 Sexing the baby: Part 1 – What do we really know about sex differentiation in the first three years of life?Anne Fausto-Sterling, Cynthia Garcia Coll and Meghan Lamarre Social Science & Medicine, 2012, vol. 74, issue 11, 1684-1692 Abstract: The most common paradigm used to analyze health differences between men and women, is to divide the body from the social environment. In such a model, the bodily contribution and the social contribution add up to 100%. A few health science researchers offer more sophisticated approaches. None, however, offer an intensive study of the first several years of life in order to offer a model which integrates biology and culture in a fashion that demonstrates the productive processes by which gender itself emerges. In this article, we identify the earliest known sex-related biological and behavioral differences in young infants, toddlers and their parents and indicate how these might relate to health and disease. We frame these differences using unifying concepts from the study of neuroplasticity and dynamic systems theory. Keywords: Infant development; Gender; Sex-related behavioral difference; Dynamic systems; Nature nurture debate; Sex-related differences; Disease (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:74:y:2012:i:11:p:1684-1692 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.05.051 Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
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