The Prevalence of Gender-Atypical Behavior in Elementary School Children

Abstract

To supplement the few small-scale studies on convenience samples of boys with an epidemiological study on the prevalence of gender-atypical behaviors (GABs) in boys and girls and to assess the influence of variation of age, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. The present study, a postal questionnaire survey, used an existing pool of GAB items for boys, developed comparable GAB items for girls, and analyzed parent-reported frequencies of GABs in a demographically heterogeneous community sample of 687 boys and girls age 6 to 10 years. The majority of GABs were quite rare, but there was considerable variability in their prevalence. Nevertheless, many children show multiple GABs although each individual GAB at low frequency; for instance, 10 or more different GABs were exhibited by 22.8% of boys and 38.6% of girls. Only few GABs varied significantly with age, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. These data are of relevance to clinicians counseling parents who are worried about the occurrence of GABs in their children. © 1993, The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. All rights reserved.