| Sumario: | Although adult women and men receive social and economic penalties for violating prescriptive gender stereotypes, few studies have explored the consequences that children may face for gender stereotype violations and even less are aimed at perceptions of parental responses to gender norm deviance in their children. Across three pre-registered studies using United States-based, English-speaking participants, we examined how parents are perceived by adults when they reprimand their gender-deviant children compared to affirming or a control condition, and how children are perceived for gender-deviant behavior in a classroom setting. We found that parents were perceived negatively overall when they reprimanded their child for deviant behavior and positively overall when they were accepting of their child's behavior (Study 1). This pattern was observed when specific behaviors were mentioned (Study 2), and when age of the child was manipulated (Study 3). We also found across all studies that as participants identified as more conservative, they rated the parents more favorably when they reprimanded their gender-deviant child, whereas political orientation was unrelated to perceptions of parents who affirmed their child for gender deviant behavior, suggesting some ambivalence about how they believed parents should respond. Our data did not rule out the possibility that boys face at least marginally more negative perceptions than girls (Study 2 and Study 3), suggesting that adults' attitudes towards gender stereotype violations for boys are less flexible than girls.
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