that rigid gender role behavior should decrease after about the age of 7 or 8. So cognitive development theory predicts what set of gender attitudes should appear at different ages; however, the research is still contradictory on whether its predictions are correct (see Albert & Porter, 1988).
Newer theories of gender role development try to combine social learning theory and cognitive development theory, seeing weaknesses in both. Cognitive development theory neglects social factors and differences in the ways different groups raise children. On the other hand, social learning theory neglects a child’s age-related ability to understand and assimilate gender models, and portrays the child as too passive; in social learning theory, the child seems to accept whatever models of behavior are offered without passing them through his or her own thought processes.