The emergence of gender-typical appearance in childhood appears to have important implications not only for child and adolescent social-emotional functioning but also for later working life. In the current study, we examined how parents’ gender-typical appearance and children’s gender similarity (to same- and other-gender peers) were related to young children’s gender-typical appearance. We also explored differences in these associations between boys, girls, mothers, and fathers. Home visits were conducted with 74 Dutch two-parent (mother, father) families with both a son and daughter between the ages 3–6 years (96.6% White, 2.0% Asian, 1.4% other ethnicity). The gender-typical appearance of all four family members was assessed by trained and reliable coders in the videotaped observations from the home visits. As a measure of children’s gender similarity, both parents reported on the similarity of their son and daughter to same-gender and other-gender peers. Generalized estimating equations showed that more gender-typical appearance of parents was associated with more gender-typical appearance of girls, but not of boys. No differences were found between mothers and fathers for the association between parent and child appearance. Moreover, children’s gender similarity, evident in parents’ perceived similarity of their child to peers of the same gender and dissimilarity to peers of the other gender, was associated with more gender-typical appearance in children. To conclude, both children’s gender similarity and parents’ gender-typical appearance appear to play a role in the gender-typical appearance of young children.

童年时期性别典型外貌的出现似乎不仅对儿童和青少年的社会情感功能，而且对以后的工作生活都有重要影响。在当前的研究中，我们研究了父母的性别典型外观和孩子的性别相似性（与同性和异性同龄人）与幼儿的性别典型外观之间的关系。我们还探讨了男孩、女孩、母亲和父亲之间这些关联的差异。对 74 个荷兰双亲（母亲、父亲）家庭进行了家访，其中儿子和女儿的年龄都在 3-6 岁之间（96.6% 是白人，2.0% 是亚洲人，1.4% 是其他种族）。所有四名家庭成员的性别典型外貌均由训练有素且可靠的编码员根据家访的录像观察结果进行评估。作为衡量儿童性别相似性的指标，父母双方都报告了自己的儿子和女儿与同性和异性同龄人的相似性。广义估计方程表明，父母的性别典型外观与女孩的性别典型外观相关，但与男孩无关。在父母和孩子的外表之间的关联上，母亲和父亲之间没有发现差异。此外，孩子的性别相似性，明显体现在父母认为孩子与同性别同龄人的相似性和与异性同龄人的不同性上，与儿童更具性别特征的外貌有关。总而言之，孩子的性别相似性和父母的性别典型外貌似乎都在幼儿的性别典型外貌中发挥作用。