Research Questions Significance of the Study

supportive, more likely to spontaneously explore and extend themselves rather than children who have more controlling parents as cited in Ryan, 2000, p.59. Miller 2002 explains that in natural settings, it is difficult to assess the role of cognition because patterns of behavior are also influenced by children‟s prior experiences. Nevertheless, a few longitudinal analyses have shown that once children know gender stereotypes, their personal preferences show the gender type more. In her study, it has been difficult to generate neutral stimuli because children appear to seize on any element that may implicate a gender norm so that they may categorize it as male or female. Experimental research also suggests that young children are quick to jump to conclusions about sex differences, even on the basis of only a single instance as cited in Martin, 2004, p. 69. Killen 2015 states that current research on conscience examines how young children develop mechanisms for inhibiting negative behavior and promoting positive behavior as a result of internalizing parental norms. Conscience is conceptualizedas an inner guidance or self-regulatory system involving an integration of moral emotion and conduct with limited focus on cognition. This emphasis is partly on the development of a mutually responsive orientation between the parents and child that sensitizes the child to learn proper conduct, codes of caring for others, and committed compliance. This is exemplified by Kochanska‟s research on conscience Kochanska Aksan, 2006 as well as Thompson‟s research on early childhood morality Thompson, 2014 .

B. Review of Related Theories

In order to do this study, there are many theories related to the topic of the study. These theories used as tools to analyze the novel later. The theories are:

1. Gender Schema Theory

Before gender schema theory appears, there is Piaget‟s theory about the cognitive structures. Piaget believes that intelligence is a process which is not about something that a child has but something a child does 1968, in Vasta, 1998, p. 33. Children‟s intelligence can be understood by seeing their actions or how they operate something. Piaget states that schemes involve two elements. They are an object in the environment and the child‟s reaction to the object. A scheme is a psychological structure that reflects the child‟s underlying knowledge and guides his or her interactions with the world. The child‟s intelligence is defined by the nature and organization of these schemes or other cognitive structures during later development. Bem 1981, in Aubry et al, 2003 explains that children develop an extensive associative network of knowledge about the gender norms of their culture, called gender schemas. Gender schemas affect the way children process new information relevant to gender. The theory also proposes that the phenomenon of sex typing derives from gender-based schematic processing which is from a generalized readiness to process information on the basis of the sex- linked associations that constitute the gender schema. Bem 1981, in Vasta, 1998 states that a schema is a cognitive representation of the general structure of something familiar. The gender-schema