Fathers and Mothers through Children's Eyes: A Child-Centered Approach Using NLP and Qualitative Analysis
Résumé
Parental roles are fundamental in shaping children's understanding of the world and their interactions with others. While much research has explored adult perspectives on these roles, less attention has been given to how children perceive and articulate them. Traditional studies often rely on retrospective adult accounts or structured questionnaires which may not be accessible for young children. These methods often impose adult-centric biases, failing to capture the unique ways in which children express their thoughts and navigate social dynamics. By focusing on children's narratives, we aim to provide a more direct and authentic understanding of their perceptions. Our research seeks to understand the stereotypes children associate with parental roles, exploring their prevalence, significance, and stability across age and gender at two key stages of schooling. Conducted as part of a French research project, this study analyzes interviews with 184 schoolchildren aged 6 to 11. The children answered two open-ended questions about what words come to mind when they think of 'father' and 'mother' and what these concepts represent. Their spontaneous responses were transcribed, forming a corpus of 46,600 words. We address the following research questions: 1) How do children perceive the roles of mothers and fathers? 2) How do these perceptions vary across age groups and genders? Our study combines Natural Language Processing (NLP) with qualitative analysis to explore these perceptions. Contextual dictionaries for each concept were developed, identifying significant lemmas—frequent and meaningful terms—in the children's discourse. These were used to construct knowledge graphs, capturing both lexical patterns in the corpus and deeper semantic relationships. The themes identified, as shown in Table 1, highlight shared responsibilities and notable distinctions between the roles of mothers and fathers. The father lexicon contains 20 salient lemmas, while the mother lexicon includes 30. Notably, all significant lemmas related to fathers also appear in the mother lexicon, except for 'game', suggesting that children view mothers as capable of fulfilling both maternal and paternal roles, though with different emphases. We observe a largely shared view of parental roles, with key differences. Mothers are linked to childbirth and broader familial connections, while fathers are more associated with the immediate family structure. The exclusive association of 'game' with fathers may reflect a stereotypical view of them being more involved in play, particularly physical or technology-based activities. Figure 1 highlights an inversion, with fathers more associated with 'Instructive and Playful' roles, and mothers with 'Executive and Household Management' functions. Statistical analyses revealed stronger associations of managerial roles with mothers, emotional roles with girls, and gender and age differences in instructive and playful roles for fathers. While our findings support some traditional views of parental roles, they also challenge the conventional gendered division of labor, showing more overlap between roles. However, the lack of comprehensive sociodemographic data limits further exploration of how variables such as family structure or socioeconomic status might influence children's perceptions. Future research should incorporate these factors to offer a more nuanced understanding of children's social cognition within diverse family contexts.